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Paperback Edition of Bombay Ice Is Out

A P Kamath

When Bombay Ice, a mystery novel filled eloquent meditation on everything from the secret art of alchemy to the hidden lives of gangsters, artists, con men, transvestites, and serial killers, was published last year, it became a big hit with major critics across the United States and Canada.

It also attracted the anger of novelist Paul Mann who sued journalist and first-time novelist Leslie Forbes for lifting the specific plot developments and character from his own novels.

The suit could not stop Bombay Ice continuing to be one of the best-received novels in recent months. Now the paperback edition of the novel has been issued.

'In this remarkable and clever debut novel, Leslie Forbes has transcended the limitations of her genre,' wrote Shashi Tharoor in his review for The Washington Post.

'She has written a literary thriller that is more literary than thrilling, which is both her novel's weakness and its strength.'

Nina Mehta, reviewing it for Newsday, called it a gorgeous novel.

The New York Times named it as one of the most notable books of the year.

Kirkus Reviews called it 'an amusingly overstuffed first novel,' adding, 'It skilfully recounts the labyrinthine adventures of a resilient heroine who's part James Bond, part Ripley (from the movie Alien).'

But some reviewers grumbled the book was too prodding and that it was too preoccupied with the mystic India.

What does the author think of the critical reception to her book?

"Why, Murder?" Forbes asks.

"Interestingly, almost all the Indian reviewers of Bombay Ice have enjoyed my adaptation of their country, while several Western reviewers, suffering perhaps from an overdose of political correctness, see my vision as overly romantic and melodramatic (but I never intended it to be other than that!).

"Indian reviewers have got the joke intended by the deliberate melodrama and appreciated the book's multiple layers where some Western readers have not... For how could there be too many layers in any story which tries to do justice to India, a country of 330,000 gods (more or less) and who knows how many independent political parties?"

What happens when the glitzy world of movie-making Bombay meets the gritty conventions of film noir? With luck, something like this intriguing, ambitious and sprawling novel.

"I haven't seen the eunuch in almost four weeks. Ignore what I wrote you before. No need to come here and rescue me," Miranda Sharma writes to her sister from Bombay, in a disconcertingly "schizophrenic" postcard that sends Rosalind Bengal across continents and deep into a world where nothing is what it seems.

Part Scottish, part Indian, Roz is a radio journalist and producer for true crime television. After 20 years in London, she still wakes with the cinnamon taste of cassia leaves in her mouth, a dream from her childhood in India, when her father taught her about meteorology and her mother about alchemy.

Despite her fear of being drawn back into the murky patterns of her lost past, Roz returns to India -- and to events that threaten her and her sister. She is a crime journalist who can't help following a good lead when it appears, especially when her sister's welfare is at stake.

Miranda recently married one of the Indian film industry's most prominent directors, Prosper Sharma, a man who's spent 20 years working on a movie version of The Tempest and who is rumored to have murdered his first wife. After her postcard, four eunuchs are found drowned in an eight week period, one of them with alleged connections to the film industry. Coincidence or not, Roz feels compelled to investigate.

The book stars perhaps 'the toughest, most sympathetic heroine since Miss Smilla's Sense of Snow,' published over five years ago, according to Harper's Bazaar.

But Roz, like the protagonists in many American mystery novels, is haunted by her own humanity and shortcomings.

And her character makes the novel even richer.

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