Bookwild - Serial Killers, Sherlock, and the Truth About Empire: Arvind Ethan David's The Great Game

Episode Date: July 14, 2026

In this episode, I talk with Arvind Ethan David about his historical mystery thriller The Great Game! Listen to hear all about: How Arvind Ethan David reimagined classic literary icons by pairing Sherlock Holmes with gentleman thief A.J. Raffles and Balvinder Singh, an Indian veteran whose perspective reshapes Edwardian-era mysteries.  The real history that shaped the thriller, including the Boer War, the British Empire, and the often-overlooked presence of Indian soldiers and immigrants in early 1900s London. How historical fiction can be propulsive, as Arvind blends grisly serial murders, conspiracy, humor, and literary Easter eggs into a fast-paced mystery. The surprising process of writing a first novel after years in television and theater, including what he had to unlearn about dialogue, pacing, and building scenes on the page. How Arvind wove real historical figures with fictional legends, from J.M. Barrie and Winston Churchill to Sherlock Holmes, while staying faithful to the historical timeline. Check Out Author Social Media PackagesCheck out the Bookwild Community on PatreonCheck Out My Stories Are My Religion SubstackGet Bookwild MerchFollow @imbookwild on InstagramOther Co-hosts On Instagram:Gare Billings @gareindeedreadsSteph Lauer @books.in.badgerlandHalley Sutton @halleysutton25Brian Watson @readingwithbrianMacKenzie Green @missusa2mba 

This week I got to talk with Arvind Ethan David, who is the author of The Great Game, which is a really, really, really fun historical fiction mystery that brings in both real-life characters from London in 1905 and some of the most famous fictional characters from that era, most notably Sherlock Holmes himself. Here's a quick description. In 1905 London, law student and former soldier Balvinder is drawn into a deadly mystery. after a robbery with the notorious gentleman thief AJ Raffles ends in murder, making them prime suspects alongside the attention of Sherlock Holmes. As ball races to uncover a conspiracy targeting the British government, he must navigate dangerous secrets, conflicting loyalties, and a growing

romance that challenges everything he believes. Even if you're someone who is hesitant about historical fiction, but you really, really, really love mystery thrillers and have loved any version of Sherlock Holmes, think you're really going to love this book. It manages to also really talk about the psychosocial environment of London in 1905 and also kind of from an outsider as Ball is an Indian man living in London at that time. That being said, let's hear from Arvind. I'm so excited to talk about the great game with you. It is such a fun example of like historical fiction and thrillers that like absolutely feel like a thriller. I know some people get intimidated by historical stuff, but I just loved it. I loved all the things I was able to learn. I loved the sense of humor. So I'm super excited to talk

about it with you. Thank you. Excited to be here. Yeah. So the general gist of it is that we have a character, Ball, who kind of gets involved in the case of some murders that are happening in London. So I know you said you had kind of like a good passage that sets up what they're what they're kind of up against. Do you want to start by reading that? Sure. Thank you. So this is, this is in fact the second murder. And I will just give you his perspective.

I will keep brief and factual my description of what we saw in the dining room. There's already sufficient terror. in the world that to dwell on it more than necessary is the sign of either perversion or cruelty, and I hope to the gods that I have little proscenity for either. Insofar, however, as the brutal detail is relevant for your understanding of what is to follow, I must set it out clearly. The Earl of Rutledge and his two adult sons, the Viscount Hollingwood and the right honorable Rupert de Latorre had been dead for some hours. Rigamortis had set in, and their bodies were taught in the final paroxysms of death.

The elder son, Hollingwood, a handsome, if slightly hard, featured man in his mid-20s, who I had last seen on the back of a fine horse, was the first we encountered as we entered the room. He had been stripped of his clothes and positioned on his back on the dining table, with his limbs extended to their most extreme. positions so he took the form of an X. When I say his clothes had been removed, I must unfortunately stress that I mean all of them. Nothing had been left to conceal his manhood, but that scarcely mattered, for what drew your eye was not the fellow's privates, but the fact that his ribs had been cut down the centre and pried open, and the contents of his

chest had been removed, like a carved turkey, he served. as the centrepiece of the table. His arms was spayed wide and I noticed that his right arm stopped at the wrist, the hand having been removed. Sitting on opposite sides of him propped up in a fac-mile of life

were his father and his younger brother, Rupert. A lad who in life I remembered as being blessed with dark curly hair, a large, handsome head, and a sweet disposition. but who had now been posed, with his eyes cut out, his mouth open as his left hand shoved into his open moor, a large morsel of meat. On closer inspection, the meat was revealed to be a ventricle of his brother's heart. Rupert's right hand, like his brothers, was missing.

The father on the other end of the table had fared no better than his unfortunate offspring. His head had been removed completely at the neck and placed on his own plate, screaming soundlessly, as his left hand shoved a fork deep into the soft matter of his brain. My subconscious knew before I saw with my eyes that his right hand, like those of his sons, had been severed at the wrist and was nowhere to be found. I am not a man easily shocked.

my long years of duty in the theater of war have inured me to the brutality man is capable of and to the degradation that violence works in the human form. Nevertheless, I confess that in that moment the horrific spectacle before us shook me to my very core

and I wanted nothing more than to run screaming from that foul room. My fists clenched and unclenched, my mouth ran dry, and somehow from some deep part of me the words of the Japji Sahib most holy of Sikh prayers came unbidden to my stuptified tongue

I'll stop there What an opening I mean it's not the opening opening but it's close so yeah it is pretty gruesome the murders that are happening and I'm not going to totally get into it

I don't want to explain spoilers, but there is like a very interesting driving force behind them that I thought was pretty fantastic. So I think anyone who really loves even like serial killer thrillers will also really, really, really enjoy this. I think that's up our alley. What was it like rating that scene, like the more gruesome scenes? Honestly, I felt a bit like our narrator does. I was like, ooh, can I really go there? I mean, I was like, am I a person of perversion and cruelty? But you sort of have to do it because it's honestly not gratuitous.

