Inspector Singh goes to London

~ A Frightfully English Execution, by Shamini Flint ~

It’s tempting to describe Shamini Flint’s Inspector Singh novels as ‘cosy mysteries’. They feature an appealingly crusty detective, and are full of sly humour. Despite their lack of pretentiousness, though, they take on major geopolitical themes. Islamic custody laws in Malaysia. Terrorist bombings in Bali. War crimes in Cambodia. Flint’s detective, Inspector Singh, has travelled around most of Southeast Asia dealing with dead bodies in the present and past.

In A Frightfully English Execution, the seventh in the series, Inspector Singh has arrived in England, familiar to him from the colonial pasts of both India and Singapore. Rather than being awash in either nostalgia or anti-colonial fervor, Inspector Singh reacts without clichés to a very modern England.

It had taken a lot of paperwork to convince border control to let him in by which time Singh had lost all fondness for his Sikh brother [the immigration official]. He disliked people who went hunting for a better life in foreign countries and then tried to pull the drawbridge up after themselves.

Mrs Singh had been more sanguine.

“You see how well our people are doing in this country”.

“What do you mean?”

“Even working in immigration.”

“He’s just a glorified security guard.”

“Like you?”

The appearance of their suitcase allowed him to ignore this sally with feigned dignity.

“In England, they trust the Sikhs to manage their borders,”, she continued.

“In Singapore, they trust the Sikhs to hunt for their murderers.”

Inspector Singh is here only to attend a policing conference, and his wife has come along to visit her vast array of relatives in Southall. He is tasked with helping to explore whether one particular cold case — the murder of a young British Muslim woman, Fatima Doud — might have been more successful if the police had more ‘community engagement’.

Bureaucratic language and Singh do not go well together, and he has little choice in the matter. He is officially supposed to be involved only in the community meetings, but everything in him rebels against the idea of not trying to solve the case — against the backdrop of the recent horrific execution on TV by a Muslim radical, against the generalized suspicion in which Muslims are held, and against all cultural misunderstandings. Needless to say, he gets himself plugged well into the investigation with his characteristic combination of inspired deduction and sheer determination.

Singh is both an insider, in that he has plenty of community information from his wife’s Southall relatives, and an outsider, in that he is a Sikh investigating a British-Muslim community. The author delights in up-ending stereotypes throughout the book. ‘Sikhs are not allowed to smoke!’, says a nosey Sikh lady in the shop where he is buying cigarettes. (Singh is abashed enough to pretend they are for a friend). The Muslim family might have stereotypical views about the behaviour of their women, but they also love them deeply, and were devastated by the death of Fatima. The policewomen are strong and tough but also very human.

It is entertaining to read Singh’s comparisons of London — an ancient, diverse city — with his hometown of Singapore.

[his bus was] packed to the gills with an assortment of people that were so self-consciously unique that he might have stumbled into a movie.

[He] fills his lungs with the sharpness of cold air, so different from the humidity of Singapore.

It was amazing to wander through streets essentially essentially unchanged for hundreds of years. In Singapore, anything that smacked of history or a more gracious era was an excuse to call in the bulldozers.

This is the first Inspector Singh novel in which his wife plays a part beyond bickering with him at home, and she is great fun indeed: seemingly conventional, argumentative, with plenty of stereotypes about other communities, and very well plugged into Punjabi-expat society.

[In conversation with a cousin]. “My husband relies on me to help him with his cases. Quite often’, she added, casting caution to the wind, I have to tell him who the killer is, you know?’

‘Really?’

Mrs Singh was assailed by doubt, a sensation so rare that she wondered at first if she was having an allergic reaction. Had her assertion been too emasculating of her husband? There was nothing to be gained in Punjabi circles from undermining the menfolk; they were the source of all status within the community unless one’s children were particularly academically gifted.

‘Of course he is the best investigator in Singapore, so sometimes he doesn’t need my help.’

Over the course of the book, you can see her biases shrinking, particularly when she starts feeling that the dead Muslim girl ‘could have been our daughter’. She is intrepid, too. Carried away by the thrill of investigating, she gets herself into trouble, and Inspector Singh is increasingly concerned.

He had never worried about her — her safety, her whereabouts, or her health. And now he was doing all three.

It is enjoyable to see the Singh marriage fleshed out, and Mrs Singh’s role expanded to more than just a nag.

There are several coincidences in the book, such as a policewoman who has second-degree connections to two murders. The Inspector Singh novels are light and funny enough that the reader is willing to overlook such nitpicky details. This novel also has a British Muslim character who spends six months in Syria training with Islamic rebels, and the grim threat of on-camera executions looms throughout, so it is also far from being simply lighthearted and mellow. It might be hard to imagine a novel which combines such contradictory atmospheres, but Shamini Flint carries it off with style.