Chills and thrills

My story in The Hindu on marking 60 years of The Mousetrap, celebrating good crime writing and lamenting about all that gore in modern day crime fiction. I’ve already ranted at the Scandinavians once long ago on this blog – just treat this as a longer rant.

Sixty years after The Mousetrap’s premiere, there is nostalgia for crime novels that you once curled up with on a rainy day — till Steig Larsson ruined that plot.

I am not sure if this is a real story or yet another of those Mumbai urban legends. A day after the thriller Gupt was released in 1997, somebody had scrawled in large letters on the low walls of Marine Drive: Kajol is the killer.

This treatment, thankfully, hasn’t been meted out to The Mousetrap. For the last 60 years, group after group of audience has been walking out of the St. Martin’s Theatre in London every evening. Lord Richard Attenborough, part of the cast said at the end of the first show in 1952 (and subsequent actors to this day have followed suit), “Now you have seen The Mousetrap, you are our partners in crime, and we ask you to preserve the tradition by keeping the secret of whodunit locked in your hearts.” And so it has come to be that London is celebrating not just the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee this year.

Read the entire story here – Murder, they wrote. Photo credit: The Hindu archives