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A review by cardica
The Shadows of Men by Abir Mukherjee
2022 on your Murder Mystery World Tour featured more than our usual share of thrillers, both in our interviews with authors, and our full-features on the show. Coming in at 8th place for our 2022 recommendations is The Shadows of Men, Abir Mukherjee’s fifth Sam Wyndham and Surendrenath Banerjee novel. This is Review Season, you’re listening to Death of the Reader on 2ser 107.3. Sam and Suren have been through a lot, over their tenure together. Over the course of their series, from A Rising Man, to today’s novel, they’ve stood side by side at their best and worst moments, but never before, has Surendrenath been given the turbulent, tumultuous and terrific control of the narrative that he gets in The Shadows of Men, and by golly, Abir Mukherjee has given him one hell of a debut in the driver’s seat.
It’d be just about impossible to list all of the reasons the city of Calcutta is buried in violence during The Shadows of Men. The novel is set in one of the many peaks of anarchy that shook the then-colonial nation, before Partition. In ‘Golakatta Gullee’, or ‘Cutthroat Alley’, you are greeted by Sam’s meeting with one of the many crime families taking advantage of the chaos. The scene establishes Sam Wyndham is embedded in the game, playing just dirty enough to prevent the worst from happening, or so he tells himself. Mid-bargain with Uddam ‘The Lion’ Singh, it turns out Suren has missed his cue to give the crime-boss what he wanted, and Sam has to abandon the trade to hunt down his partner. Suren has gotten himself arrested! Fortunately for Sam, as a dirty cop, it’s easy to overturn a simple crime like…murder? Oh that might be a bit more complicated.
Suren, it turns out, is accused of the strangulation of Prashant Mukherjee. He insists he found the body already dead, but his admission to lighting the crime scene on fire isn’t doing him any favours. If you’re trying to get a dirty cop off a charges of murder and arson, you might have to take it right to the top, to Lord Commissioner Taggart, who might just be attacked seconds after agreeing with your assessment of the case. Unfortunately for Sam, that’s exactly what happens, and Suren realises there’s no jumping back up from this cliff. From this point on, Suren is on the run, trying both to solve the murder he’s accused of, and avoid being caught. Conflict in Calcutta once again boils over, creating the perfect cover, but also the cruelest obstacle. As Suren works his way through a burning city, it’s clear that he’s not the only one following these footsteps.
Decorated with a dynamic expanded cast of police, military, criminals, criminals-in-all-but-name, and of course potential love interests, The Shadows of Men is never left wanting for the most interesting person possible to provide themselves to the page. Given all the mess Sam and Suren seem committed to getting into, it’s genuinely a miracle that they have as many allies on tap as they do. If you were to fumble as many favours as these two, I’d forgive your friends for skipping your birthday party, let alone flaunting the law to get you out of your latest failure. Abir brilliantly uses his broader cast as a road for us to walk down towards the next room wherein Wyndham and Banerjee buffoonishly bury themselves in deeper trouble. At some points, it’s hardly believable they’re actually making progress on solving the crime.
The Shadows of Men keeps up a typically thriller pace, with Sam and Suren going from one extravagant hazard to the next. One scintillating source of momentum for the action is the trading perspectives between our leading pair. The timeline isn’t entirely linear, jumping you back and forward between events as the cinematic camera captures every angle, even when the two are physically side-by-side. It screams the flavour of classic action cinematography, wherein the camera winds back just a few frames to really sell that punch. The subtle push and pull avoids the repetitious feeling you might get in more explicit flashbacks or flashes forward, and the flavour of this particular page turner is the constant falling downhill until Sam and Suren inevitably collide, and then the hill abruptly getting steeper and sillier once they’re back in each other’s embrace.
The mystery in The Shadows of Men isn’t complex, nor is it particularly meant to be. The only real sin you might feel it committing is that there isn’t really any reward for trying to get ahead of the beat, instead focusing on its own confidently clamorous rhythm. The downhill tumble through absurd event after absurd event won’t feel nearly as tidily organised as Abir has secretly made it, and that’s just the right flavour of chaos. As Sam and Suren fail their way forward, the real mystery is how they’re able to get away with it all, and how many pieces compose the insane domino-run Abir has crafted. When you finally reach where the two tumbling tracks Sam and Suren have been following collide, the linking point is viscerally satisfying. Those emotions flow seamlessly into an ending you’ll find very different depending on which hook has sunk deepest into you from the novel, but the specifics of that you’ll have to read for yourself.
The Shadows of Men takes out 8th place on our 2022 recommendations this season because even though it might be a misfit in the mystery-oriented criteria we set out, the same nuanced and detailed construction we love forms the foundation of the novel. That method might serve an entirely different purpose, but the near-slapstick terminal velocity The Shadows of Men operates at scratches all the right itches.
