15 June,2026 09:29 AM IST | Mumbai | Nandini Varma
Illustrated panels from the book. Illustrations Courtesy/Pratham Books; Sunaina Coelho
You've written a few mystery novels and children's books. What about writing detective stories excites you?
Shabnam Minwalla: I love writing mysteries because it is more than just a book. It is also a game that the writer plays with the reader. You're supplying clues to give the reader a fair chance to guess, but you're also adding a little misdirection to make sure the reader doesn't guess [everything]. I enjoy that aspect. Also, I've always felt the lack of Indian detectives, especially Mumbai detectives, and crimes solved in the city. I think mysteries allow the characters to really navigate the city.
How did the character of Detective JJ come about?
SM: The publisher [Pratham Books] suggested that I create a detective. I write a lot of mysteries where the main detective is a child. In a book of this kind, which is so succinct, I wanted to play around with an old-fashioned stereotype. I thought of having a conventional-unconventional pair, the older investigator and his assistant who is a child. In a way, JJ is a lot like the detectives of the 1950s, who had this ability to detect poisons and carried strange gadgets. They've become old-fashioned now because everything is more realistic, but they were always great fun to read. I thought of trying my hand at a detective like that, who is brilliant in his own way but also impractical.
What were some of the detective stories you enjoyed reading while growing up?
SM: Of course, [there was] Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie, but my favourite was Raymond Chandler. My uncle had the entire collection. Whenever I went to my granny's house, I would pull them out and read them. I was very young, so maybe they weren't age-appropriate but I loved his writing. I rediscovered them in Los Angeles, where his protagonist Philip Marlowe is based.
I also loved Kate Atkinson's investigator Jackson Brodie and Sue Grafton's Kinsey Millhone. Brodie's crimes are really messy; there's rarely a neat ending and everything is complex in an unexpected way, which, I feel, mirrors life.
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I MIXED up a few different elements from real people I know to come up with Detective JJ. This is often the process. The face belongs to a person I know quite well; the pants and shoes are something that I've seen older people, like my father's generation, wear to dress-up and look stylish. All of it is taken and exaggerated to work with the story and the comic format.
Getting started and getting through the labour of it were the biggest challenges. Initially, it's all fun when you are scribbling the characters and machines, but then you have to draw and colour it properly. In an age where you can generate whole books, and your phone apps convince you that everything should be available in an instant, it is easy to be impatient and forget that time, love, and effort all go into making a thing of value.
