Archive

Sujata Massey (pictured) has published two novels, The Widows of Malabar Hill and The Satapur Moonstone where the central character is a Parsi detective, Perveen Mistry. But Massey is not new to mystery fiction. She lived in Japan with her husband between 1991-1993 where she created the Rei Shimura mystery series centered around an underpaid English teacher in Tokyo who becomes an amateur sleuth.
Has she always been interested in historical mystery fiction? "Yes,” she says. "When I was a student at John Hopkins University, the teachers were all professional novelists and journalists, like John Barth, famous for metafictional and postmodern novels and Jonathan Yardley, a noted book critic at The Washington Post. However, the person who influenced me the most was a best-selling mystery author called Martha Grimes, well-known for a series featuring Richard Jury, a Scotland Yard inspector.” Grimes is now 88, but was very popular as well as prolific during the 1960s-70s. Whereas the other teachers were very serious about the craft of fiction writing, or in the creation of extremely intellectual fiction, Grimes captivated Massey’s attention by her great art of storytelling, her clever twists and descriptive writing. She impressed on Massey that one could write good stories and there was nothing wrong with popular fiction — the most important thing is to write the book which an author has always hungered to read. Her novels are most often about loving family relationships, rarely about dysfunctional families, about parents who are mean and cruel. "I believe there are complications in families but there is a lot of love and affection and these are the stories I like to tell.”
Born in England to parents from India and Germany, Massey was raised primarily in St Paul, Minnesota, although her home for almost 30 years has been Baltimore, Maryland. She earned a BA in Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and wrote features for the Baltimore Evening Sun newspaper before becoming a novelist.
Storytelling has been a very important part of Massey’s life. "I always loved to read. If I was sitting in school and if the teacher was helping out slower students, I would just get a piece of paper and start writing a story because I was bored. I liked imagining things and, being the eldest of three sisters, I was always telling them stories every night. I would occasionally read books to them but more often I had to invent adventure stories.”
Her area of expertise has always been historical mystery fiction: there are 11 books in the Rei Shimura mystery series. But after the 10th one, she took a break as she wanted to do something new. "India was pulling at my heart and I finally knew I wanted to write about my father’s home city of Calcutta. So, I wrote a book which was not a mystery; it is a big sprawling stand-alone novel, The City of Palaces.”
Why the sudden interest in Parsis and Bombay? "Well, frankly, it was not initially a fascination with Parsi culture; but, as I researched, I found so much to admire in the Bombay Parsis’ commitment to good works, education and support of women’s rights. I was interested in women who were pioneers in India. I needed to give my protagonists a career but if I am writing historical fiction it has to be someone believable.” She could have chosen an Indian woman doctor or a teacher, but finally settled on a lawyer. She felt that law was fascinating as solicitors and lawyers often have to deal with wills, where people are trying to steal money and swindle others. The situation is exacerbated, particularly in India, by the issue of marital law where women are often repressed and discriminated against after their spouses have died. She found that the most important women lawyers were from Maharashtra or Bombay Presidency, as it was called at the time; this was the most progressive area for women’s work. Her models to a certain extent were Cornelia Sorabji and Mithan Tata Lam; significantly, both these lawyers had Parsi heritage. Though Sorabji’s father voluntarily converted to Christianity by virtue of which she would also be a Christian, she identified herself as an "ethnic” Parsi; hence, there was no doubt in Massey’s mind that she should have a Parsi woman detective and Perveen Mistry was born.
"Both Sorabji and Tata Lam have been an inspiration for me.” Sorabji impressed on the government the need for women in the legal system and fought for women behind purdah. In The Widows of Malabar Hill, Mistry fights on behalf of women in purdah. In The Satapur Moonstone the government realizes that they need a woman to do detective work and they send her to Satapur. Tata Lam was the force behind the changes in the Parsi Marriage and Divorce Act. She made it easier for women to escape unhappy marriages through divorce rather than separation. Mistry is one such woman having suffered marital abuse.
Massey’s novels are set in the 1930s during the British Raj. This gives a sense of complexity to her characters as it seems to create some tension between their loyalty to India and their attitude toward the British. The City of Palaces features a Bengali woman who as a 10-year-old girl in 1930, is orphaned on account of a cyclone. She makes her way through British India where she learns English as she works as a maid in a British oriented school and finally as a clerk for an Indian Civil Service (ICS) officer. Says Massey, "I was very interested in Subash Chandra Bose; hence, the climax of the story hinges on the decision whether the protagonist should work as a spy for the freedom movement or remain faithful to her British employer who has fallen in love with her.” A similar fate awaits Mistry. Gandhiji was garnering power and this was setting up a challenging situation for the Parsis. Mistry feels that her parents are supporting the British merely for personal gain, but has strong feelings for the freedom movement; yet, at the same time she has a very close relationship with two of her dear English friends Colin Sandringham in The Satapur Moonstone and Alice Hobson Jones who appears in both the novels. "Rabindranath Tagore had very close friendship with his (English) translator, even though he surrendered his knighthood to the British,” says Massey.
Her next book is The Cuttingmaster Affair. "I like this old Parsi surname which probably has something to do with textile tailoring and which I chose out of the 24,000 Parsi surnames I found on a Zoroastrian website.” Once again, though at one level it deals with a female student in Wilson College in the 1920s and the difficulties she faces on account of constant attention she  is getting from male students (Sorabji faced similar problems), it is also a mystery story about a woman trying to assist in the freedom movement at the time when the Prince of Wales was visiting Bombay.
In the Parsiana review of The Satapur Moonstone, it is mentioned that the moonstone did not have a such significant role to play in the novel as to justify it as a title. Massey said, "I chose the moonstone for two reasons. There is a very subtle reference to Wilkie Collins’ novel, The Moonstone, which my father gave me for Christmas when I was 12. I was also looking for a stone which was native to India and settled for the moonstone, which is a semi-precious stone.” Further, one of her characters, Roderick Ames, has a very fleeting role to play in the novel. Massey explained she wanted to include a variety of people who would be passing through this area so she thought an Anglo-Indian engineer would have been interesting — a character who had a bit of a chip on his shoulder, accepted neither by the British nor by the Indians, someone in that middle world.
Were there any particular writers who influenced Massey? Though there are certain great women writers like Josephine Tey she admires, she does not feel that Tey has influenced her writing in any way. "The direction for mystery novels with a female detective was indicated by a writer called Sue Grafton. She portrayed a female detective not as an old lady drinking tea but as a full-fledged professional.”
The reception Massey’s novels have received has been formidable. In 1997, she won the Agatha Award for the best first novel, The Salaryman’s Wife; in 2000, The Flower Master won  the Macavity Award for the Best Mystery novel; and in 2019, The Widows of Malabar Hill, the first of her Mistry novels, made a clean sweep by winning the Mary Higgins Clark Award, the Lefty Award for Best Historical Mystery novel, the Agatha Award for the Best Historical novel and the Macavity Award for Best Historical Mystery novel. Her most recent novel, The Satapur Moonstone has been nominated for the Sue Grafton Memorial Award and the Bruce Alexander Memorial Award for Best Historical Mystery. 
The good news is that she hopes to keep writing about Perveen Mistry’s legal adventures for several years. "I can’t imagine it stopping easily, there are so many stories to tell.”