Abir Mukherjee with Val McDermid: Calcutta on the Brink

Though he’s an award-winning, internationally bestselling author now, Abir Mukherjee didn’t always live the dream. For twenty years he worked as an accountant before throwing away the spreadsheets. Now he’s grown to become one of the UK’s leading crime writers, his Raj-era thrillers featuring Captain Sam Wyndham and ‘Surrender-Not’ Banerjee adored by legions of loyal readers and published in twenty different countries. His popularity has continued to rise during the past year, with Death in the East, the fourth in the series, published just before the pandemic.

Mukherjee joins us today as he looks forward to the publication of book five, The Shadows of Men, about the murder of a Hindu theologian in 1920s Calcutta. In this event, he tells fellow author Val McDermid about living in Scotland but writing about India, his desire to pay tribute to Agatha Christie, and his process of planning the Wyndham and Banerjee mysteries.