The stakes are that high. And as he discovers, the killer isn't doing it just out of a sense of sadism. He has a message to communicate and he's telling his message in flesh. Yes. Yes. I completely agree. So for people who haven't read it yet, one of the fun things about the great game is it very much has his own main character, but it also is Sherlock Holmes adjacent. And we do end up meeting an older Sherlock Holmes as the story progresses.

So is that was Sherlock kind of the first thing that came to you for this? Or what was the kind of spark of inspiration? You know, he wasn't. I didn't set out to write a Sherlock Holmes story. I mean, I've always loved Sherlock since I was a very little boy, but that wasn't the ambition. I knew I wanted to write something set in this period, sort of early 1900s, London.

And I knew that I would probably be playing with some of the characters from the canon of Edwardian, Victorian thrillers and mysteries. But I actually didn't start with Sherlock. I started, in fact, with Raffles. So Raffles for the readers and any listeners who may not know is sort of Sherlock's dark mirror shadow. He is a gentleman thief, the first and original gentleman thief,

created amazingly, a little piece of thriller history, created by Sherlock Holmes' sorry, by Arthur Conan Doyle's brother-in-law, Ernest Hornon in a complete I mean this today would be like if this happened today this would be trending this is like I don't know Joe Hill rips off his dad and like writes the Shining 2

you know that's what this is but you know Conan Doyle's brother married to his beautiful sister Connie just one day ups and publishes this series of short stories in which a sort of inverse Sherlock and an inverse Watson are stealing from the rich and very much not giving to the poor. And so I started there.

I was sort of, it was like everyone's forgotten about Raffles and he's such a great character. So I wanted to start on an adventure of his. And I love the idea of a cat burglar being interrupted by a serial killer who's killing the same, you know, whose victims are the same houses, the same great houses and great wealthy aristocrats that the cat burglar is after.

Like, what do you do? You know, it seemed like an interesting moral dilemma if you've witnessed a murder, but to help the, you know, catch the killer, you have to confess that you were there trying to steal the diamonds. So that was my way in. But you can only write in the London, you know, Edwardian London for so long before Sherlock pokes his head up.

Yes. And notices something as a foot. Yeah, totally. That's so fascinating. And it kind of came through him. So then creating Balvinder, where did that, or when did he kind of come into the picture for you? almost exactly where he comes into the picture for the reader so in the original raffles's stories raffles

has this sidekick called bunny who is even more stupid than watson is he's like the ultimate dupe i mean to the extent that most of the time he doesn't even realize that they're going to be stealing something he thinks they're just going for a nice jolly and and raffles sort of tricks him into stealing and also, I mean, not just from stealing. In the original stories, Raffles tricks him to stealing from his fiancé, ending that relationship, tricks him from stealing from his parents, being kind of. He's just, Raffles like abuses him terribly, and he is forever duped because in part he is in love with Raffles.

The original stories also have a strong sort of homoerotic subtext, which is very unusual for the literature over that period. And so, and so I was like, that's interesting. So I started writing, you know, thinking I was doing that. And then I realized, oh, what if it's not the original bunny? What if it's someone who is much smarter and much less duped, but still willing to go along, maybe even more willing to go along with the criminal life for his own reasons?

And as I was writing that character, I was like, oh, I know who this guy is. This guy is me if I was born 150 years ago. Let's try that. And then I started having fun because it's fun. You know, you don't want your writing to be autobiographical. You want lots of layers. But the idea of saying, who would I be if I was born into Victorian England was quite an interesting idea.

And I, you know, so that made, that made the history fun for me and hopefully for the reader because it's not, it's not history book history. It's history told from the perspective of an outsider. As the readers will be an outsider, unless they are, you know, 200 years old, they will be an outsider to Victorian England. It was also making me think of, I saw, there's an author named Diana Gray who wrote I Medusa last year. well, it came out last year. And she wrote her as a black character. And she was, like, to her, it was really important that, like, she could go back in because with some of these mythologized stories, we just kind of, at least in America, we'll just

default to assuming everyone was white there. And she's like, that wasn't the case either. I'm not even doing revisionist history to include her in it. I just actually am going to choose to include her. in it and was that kind of part of what was kind of interesting for you because even if Indian men were not necessarily a part of the fiction a large part of the fiction coming out at the time they were definitely there we were there no first to say I loved I'm Medusa I love that whole there was like a there was like a little rash of Medusa revisionist novels that came out

yeah the last few years and they were all great because she's such a great character And I actually, I didn't think about that specifically, although I have read it. But yeah, you're right. We were there. We were, you know, the first Indian restaurant in London opens in 1807, right? Wow. Opens 220 years ago. And the first Indian member of government, the member of parliament and elected MP is 1897 or something.

So again, 130 years ago. we have been there, you know, there's a reason that Britain was an empire. It controlled two-thirds of the world. And by the way, open borders. And today, open borders is like this political, you know, death trap. Open borders was the norm in the world until about 1940. So you could just turn up. There was no passports.

