Arvind Ethan David: THE GREAT GAME

Right.

Right.

Yeah.

Because a lot of people, when they think of 1905 London, or they think of, you know, 1880s or 1890s London, we have, especially Americans, I think we have this idea of rain soaked streets and fog and gas lights and charming fires, but there was a tremendous amount of, of important things happening both in the British Empire and in the world at that time that people tend to forget among the deerstalker hat and the magnifying glass of Sherlock Holmes

well it's all true at once right that's what's right super interesting as in the world today things don't happen one at a time and even in the original Sherlock stories, yes, he's charging about as this great agent of justice, but who's justice? And there are multiple cases, the Bruce Parrington papers being one of the most obvious, his final bow, where he is explicitly charged by the British government.

uh by the crown directly in a few cases and of course his brother mycroft famously sherlock says it may be more accurate to say that he is at this point the british government right and if you're an agent of the crown in the 1890s and 1910s it means you're an agent of empire right and that's interesting to think about with this perspective and In the cases where Empire does pop up, as it does in The Sign of the Four, where the whole mystery is around, you know, the theft of a great Indian treasure, the great treasure of Agra,

then

suddenly the Empire pokes its nose in and you have Indian characters and colonial characters and Pacific Islander characters.

But of course, it being...

the early 20th century or the late 19th century, they're treated in a particular way.

And to me, it was interesting as a writer of color, as an immigrant, as a subcontinental or someone of subcontinental heritage to go, okay, let's see if that stands up, shall we? Let's see how that plays.

Right, yeah, just because it was done in the late 1890s and the early 1900s doesn't mean it was accurate.

And I was intrigued by your desire to want to take a more modern approach to that era and try your hand at that type of literature, but with a modern sensibility and with your own unique lens on that.

What I tried very hard to do, because you can get, there are people who get very upset about revisionist history, about applying modern values to old historical characters or even historical literary figures.

And I have some sympathy for that.

But I do think, I think it gets a bit absurd when you're going through Roald Dahl cutting out you know, spiders with black faces.

You can take this a little far.

So what I try and do in this is less to provide a modern sensibility and more to say, what would somebody on the other side of the empire have made of it back then? Because most of our narrators, most of our figures that come to us from the literature are from the empire.

They're upper class white Englishmen.

And so they have their perspective and great, they've allowed their perspective, but they weren't the only people wondering about London at that time.

And so I put into my story, I put a Irish woman who has very particular views on Irish home rule and on feminism.

And I put an Indian war veteran and law student who has his own very clear perspective on what's happening.

Or rather, in Bal's case, his perspective is not clear to start with.

It evolves as the events of the novel evolve, as they should for any good hero.

But he comes into it sort of quite happy with playing his part in the empire.