This is Review Season on your Murder Mystery World Tour, Death of the Reader. The Shadows of Men by Abir Mukherjee is out with Penguin in Australia, and thanks to Abir for joining us on the show to dive all the way into the weeds about it. Whilst you’re subscribing to Death of the Reader, you should also go check out Abir’s podcast with fellow author [a:Vaseem Khan|13340713|Vaseem Khan|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1599649623p2/13340713.jpg], the Red Hot Chilli Writers podcast.
It’d be just about impossible to list all of the reasons the city of Calcutta is buried in violence during The Shadows of Men. The novel is set in one of the many peaks of anarchy that shook the then-colonial nation, before Partition. In ‘Golakatta Gullee’, or ‘Cutthroat Alley’, you are greeted by Sam’s meeting with one of the many crime families taking advantage of the chaos. The scene establishes Sam Wyndham is embedded in the game, playing just dirty enough to prevent the worst from happening, or so he tells himself. Mid-bargain with Uddam ‘The Lion’ Singh, it turns out Suren has missed his cue to give the crime-boss what he wanted, and Sam has to abandon the trade to hunt down his partner. Suren has gotten himself arrested! Fortunately for Sam, as a dirty cop, it’s easy to overturn a simple crime like…murder? Oh that might be a bit more complicated.
Suren, it turns out, is accused of the strangulation of Prashant Mukherjee. He insists he found the body already dead, but his admission to lighting the crime scene on fire isn’t doing him any favours. If you’re trying to get a dirty cop off a charges of murder and arson, you might have to take it right to the top, to Lord Commissioner Taggart, who might just be attacked seconds after agreeing with your assessment of the case. Unfortunately for Sam, that’s exactly what happens, and Suren realises there’s no jumping back up from this cliff. From this point on, Suren is on the run, trying both to solve the murder he’s accused of, and avoid being caught. Conflict in Calcutta once again boils over, creating the perfect cover, but also the cruelest obstacle. As Suren works his way through a burning city, it’s clear that he’s not the only one following these footsteps.
Decorated with a dynamic expanded cast of police, military, criminals, criminals-in-all-but-name, and of course potential love interests, The Shadows of Men is never left wanting for the most interesting person possible to provide themselves to the page. Given all the mess Sam and Suren seem committed to getting into, it’s genuinely a miracle that they have as many allies on tap as they do. If you were to fumble as many favours as these two, I’d forgive your friends for skipping your birthday party, let alone flaunting the law to get you out of your latest failure. Abir brilliantly uses his broader cast as a road for us to walk down towards the next room wherein Wyndham and Banerjee buffoonishly bury themselves in deeper trouble. At some points, it’s hardly believable they’re actually making progress on solving the crime.
The Shadows of Men keeps up a typically thriller pace, with Sam and Suren going from one extravagant hazard to the next. One scintillating source of momentum for the action is the trading perspectives between our leading pair. The timeline isn’t entirely linear, jumping you back and forward between events as the cinematic camera captures every angle, even when the two are physically side-by-side. It screams the flavour of classic action cinematography, wherein the camera winds back just a few frames to really sell that punch. The subtle push and pull avoids the repetitious feeling you might get in more explicit flashbacks or flashes forward, and the flavour of this particular page turner is the constant falling downhill until Sam and Suren inevitably collide, and then the hill abruptly getting steeper and sillier once they’re back in each other’s embrace.
The mystery in The Shadows of Men isn’t complex, nor is it particularly meant to be. The only real sin you might feel it committing is that there isn’t really any reward for trying to get ahead of the beat, instead focusing on its own confidently clamorous rhythm. The downhill tumble through absurd event after absurd event won’t feel nearly as tidily organised as Abir has secretly made it, and that’s just the right flavour of chaos. As Sam and Suren fail their way forward, the real mystery is how they’re able to get away with it all, and how many pieces compose the insane domino-run Abir has crafted. When you finally reach where the two tumbling tracks Sam and Suren have been following collide, the linking point is viscerally satisfying. Those emotions flow seamlessly into an ending you’ll find very different depending on which hook has sunk deepest into you from the novel, but the specifics of that you’ll have to read for yourself.
The Shadows of Men takes out 8th place on our 2022 recommendations this season because even though it might be a misfit in the mystery-oriented criteria we set out, the same nuanced and detailed construction we love forms the foundation of the novel. That method might serve an entirely different purpose, but the near-slapstick terminal velocity The Shadows of Men operates at scratches all the right itches.
This is Review Season on your Murder Mystery World Tour, Death of the Reader. The Shadows of Men by Abir Mukherjee is out with Penguin in Australia, and thanks to Abir for joining us on the show to dive all the way into the weeds about it. Whilst you’re subscribing to Death of the Reader, you should also go check out Abir’s podcast with fellow author [a:Vaseem Khan|13340713|Vaseem Khan|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1599649623p2/13340713.jpg], the Red Hot Chilli Writers podcast.