There was no immigration. and many, many Indians, Caribbean, Asians, Africans did turn up in the London. You know, Shakespeare didn't like make Othello up. There were people like Othello walking the streets of London in the 1500s. Yes. So, so yeah, it was, you know, and to me it's having grown up as an immigrant as a person of color, loving the literature of this period,

loving Sherlock and Raffles and Tarzan and 2000 leagues under the sea and, you know, all the stuff. And of course, even the new stuff, Penny Dreadful, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, all of it defaults to everyone being white. And I'm like, that just ain't so. We were there. So, so, so yeah, it was fun to just, you know, as you say, not revisionist, but just go, yeah, let's put. put it the people who were in fact there. Yeah, it's more honest, actually. I thought it was interesting too because he has just come,

they both have come back from the Boer Wars. And you hit on, there was, there's this sentence that I was like, this is just fantastic where it says, no, this was a white man's war betwixt to the Brits and the Boers, yet fought on African soil and was such a contingent of Indian auxiliaries.

And then you go on to explain how like the auxiliaries are essentially the drivers, the cooks, water carriers, and in Balvinder's case, like medical stretcher carriers is what he kind of says. But I thought that was so fascinating the way you set up, how kind of silly that war is in where it was fought, who it was fought by, who got to fight at which levels. And then when it's done, he kind of comes back to society, Balvinder does. And without raffles, he wouldn't be getting access to some things because he's Indian, which is like it's happened in America too, where we'll have like black soldiers fight for us. And then when they come back, they're still treated second class. So what kind of drew you to writing in that time period and then like including that as well? Well, as you say, because it's so familiar, right?

I mean, historically, it's always been true. The Indians fought in every British war from the 1800s through to the Second World War. And again, I'm not recognized in the official histories, are not counted in the death tolls. There are no memorials to them in London. In a very similar way, as you say, that black troops fought in the First and Second World War and the Vietnam War and were not as recognized and came home. You know, the Germans would, in the Second World War, would drop pamphlets on black troops in Germany

saying, you're fighting for the wrong side, saying why are you fighting for this country that hates you? Come to us, we will welcome you. And, you know, it was not successful because there was real patriotism in those black troops, but you could see their point. Yes. just before the war, the Germans were studying how legislation in the American South worked

to segregate and suppress black Jews. They were studying it to apply it to the Jews in Nazi Germany. So this is an old and repeatable pattern and sadly repeatable to the current day where we hear these horror stories of Iraqi and Afghan servicemen who served as translators and as auxiliaries to American troops in those wars, now being denied immigrant status, being deported by ICE, dying in custody. You know, not to get all political, but this is a pattern as old as empire. And so this was something that, you know, my family has always talked about there. people in my family tree who fought in the wars. My great-grandfather was killed in the Second World War by the Japanese.

My grandfather was tortured by the Japanese as a teenager. And there isn't as much recognition. And so I was like, you know what? Again, it's part of the tradition of this type of thriller. You know, Dr. Watson, obviously, is a war vet in every version. He comes back from the Afghan War, including in the Martin Freeman, Benedict Cumberbatch, Sherlock. And in the stories, Raffles and Bunny are, you know,

they go and serve in the Boer War. So I was like, okay, let's just keep that. Let's just keep what's in the canon. Let's not mess with it. But if it is Belvinder, how did he serve? And he wouldn't have been given a gun. He would have been sent to the front lines with his stretcher and his cleaning and his mop.

but not with a gun. Right. And so I was like, let's tell that story. Yeah, definitely. I think it's important to kind of like know, like these were all things that were happening. Like that part is not fictionalized. And I think sometimes getting to read about it through fiction kind of helps us

just have like a better understanding of stuff like that. But the book also very much like you were discussing is touching on class divide, maybe even you could call it class warfare in some situations, it's definitely talking about imperialism and like the injustices of that and how it actually doesn't even really make sense. It's just like greed and sadism for the most part. Did you know when you started writing it that you were going to want to kind of tackle that even within the murders that they're solving or did it kind of come as you were writing the story? A little bit of both.

A little bit of both. It's history I know and it's issues I care about. But I didn't set out, you know, I don't think any good author ever sets out to write like a polemic. A polemic is nonfiction, right? If you're going to write like an argument, that's great. And I've written many arguments in my time. But in this, I was telling a story.

I was telling this murder mystery, this conspiracy. And in a way, I was on a voyage of discovery with Val. One of the nice things about a character like Val, who hopefully readers will come to take to their heart in his sarcasm and his subversiveness, is that once you have him, he has to go where he has to go. and really my job as writer was less to tell him what to do,

he could figure that out for himself. And more was just to give him the context, was to say, all right, you walk into a room where a noble family has been butchered and laid out on their table. And then he knows how to react to that. And it was sort of the same with the politics. I didn't set out, you know, with any great deliberateness to go, let's talk about this politically. I was like, let's put Bell in these rooms. So, for example,

there's a scene where he is meeting Raffles for breakfast at the Garrick Club. And the Garrett Club is one of these grand English gentleman clubs on Palmao, where you have to wear a suit and tie, and you have to be a member to be admitted. And Raffles is late, because he's been on a bender. and Bell gets there and he's hungry and he's dressed up and he's ready and of course he's not allowed in because he's not a member

and nor could he be because the Garrick did not admit a non-white member until late into the 20th century and so but I didn't like set out to make some point about the Garrick where I've had the occasional meal

I set out to put Bal in that room and I was like oh gosh this is what would happen. Yeah. Yeah. Am I still moving? It says my internet is wrong. You are occasionally freezing.

