For much of the 40-odd years that I have been devouring fiction, the imaginary worlds I journeyed to have been divorced from the real world I lived in. Be it the nineteenth century London of Conan Doyle and Edgar Wallace, or the mid-twentieth century England of Agatha Christie and Enid Blyton, or Perry Mason’s California, they were all a far cry from the Indian city life I was immersed in.

What were moors and mews that Christie and Doyle revelled in? What were these mouth-watering scones and tarts that peppered Enid Blyton’s pages? I had never seen a scone in my middle-class life of the seventies. Nothing I read seemed to have much in common with the real world around me. While they were not as alien as Tolkien’s Middle Earth or Asimov’s Trantor, they were nonetheless unfamiliar.

Why didn’t we have fiction from our own world, I wondered. Was that why RK Narayan appealed to so many of us? Apart from the undeniable craft he possessed, one could relate to his characters and locales. They seemed real; they felt as if they were from our world. Admittedly, what we read was limited by what local libraries stocked and Sunday second-hand book shops offered.

When I gave up studenthood to enter the corporate world, another question popped into my head. Why was so little fiction set where I spent the largest chunk of my waking hours? Why did so few authors write about the corporate world? Surely, there was no shortage of conflict and emotion in the workplace? And the stakes were high too; far higher than in private lives. Talk about motive for crime, and there was ambition, collusion, malfeasance, corruption, love, lust, frustration – you name it!

Yet, there was very little ‘corporate crime fiction’.

Wouldn’t it be great to have good crime fiction set in India? Well-crafted plots that we can relate to; familiar victims we can empathise with; recognisable antagonists we can heartily hate? With more Indians turning to writing, will we see a surge of crime fiction set in India? Above all, wouldn’t it be great to read gripping narratives written by Indian hands for Indian eyes?

Then, the penny dropped. While I waited for others to do it, why not take a shot at it myself?

I had already made a beginning with writing epic fantasy, and I had loads of material from my three decades in the corporate world. I had seen ambition and greed at close quarters, and had witnessed sharp minds cross the thin line that separated the two. Opportunities for crime were aplenty, with many readymade for crime fiction.

I did take a shot at it, and the attempt became Fraudster. I am happy that one of the Big Five global publishing houses decided to back the novel. Fraudster is about greed and temptation in banking, which is a very thin sliver of larger corporate India. There is space for a lot more stories; tons of them. I hope better writers than I turn to it too.