Author: Satyajit Ray
Published: 2000
Publisher: Penguin Books India
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Satyajit Ray is world renowned as a film director. But few people know that he was also a very popular detective fiction writer in Bengali. He created the character Feluda a Kolkatta based private investigator. Feluda's character was inspired by Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes.
This volume comprises of 19 cases which were successfully investigated by Feluda. The cases - mostly murder mysteries - are narrated by his nephew Topshe ( an equivalent of Watson in Sherlock Holmes mysteries) who assisted him in these cases . They are also accompanied by their friend a quaint, comical character called Jatayu who is a thriller fiction writer.
Almost all the stories follow a predictable pattern, yet they are very enjoyable and hold your interest. I am not able to pick my favorite ones since all are equally good.
Ray wrote these stories in Bengali for a teenage magazine Sandesh. Gopa Majumdar and Chitrita Banerji have done an excellent job in translating them into English.
The stories are set in modern times yet not modern enough. It spans the period mid 1960s to early 1990s. So the present generation having grown up in the era of internet and mobile phones may wonder why Feluda did not make use of such technologies.
I highly recommend anybody interested in detective stories in classic mould of Sherlock Holmes's cases to read this book. I could get hold of only Volume 2 in the library. So look forward to read Volume 1 also.
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