You're occasionally freezing. But of course, the joy of the side is it shouldn't matter. Yeah. Okay. I'm just switching to a different internet. Or I switched my hotline. So hopefully that won't happen. I think kind of what you're talking about too is in some of these conversations I've been having

lately with people to where they're like don't make books political well every it's it it everything is political in a sense because like politics is about how we're able to live our lives and like navigate our lives and who gets to go where so it's like he just like you're saying he just wouldn't have been able to get in there that's just that's just the truth of the time period what i did really love about that scene as well though is you and include he's friends with Jay and Barry is something that happens, who is a true author of Peter Pan and many other books of the time. And something I've been enjoying so much with historical fiction is when like the real life people are even able to interact with the fictional ones. So I think

it's kind of cool that you have like Sherlock, which is like the fictional, Sherlock's world, which is like the fictional things that were going on in that time. But then there's also like the real, or the non-fictional, real characters in there as well. So how did you decide, like, who to bring into that? Or did it just kind of, like, come to you when you were writing that scene specifically, too? I mean, pure, look, you know, at the end of the day, I'm a fan. And to some extent, this gave me the excuse to, like, do some fan service and some fan fiction tributes, you know? And the thing about Barry is, it's well documented, whilst there was some darkness,

in him. He was just nice. He was like a very lovely guy. And so I was like, oh dear, Val is stuck outside the Garrett Club. All these like stiff upper lip asshole Brits are like blanking him even though they know him and not letting him in. I'm like, who would let him in?

I was like, ah, lovely Scottish Jimmy Barry. If Jimmy Barry walked in, if the creator of Tinkerbell walked in, he would go, come on, come on, come on, fella. Let's have a meal together. And so I thought that'd be fun. But yeah, more generally, it was a real joy. Because the truth is, I think for those of today, right,

looking back from the distance of 120 years or whatever, who is more real to us? Sherlock Holmes or Winston Churchill? You know, they're both, in a way, they're both creatures of legend at this point. You know, more, you know, we know Sherlock from Benedict Cumberbatch, and Robert Downey Jr. and Henry Cavill, and we know Winston Churchill from Gary Olman and John Lithgow. You know, that's our version of history and our version of our touch points.

So I was like, they're all real, you know, my daughter is eight and she recently decided that Santa didn't exist. And we had never lied to her because we don't, I don't do that. I only lie for a living. I don't lie as a parent. And so she would ask me from time to time, you know, Daddy is Santa rail. And I said, listen, he's rail in the same way that Spider-Man is rail. And that's pretty real in this household, right? That's a good point.

And they live in our imagination. We love them. And that's okay. That's enough. Who cares? if there was a historical Santa or not. Would that make children love him more? Or if there was some horrible scandal.

Imagine if historical Santa was like a kiddie fiddler. That would destroy it. We don't want to know. So yeah, I was just going, who do I love who was walking about either in historical 1905 or in fictional 1905? and I just took them all and put them in there. I love that.

Did you, like, create any rules for yourself on, like, either how to have, like, the Sherlock world or how to have any of the, like, non-fictional characters? Or was it just kind of, like, they fit where they fit? I'm pretty strict about the timeline, because I think if you are playing in historical fiction, you can't play fast and loose with, like, you know, people who were dead turning up or people being the wrong age and stuff like that. Right. So I'm pretty rigorous about that. And that's, you know, there's even a timeline at the end of the book,

which lays out year for year all the events blending rail history with fictional history. So for example, the book said in 1905, so if you go to the canon, you know, Sherlock and Watson are in their late 50s at this point, which is older than. than it is now, right? Late 50s in 1905 is like late 60s, early 70s, by today's standards. And so it was important to portray them not as young, but as the sort of grand old men to the young bunny and young bell and younger raffles. And, you know, and similarly, you know, Churchill turns up, But he's young. He's in his, he's not, he's not the Churchill we know from the movies. Right.

He is, he's not prime minister. He's in his first government job. He's a young man on the make. He's like, you know, he's like young Senator Obama in like 2008. He's like, he's like trying out his voice and seeing what he can do. Yep. That's, that's where we are with him. So yeah, that was my rule to be pretty specific about the time.

And it turned out, you know, 1905, my God, a lot of stuff happened. So it was a good year. It turned out to be a good year to set it in. Yeah. It's in pure coincidence on my side. There was a book that I was really excited to read called it came from Neverland. And I just got approved for it, basically. So I ended up reading your book and this book, I'm listening to this other one.

So I was like, my physical book was this one in 1905. And then the one I'm listening to is. is 1911 or something like that. And it's all, it's a horror retelling of Neverland. So I had this like strange thing where like Jay and Barry is, is referenced in this version and then it also in your book here. And I was like,

this is kind of cool having both of these things happening. But I was having the same realization. I was like, damn, there was a lot of stuff happening at the beginning of the 1900s. It was an extraordinary time. That book sounds fun. I'll check it out.

And of course, yeah, Peter Pan is written in 19... Well, Peter Pan is staged. So the stage production is 1904, because it starts as a play. So, and I think the book, the novel, comes out a little later. Maybe 1911 or 1909, maybe, I think. And so, yeah, it's a good... It's a good ball up. But, yeah, my God, the stuff that is going on, of course, we have, you know,

we have the politically... Yeah. up to the First World War. We have the, let's say, Churchill in office. And then fictionally, or in the world of literature, we have Peter Pan. We have, you know, the sort of raffles in Sherlock Holmes at the height of their fame. We have H.G. Wells is, you know, sleeping with anyone who will have him and publishing a book a year. It's a really rich period.

It really is. And what is going on. Yeah. All of that included, I feel like the story also is kind of touching on like how much like where you were born kind of sets you up for the kind of life that you're going to have. So we sometimes get these contrasts. Like there's kind of like with the war like Raffles has a horse and a bayonet and weaponry. and Balvinder, as we talked about, is basically a medic with like nothing to protect himself. But he even there are a few different times where Balvinder is like put in a situation and he's like,

would this have been me if I were born in the middle of London as well? And kind of what you're saying, like there were the open borders, but like you also still would kind of get treated differently based off of where you were born. So what was it like kind of writing that contrast as well? Well, it's just the, you know, the randomness of the thing. The thing that no one gets to choose is who their parents are and where they're born, right? You have zero choice over that. But it's the single greatest determinant of your success.

