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....

This time it started with Nicholson Baker’s U and I, a novel about the almost semiotic connection the author feels with John Updike. It left me wanting to read something new of Updike’s. So I took down a volume of short stories, Licks of Love, I had bought a while ago but hadn’t read. Right at the end was a novella, Rabbit Remembered – the finale to the Rabbit series. It had been several years since I last read Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom novels, and so I began the series in chronological order in order to read the novella at the end. The Rabbit series as always, worked marvellously, however the novella was a cop out. Around that time, the person who gave me Baker’s book made a chance remark about the John Updike-Tom Wolfe war. Suddenly glutted by ‘Updike-an’ suburbia and disappointed by that novella, I was curious to know what Wolfe had to say about Updike. In my library, I had a collection of Wolfe’s essays titled Hooking Up. It included his My Three Stooges, an incisive rebuttal to Updike, John Irving and Norman Mailer trashing his A Man in Full. I hadn’t read it before and Wolfe vindicated himself nicely enough in that essay. He annihilated without compunction Updike, Irving and Mailer but in the process, he also led me to Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song which I might have otherwise never read...

In 1976, Gary Gilmore was sentenced to death in the state of Utah for murder. On successive nights, he killed two men for very little gain. But what made Gilmore’s story special was that unlike others before him given the death penalty, Gilmore decided not to appeal…. He wanted to be executed. The Executioner’s Song is a true life anthropological account of Gilmore’s choices, the other people in his life, the media circus that ensued following his execution sentence and of Gilmore himself. As Gilmore wrote, ‘I am not a prominent person. I’ve just gained some unwanted notoriety’.

What Mailer does over almost 1020 pages is make the reader realise that in many ways Gilmore didn’t have a choice but to live out his criminal destiny. How the humongous book would end is something I knew even before I began reading. Nevertheless I read it with a dry mouth and hammering heart…it was No Orchids for Miss Blandish all over again. An awful place to be in. On the one hand I didn’t want the book to end and on the other, I had to keep the pages turning to know what happened next, in the last months of Gilmore’s life....
Who would have thought literary sleuthing would have taken me on a 360 degrees flip? The buzz of literary entertainment was back in my life...