Dear Readers,
As my editor said, no one is knitting in your books, no animals are helping to solve the crime, and my protagonist was no amateur. So, these books are neither classic nor cozy mysteries, making me call them easy mysteries with a question mark at the end.
I hope you love deducing the sequence of events surrounding these murders as much as I loved penning it.
Story of an Engineer
My father was an avid reader. A man who had to travel miles to make it to a library to go through daily newspapers and books of his choice. History, economics, Marxian laws, and even fiction novels were all up for grabs. With the wheel of time spinning, his responsibilities increased exponentially, and his passion focused on passing the trait to his next generation: my brother, a graphic novelist, and me, your easy mysteries author.
Sons inherit bungalows and lands from their fathers; I inherited books, the best of the lot was "And Then There Were None" by none other than the queen of crime mysteries, Agatha Christie. It intrigued the young Mathematical mind to try some more of it. Whether love for mysteries or the enticing smell of papyrus used for the novels, the old bookstore's novel collection became a regular stop while traveling back from school.
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​Interestingly, the first opportunity to craft a murder mystery was not a book or a short story but an event at a cultural fest during my engineering years. It did attract enough crowd to get a repeat in the years to come. Then the whole creative in me went on a break for almost half a decade, putting my professional career first. One day, a colleague introduced me to the New York Public Library and the system of borrowing books if you work in the crazy financial capital of the world, New York. Those books impacted me profoundly. Did I want to write? Did I want to be in those famous NYPL shelves? Did I want to be famous? Not even close. These were too complex algorithms for this engineer to code. All I want is to design a puzzle for people to deduce. What better than to pen? "The Masquerader" was not my first draft, not my second, even. Eliot Chatterjee was not my first protagonist either. ​