I mean, we, it's a bit of a bugbear in my household when people talk about being self-made or coming from nowhere. We're like bullshit yourself made. Bullshit you came from nowhere. You know, I mean, very occasionally, very occasionally, I remember I, for many years, I judged the Television Academy's summer internship scheme, which is a pretty prestigious sort of Hollywood internship. And I remember one year we were going around, actually, most years there were people

like this, but one year there was this, you know, you get a lot of people who are like, you know, 4.0 average, Dean's List, Harvard, Ivy League, Ivy League. blah blah blah. But then you look like, where did they start? And they grew up on the Upper West Side and their parents are investment bankers. I'm like, fine, okay, it's good. You still did good kid, but it's not that much a leap. Then you know, then you find people who are like born in refugee camps and still made it to Harvard with a 4.0 GPA and debate scholarship. And then you're yeah, you're the one we're going to give the scholarship to. And that's not that's not DEI. That's just recognizing that there is greater effort and to go further than there is to go adjacent, right?

And so, yeah, so in the book, in the book, Bal has this sort of brain freeze where he meets Sherlock, who is his hero, and he meets his hero, and Sherlock is every bit as amazing as he hoped he would be. But at the same time, he can't help himself but thinking, what if Sherlock had been born in India? Right. What if, instead of Sherlock, he is Salman Holmes. and he's born in a slum in Calcutta, would he still have become the greatest detective the world has ever known? Would he still have become internationally famous?

Or would he be stuck in a slum solving the mystery of the missing chapatis? We don't know. That's the question. Yeah. And I'm conscious of my own life of, you know, my mother is what's called a midnight's child, as Samin Rushdie, immortalized.

She was born in India just before partition, and her family had to flee because her home state of Sindh was going to become Pakistan and her family are Hindu and didn't want to be in Pakistan. So she was a refugee as a baby, and I'm the child of a refugee and she moved to Malaysia. And if she hadn't, my life would have been very different. And then again, from Malaysia,

I got a scholarship and I went to boarding school in England. And if I hadn't, my life would be very different? You know, would I still have written this book? I don't know. I mean, I know, you know, I did read Sherlock in Malaysia before boarding school. But I don't know whether I would have had the life experience. Now, I wouldn't have had the life experience I've had. I probably wouldn't be working in Hollywood.

I probably wouldn't be a novelist. Right. Yeah, I thought that was a really powerful scene when he is. he's kind of like meeting his hero and then having to kind of contemplate like what all of that even means um but then there's also oh my brain is losing it oh the he when um he meets mod adler at uh the which school basically at a college and they're they're playing music that is like familiar to him and calming to him basically. And so when we get to that part, he feels like the two men who are with her are probably, I'm assuming we would say Malaysian now, but you do use the different word, which I wanted

to ask about, I have so many questions about how you nailed the vernacular of that time. But you also had, there's also a sentence in that moment where you talk about like where the division that was happening in India and India and kind of Asia would have made him kind of like a counterpart to them in another place when he's here kind of in a very white predominant area. Now he feels kinship with them. So it's so complex. So what was it like getting to write about that stuff too? I mean, this is just a universal rule, right? Like if you if you're on holiday, if you're an American or Brit and you're on holiday and Thailand or whatever, it's, you hear an American accent, you turn around and you go, hi, hi, how are you? Where are you from?

Well, it's like, you know, if you're walking down the street in New York, you don't turn around and say hello to anyone who's the American accent, right? You'd never get anywhere. So it's just a universal truth. And often those people are not people who with whom you would have anything in common if you were at home, but the distance from your home makes you hungry for commonality and fellow travelers and people who sound and look like you. And I think there's an assumption that that's only true for white people abroad. It's true for everybody. And so that's what happens.

It's why, you know, it's why black folks give each other the nod in public, even if they're strangers and Indians do it too. And interestingly, increasingly, I think black folks and Indians do it to each other, which is nice. And so yeah, he just has that moment. But you brought up Maud. What did you think of Maud? I really want to know.

Oh, my gosh. I really enjoy her. And I loved, like, when I was reading it, because I haven't read anything, Sherlock Holmes in a while. But I was like, I'm pretty sure Adler, like, means, I was like, I think that's a name that matters. So I thought that was cool having her, because her mom, she's the daughter, correct? Is that what it?

The cousin. She's the cousin. The cousin. That's what it was. I thought she was a part edition. Yeah. And I liked kind of what she was able to like bring out Involvenor as well. Yeah, she was super fun to write.

So yeah, Mord Adler is this. So spoiler, she's Irene Adler's younger cousin. The woman for those who like their Sherlock. Yeah. But she's her own woman. And she's, as you say, musician, a violinist, a sort of prodigy violinist who bow meets, and, spoiler, they fall for each other pretty hard. And so we get to explore what that side of things, you know, the book is not, is not

primarily a romance, but I'm very proud of their romance, which is, which is, which is, which is, which is, which is, which is, a little bit, a little bit spicy. And, and, and, and, and, and, but the most amazing thing. about Mord Adler is she's based on a real historical person. There was a, there was a woman called Maud McCarthy who was a Irish violin potaget and prodigy, I mean, and she traveled the world performing and went to India and fell in love with Indian classical Carnatic music. And, you And she brought that tradition to the West and to Britain. And she was very fiery and very pro-feminism and liberalism. And she was pretty romantically and sexually adventurous.

