Death on Diagonal Lane - Original Blurb, Cover and Biodata

 My new humor novel Death on Diagonal Lane has been published by Hachette India. You can see the published cover and blurb on the Hachette India website. But it wasn't always like this! 

THE ORIGINAL COVER:

When Hachette asked me if I had any ideas for the cover, I made this mock-up for them, based on what I felt the book should look like... the cartoon was one that I drew myself. It is a reference to all the brinjal jokes in chapter one. I felt the juxtaposition of a grim-sounding title and a weird cartoon would create an unusual effect.

THE ORIGINAL BLURB:

This was the blurb that I had submitted as part of my manuscript (the one that you see on the back of the book has been written by the Hachette editorial staff):

Diagonal Lane is thrown into turmoil when old Mr. Reddy is found dead in suspicious circumstances. Friendly neighbor Mr. Murthy attempts to keep the police out of it. Friendly neighbor Mr. Shetty bungles it up, and the police do get involved. The police officer who lands up to investigate turns out to be Mr. Murthy’s old school chum: Sub Inspector Rathindranath (Ratty) Gowda. A stroke of good fortune? Not really. You see, Ratty is a sub-inspector on the make, one who itches to get the sub off his title and his name in the yellow headlines. He proceeds to put the denizens of Diagonal Lane through the wringer. It takes all of Mr. Murthy’s tact and diplomacy to prevent his childhood chum from putting behind bars all the leading lights of the lane. But meddling too much in murky police affairs, even for purely public-spirited reasons, can sometimes backfire. It does not take Mr. Murthy long to appreciate the veracity of that old adage: Policemen have no friends.

A dark comedy on contemporary middle-class India. A sardonic whodunit that lays bare how this sort of thing really happens in life-as-we-know-it, rather than in the comforting, otherworldly pages of Agatha Christie.

This work can be seen as a somber satire on the fragility of Indian middle-class existence. However, at first glance, it reads like a light farce replete with scintillating repartee, barmy characters and a Kafkaesque plot that piles absurdity on absurdity. Most readers will regard it as a ‘fun read’. 

THE ORIGINAL AUTHOR'S BIODATA

I had originally written a funny first-person author's biodata as part of my manuscript submission. But Hachette preferred a conventional third-person biodata, which is what you see in the book. I thought of making that funny too, but it is really hard to write a funny biodata in the third-person. What passes for self-deprecating humor in the first-person sounds plain insulting in the third-person! Anyway, here is the original:

Pashupati Chatterji 

I am an Indian origin humor novelist, cartoonist and songwriter currently based in a small winegrowing village on the outskirts of Lyon, where I live with my French farmer’s daughter wife, Blandine.

After an early childhood in Africa and a peripatetic career all over India and the world, in the course of which I picked up six languages and little wisdom, this is where I have landed up. 

Two decades a corporate wage slave, I threw it all up to play at being penniless starving artist, in an attempt to recapture my lost soul. A decade of much un-success in the course of which I managed to become penniless and starving to an extent hitherto unimaginable, although the jury is still out on whether the stuff I produced in this period was art. I then did the only sensible thing I have ever done: I married Blandine, my French girlfriend. She took me back home with her baggage. Despite being French, she had little time for penniless starving artists. I hocked my soul and got a job. But the artist did not die. Not entirely. By sneaking in a phrase here and a sentence there into my word processor when the manager wasn’t looking, I managed to piece together this humble opus. Treat it with kindness, great chieftain in your plush editorial chair, for it has been written in blood.