CHENNAI: An avid fan of the American series Desperate Housewives will have no difficulty comprehending that an urban and clean housewife can be associated with gruesome murder. But for the others, Mumbai-based author Kiran Manral’s novel Reluctant Detective, could be a good starting point. The title gives away nothing, warns the debutante author, also a popular blogger. “The operative word here is reluctant and not detective,” says Manral, who was in the city recently for a book-reading session. “The book is about a nosy housewife. There are two murders in her neighbourhood and she wants to find what happens,” she elaborates and adds, “She doesn’t do any real path-breaking detective work.”Kiran admits that she has an interest in the stories of those people that newspapers reported as murdered (to the point of curiosity, not obsession, she clarifies) “I am morbid that way,” she says. This trait, in her opinion, may have made her introduce a grim situation to the bright and happy life of the housewife. “Within the humour, I wanted to bring in something grim that would offshoot the ‘haha’ (feel) of the whole thing,” she explains.The book’s wrapper, however, gives an illusion of it being even chick-lit. With a snazzy high-heeled shoe and pink blotches, it might steer your mind to assume that if it’s not a detective novel, it might be chick-lit. But then Kiran disagrees, again. “It is a humour book.It was never chick-lit for me.” And if you’ve read her blog Forty and Counting (which started off as thirty six and counting), you’ll agree with her when she says humour is a style that she is comfortable writing. But what she has tried to do in this book is try to make a social comment between all the laughs. “Some resonance which we should perhaps pay attention to,” she explains. Reluctant Detective is published by Westland, and costs `195.
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