I'm not even going to say for the age. She just was. The woman would set your hair on fire today. And so finding her, I was like, oh, I have to put this woman in my book, she is too great. Yeah. Yeah, it was cool because you mentioned, again, I'm getting back to the vernacular and I'm forgetting

what it was, but there was kind of like a different term for feminism around that time period. Wolf and Craftism. So Mary Shelley, creator of Frankenstein, her mother is

really the first feminist. and her name was Wolfencraft. So yeah, the mother of Frankenstein's mother is the mother of feminism. And so it all, you know, literature and real life. Who knew? Who knew? Right. The dialogue is so transportive too since like it feels, I mean, I guess I don't know 100% for sure, but it feels like indicative of the time that it's written in.

Was that like, did you, did you like research different things? Did some of it kind of come from reading books from that time period? And like when you were writing, would you ever be like, oh, nope, that was too modern of a phrase. Did you have to like do any of that in editing? For sure, for sure. Yeah, it was important to me, because it's first person narration, right? Bell is telling you the story. He has to be authentic.

And also if you're playing, if you're trying to write in the world of Conan Doyle and, you know, H.G. Wells and J.M. Barry, you better live up to their pros, right? These guys were masters. And so, yeah, I was pretty exacting with myself. I think that was the single thing that I was hardest on is that making sure that it was authentic, but at the same time approachable, right? You don't want it to be like so like full of obscure words and references that people don't know what's going on. So I hope it's a it's a quick read and it's a page turner. Oh yeah. But yeah, it's it's pretty authentic to the to the period. Yeah, every now and then you find stuff. But the stuff you find that you think is anachronistic often is not, you know?

So you're like, oh, I can't have someone as, you know, sexually forward as mord. no you can because women have been sexually forward since the beginning of time right since eve eve on up right so so so you can but then you find like weird stuff like for example I think I had a sequence where Bal was doing the classic detective thing of like sticking stuff on his on his board right yeah and then drawing you know connections and putting tape between it and then I was like oh let me just check that that would have have actually happened. And it turns out no, and it turns out, no, thumb tacks were not invented in 1905.

Nobody was sticking stuff up on their mantelpiece. I was like, oh, I have to change that, I have to take that down. So it was like really random specific stuff like that that you had to change. Oh, I tell you another thing. So like whiskey, you know, there's quite a lot of drinking in the book. Now, you know, knocks it back with Watson and with Raffel. and, you know, there's a lot of alcohol. But, you know, these days, there's a lot of prestige about aged scotch.

You know, everyone's like 15-year, 18-year, 25-year scotch. That just wasn't a thing back then. There was, you know, I mean, some of it was old, but it just wasn't a thing they talked about. It was just like, was there a good scotch or bad scotch? That's a marketing invention to charge us more money for Johnny Walker Blue. that's what that is. It's right. Oh, $40 a shot, sir.

No, then it was just like, is it good or is it not good? It doesn't matter with those 18 years or old of 15 years. There was no ice. There's no ice in cocktails in 1905. His ice was really rare and expensive and hard to get. Yeah. So, yeah, it was, you know, stuff like that. Also, probably everyone was more smelly, but I didn't speak to that too much.

Yeah, I mean. that's definitely the case but it's not what we want to be thinking about is the reader probably the whole time or the writer um the other interesting thing to me is is the title so the great game it also sounds um very shakespeare adjacent like the game is afoot we have kind of those references but without giving too much away some of the kind of like conspiracy that he finds himself investigating slash a part of

is also one that kind of reflects like maybe like the game of empire or the game of imperialism like I feel like it kind of fits in that direction too and it also feels like again like it very much feels like a mystery thriller but I also feel like

we're kind of being reminded of like who writes history and who kind of decides that so is that kind of all part of the title as well? First, I mean, first, yes, you are correct in all particulars. Thank you for thinking about it so hard. But secondly, my God, titles are the worst, right?

I can imagine. They're always the last thing. The great game was not the working title. It was not any of the working titles. We were going back and forth, me and the publishers and the whole, you know, the marketing department got involved and legal got involved. There was a lot, you know, that went into this. But you're exactly right. So the great game in its first what the phrase came to mean in the period, you know,

in the 1900s was the great game of empire, was the great game of spycraft and state craft in which the great empires at that time, the British Empire, the French Empire and the Russian Empire, were, you know, fighting for position. And so, you know, I think the novel starts as a murder mystery and it sort of evolves into a conspiracy thriller. And I think if, you know, as I'm not going to say, I'm going to be careful about this and not say more than I should, but if there was more in Balvinder's future,

I think we're getting into the world of, you know, spy thriller and international espionage and international statecraft. And I think that's sort of the trajectory and the great game sort of captures that. And it also the phrase, it allowed me another little literary nod, which is even though the phrase was invented by a real spy, there's a real British spy who invents the phrase in the 1890s in a letter to another spy. But the person who made it famous was another great man of letters. another great author of the period was Rudyard Kipling, who uses it in Kim.

And he says this, welcome, welcome to the great game, my son. And of course, Kim is an Anglo-Indian hero, one of the first, you know, sort of cultural hybrid heroes in literature. And so it was a little, you know, Bell giving him a little nod across the multiverse of Yeah. And Rodean literature was nice. I love that. The other thing that I was thinking about, and you can maybe talk about some of this, too, I know you have, you've told stories in multiple mediums, and this is, this just happens

to be your first novel. How did all of the other mediums that you have worked in? How did that kind of play into your process as you wrote a novel? And was there anything where you're like, oh, I was kind of leaning into this instead of like novel structure. For sure. Yeah. So as you say, my background is mainly as a playwright and as a television writer. And in all sorts of drama, audio and audible originals and all of that. And I've been doing that for a minute. I've been doing that for a while. So I'm pretty used to that. And I'm a sort of accidental novelist.

