My mouth felt dry and my heart was hammering…it was an awful place to be in. On the one hand I didn’t want the book to finish and on the other, I had to keep the pages turning to know what happened next…and worse, resist as hard as I could the urge to turn to the last page and know how it was all resolved....

I was all of 11 and the book was James Hadley Chase’s No Orchids for Miss Blandish. Even before I was a teenager, I had graduated from children’s fiction to more lurid volumes. The passage of reading so transpired because I read whatever my older brother Sunil did. When he was buying and borrowing the Famous Five and Hardy Boys, I was allowed to devour them after he was done. When he moved on to more adult tomes, I did as well but without letting go of my Enid Blytons.

This perhaps must have been the reason why neither he nor my parents imposed any kind of restraint on what I read. The seamy side of life – rapists and murderers, ransom money with large dollops of sex – they must have thought was balanced by happy wholesome stories of children and dogs setting forth on bicycle trips with packed lunches of bread and butter and hard boiled eggs with salt and bottles of gingerbeer, all under clear blue skies with fluffy white clouds....

So with the rapacious appetite of another creature steeped in books and pages – the silver fish – I devoured James Hadley Chase and Erle Stanley Gardner; Harold Robbins and Irving Wallace…. By my mid-teens, I was satiated and had completely moved away from literary entertainment of any sort. Deep in the throes of teenage passion, the tall, dark, handsome, older stranger of the M&Bs (Mills and Boon) paled in comparison to the boy next door with the bike, who was there and available. So first went the romance novel. Then came the mystery and detective novels. One of the fundamentals of a good thriller is that the reader must have equal opportunity with the hero of the book for solving the mystery. All clues must be plainly stated and described. The culprit must be determined by logical deductions – not by accident or coincidence or unmotivated confession. And that for me was the very root of the problem.

Very often half way through the book, I knew exactly how it was going to be resolved and thereafter pursuing with the story seemed pointless. And so I veered towards social fiction and stayed there. Primarily because human nature – no matter how often one was exposed to it in the real or the fictitious world – continued to amaze me. Moreover, intellectual conflict that was the basis of the literary novel, was not bogged down by logistics of reason as the thriller is. So it seems ironic to me that these days what gives me the greatest pleasure in my reading hours is the literary sleuthing I embark upon and where it leads me to....