I hope this doesn't make anyone hate me. I wasn't planning on a novel. I wasn't trying to write a novel. I got a phone call. Someone had read a two-pageer that wasn't even meant to be a novel. And they were like, do you want to write this as a novel? I'm like, I think, sure, okay, is that good? Is that a good thing to do?

But of course, you know, it was cool. But of course, I was excited because I've always wanted to write a novel. I just haven't done it. and yeah, I found out a lot of stuff. I found out that I'm an idiot. I found out that novels are hard. You know, for one thing, there are a lot more words. Yeah.

Like, you know, Hamlet is 30,000 words. War and Peace is 460,000, you know? Wow. Yeah. That's what we're talking about. Like, the big sleep, the screenplay, is I think about 25,000 words. Big sleep, the novel, is like 60.

It's the same story, right? But it's a lot, it's a lot more. So that was the first thing. It just took me longer. It took me like six months to write this, writing four or five hours a day every day. And nothing has ever taken me that long before. Right.

Of course, movies can take years and TV, But generally speaking, once you're like writing towards production, the way I was writing towards publication, you know, you're churning out a TV episode every every couple of weeks, you know. You need a draw, because just that's the demand of the medium. Right. So it took a while. It was a marathon. It wasn't a sprint. And I had to definitely, you know, do a lot of stretching and muscle strengthening exercises just to keep up the endurance.

I mean, one thing I did that people might find interesting is because I'm so used to quick feedback. Like, you know, if I'm working in a TV writer's room, like, you're getting feedback every day, right? Or you send in your script on Friday and you have notes on Monday. Right. And I couldn't cope with the loneliness and the suspense of writing for six months and only then getting any feedback. Yeah. So I sent in every chapter as it was done. Every chapter went to my agent and went to my editor.

Yeah. And I was like, pretend I'm Charles Dickens and I'm sending you the pages. Or, you know, pretend I'm Arthur Conan Doyle. A lot of the original Sherlock stuff was published in magazines, right? It was serialized. I'm like, let's pretend this is a serial. And, you know, that was fun. Because I mean I would get back, like, in the margins as like track changes in every chapter.

I would get back sort of live notes every week. So that kept me going. Yeah. The other thing that was a bit of a revelation, but probably only because, as previously mentioned, I'm an idiot, was that I had to do this all by myself in the sense that, you know, plays, you have TV, you have actors, you have directors, you have directors. You have costume departments. And so I remember like delivering, it was the chapter that

Bell meets Sherlock, where they go for lunch at the Savoy, right? And the four of them go for lunch, Watson and Sherlock and Bell and Raffles. And I was really proud of this scene. I was like, you know, it's all rack-a-tac-tat, they're all at each other's throats. Everyone's trying to one-up each other.

It's a real, you know, it's a really tense, scene and I sent it in in one of my weekly updates Friday night, press send, latest chapter. And then, you know, I came in Monday morning and the note from my editor was like, yeah, it's great, but like, what are they doing? And I went, what do you mean? And she's like, what are they doing? I'm like, they're talking. And she went, yeah, I can see that. You've written 25 pages of dialogue and you haven't described. a single thing that is happening. Right.

And I still didn't get it. I still didn't get it. I was like, what do you mean? They're sitting having lunch. They're having lunch and they're talking. And she's like, yeah, but what are they eating? What's the light in the room like? What are they thinking?

I was like, what do you mean what are they're thinking? The actors will show. Oh, no actors. Right. Yeah. So it's like, I get it. You need me to describe what they're thinking. Right.

Not just the lines they are saying. So that was, yeah, I learned a lot mainly, as I say, that I was an idiot. So it was helpful. Well, I mean, you were starting a new medium. You were a beginner is essentially what it was. One of the things that you mentioned how Sherlock came out serialized in some cases. And there's a part where, I think when he meets him, where Balvarez, is thinking about reading the books himself or yeah the as books when he was younger um and how some

people might be like why why are you into this detective or whatever or this white detective especially too and it kind of talks about how for him like with his life being full of chaos it was actually kind of a place that he got to go where there was like order and you could understand things and like things got resolved and i talk a lot about about how books have always been kind of like that safe space for me as well, even as a child. So was that kind of, was that your experience with books? Was that some of that coming in? Or like what kind of made you want to write the how much books meant to the main character?

No, 100%. I think for any of us who readers, who are readers first and maybe were authors next, or not, but yeah, books are the ultimate safe space. It's why they are books. Books is where we go to not be alone, to go where to find ourselves, to find our tribes, to connect across the centuries and generations and genders. You know, books are everything. You know, this is, I'm talking to you from my library. I love that. Books and everything.

But I think mysteries and thrillers and crime in particular are where the reason, one reason we love them so much is because there is order. You know, Sherlock is sort of a magician who comes into this impossible world of cruelty and crime and evil

and sitting in his dressing gown, playing a violin, he brings order and justice and resolution. And he does it with the flourish. And I think we all crave that. I think we don't read the crime because we want the bad guy to get away.

Right. We read the crime because we want the bad guy to get caught. However delicious he is or she is, or she is along the way, sure, we'll enjoy a little bit of the transgressiveness of wondering, oh, could we be naughty too? But ultimately, we want them caught, we want justice done. But of course, whose justice is a complicated question. And if you grew up at the receiving end of a colonizing, subjugating empire, as Bell did,

and as many people in this world still do, then whose justice becomes not obvious. Right. Yeah, there's that big gray area in that situation. Was there anything when you were writing that surprised you either from like research or just like since it was your first novel that you were writing? Well, it might be that one to say, actually. Yeah, in terms of craft, in terms of craft, it was definitely, it was definitely the dialogue.

I tell you one other thing, though, which, you know, this is sort of inside baseball, you know, writer-to-writer stuff, which is because you're writing, this is my first novel, and I wrote it in the first, with the first-person narrator. And that is a kind of intimacy that I had not experienced before, you know? When you're writing a, you know, a play or a movie or a TV show, you have to be all the characters, right? You have to be able to equally inhabit all of them and you're jumping back and forth. But in a novel, even though I still hope, you know, worked hard to give the other characters, their own voices and their own perspectives, ultimately, Bals our guy, right? As both reader and author, he's, you know, he's my guy and hopefully he's the reader's guy. And, you know, I just fell in love with him a little bit. And when you live with someone and write in their voice every day for six months and then, you know, edits and revisions.

Yeah. It's hard not to fall in love with them. And that hadn't really happened to me before. I hadn't fallen in love my own creation. And it sounds incredibly like, you know, you know, math. I'm not, you know, masturbatory. But, you know, it's not meant to be. I'm not meant to be like so up myself.

He didn't feel like a creation anymore. He felt like a real person. He didn't, you know, I started by saying that he was like a projection of myself. That's how it started. By the end, he was very much his own man. Right. And so, like, ending and saying goodbye to him was really sad. I heard another of your guests

talk about how loyal she was to her character Yes, I was going to bring that up, yeah Yeah, who was that? It was Emma Brody, into the blue That's right, that's right. Yeah, she was talking about how loyal she was And she was like, it was like leaving a boyfriend. And yeah, I was like, bow, I'm so sorry, goodbye, my friend

and then I cried a little as I wrote his last lines. Yeah. I think that's good, though. Like, I think, because I was going to bring up her conversation where it's like the fact that she loves those characters so much is also, I think, why it's resonating with us as readers. So I don't think you're narcissistically in love with him just because you created him. Well, and also one of the fun things that's happening now is, you know, we're starting to have conversations about film and TV. and so, you know, and there's, and again, I can't say too much, but like, you know, they're actors, they're actors circling, and I get to start imagining, ooh, now you'll be bow.

Ooh, that's kind of cool. Can you grow a beard? Right, right. I know, I was going to ask, but it sounds like maybe you can't really, but since you have written other mediums, Do you feel like this would be best as a film or a TV series or do you feel like it could do both? Or can you not talk about it? I cannot talk about it. Okay, we won't talk about it, but I'm excited to be reunited with Val in whatever mediums become.

Me too. Okay, well, we'll leave people on that cliffhanger in that realm. I adored this book. I have just the tiniest bit left to finish it, but I can't imagine that's going to change how much I loved it. I think if you love mystery, thrillers, I think even if historical fiction is not your thing, you're still going to really enjoy this one. So I really recommend everyone to go get it. But I do always ask at the end, if there are any books you've recently read that you've loved, or if there are books you just all-time greats that you always want to recommend. Ooh, so I, what have I just finished? I have just finished, hold on, let me get it so that I can point in it. I can point in it because it's, so I've just finished ordinary monsters by J.M. Miro. Okay. Now, it is, it is a big book.

Oh, wow. Yeah, that is. Right. But it is, it's actually, it's historical fantasy. It's actually set in almost exactly the same period. It's set in the late 1800s in London and actually in Japan and in America. It's a wide-saring book. It's beautifully written.

It's kind of like a period X-Men. Oh, okay. So I would hardly recommend it's beautiful in its language. I think it's kind of great. And so I've just finished that. And then in terms of all, obviously, you know, the obvious stuff, we've got to, everyone we've mentioned, right? If you haven't read Sherlock Holmes, I would say if you haven't read Raffles, and most people have, yeah, most people have not these days. It's actually, it's a real weird thing.

He was at his time as famous as Sherlock. He was, you know, but if you haven't, you know, go go and dig up the original Raffles stories. They're kind of great. and I also just finished Hanif Qureshi's memoir shattered and Hanif of course, you know, is a great literary novelist, the Buddha of Suburbia and my beautiful laundrette was his screenplay so he's his brilliance. But he had this tragic accident two years ago.

It's just one of these things with the randomness of life where he he fell over and broke his neck at home. He's like, just, he's not that old. He's not anything. He wasn't sick. He just, and now he's paralyzed. And he's written this beautiful memoir or shattered that he's dictated essentially from his hospital bed to his, to his boys.

And I just finished it. And it's, it's a real testament to like the resilience of a writer who is so much a writer that even when everything else is taken away, he still writes. And in that, it has something in common with another book I've just read, I read last year actually, which is Salman Rushdie's memoir, Knife, which tells the story of his recovery from his horrific attack. So, yeah, I mean, those are sort of real-life thrillers, but writers surviving terrible, you know, terrible injury.

It's powerful. But there you go. that's what I would leave you with. I like those. I really enjoy memoirs. I think there's, it's such an expansive, like medium or genre or whatever. Like, there's just so much that you can learn from other people's stories.

So I'm adding those for sure. Where can everybody find you to stay up to date with everything? I'm at RVD on Blue Sky at Arvind David on Instagram. and threads, which are probably the best places. And I will be launching a substack soon. Ooh. But I will announce it on socials very soon. Okay.

Perfect. Well, I will put those links in the show notes. I hope to stay vague that there's more, there's more news to come and more to hear about this fun world you've created. And thanks so much for talking with me about it. Thank you, Kate. It's great fun.