Vaseem Khan

Vaseem Khan (born 1973) is a British writer, author of the Baby Ganesh Detective Agency novels – a series of crime novels set in India–featuring retired Mumbai police Inspector Ashwin Chopra and his sidekick, a baby elephant named Ganesha. Previously Khan won a Shamus Award and the Eastern Eye's Arts Culture & Theatre Awards for Literature.

Biography
Khan was born in the London Borough of Newham, studied at the Coopers' Company and Coborn School in Upminster, Havering, did A-Levels at Newham College of Further Education, before studying accounting and finance at the London School of Economics. Next he spent a decade on the subcontinent working as a management consultant to an Indian hotel group building environmentally-friendly hotels around the country, called ECOTELS. He returned to the U.K. in 2006 and has since worked at University College London for the Department of Security and Crime Science.

Khan was in India for a decade; the experience led to him writing The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra. Khan was offered a four-book contract by Mullholland Books, an imprint of publishers Hodder & Stoughton, for the first books in this series, referred to as the Baby Ganesh Detective Agency series.

In January 2016, The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra was selected for the Waterstones Book Club, and later named a Waterstones Paperback of the Year. It was also named as a Daily Telegraph Pick of the Week (in conjunction with WHSmith), an Amazon Best Debut, and was a top 10 best-seller in The Times Saturday review.

In 2021, Khan was awarded the Sapere Books Historical Dagger Award by the Crime Writers' Association. In May 2023, Khan was elected the chair of the Crime Writers' Association.

Works
The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra is the first novel in the Baby Ganesh Detective Agency series, in which newly-retired Inspector Chopra investigates the suspicious drowning of a poor local boy. At the same time he comes to grips with the surreal situation of being sent a baby elephant by his long-lost uncle. Published in August 2015, it went on to become a Times best-seller. Khan has stated that his objective with this series was to take readers to the heart of modern India to give them an idea of what India "looks like, feels like, sounds like, smells like, even tastes like".

The second novel in the series is The Perplexing Theft of the Jewel in the Crown. The plot of the novel revolves around the theft of the world's most famous diamond–the Koh-i-Noor which was originally mined in India before being appropriated by the British and handed to Queen Victoria during the Raj. In the novel the Crown Jewels are brought to India for a special exhibition. The Koh-i-Noor is stolen and Chopra and Ganesha are called in to try and recover the great diamond.

In the third novel in the series, The Strange Disappearance of a Bollywood Star, Chopra and Ganesha are on the trail of a kidnapped Indian film actor, and in the fourth, Murder at the Grand Raj Palace,, they tackle the murder of an American billionaire at a luxury hotel. The fifth in the series, Bad Day at the Vulture Club has Chopra investigating the death of a wealthy man from the Parsee community.

The Parsees do not bury or cremate the dead. They leave their remains out in stone structures (Towers of Silence) for vultures to consume; the process is called excarnation.

Khan said of his decision to include an elephant as Chopra's sidekick, "I thought it would be different and fun to cast an elephant in a crime-fighting role. On a purely practical level elephants possess all the qualities of the best detectives. They're highly intelligent, and have those amazing memories–that's not a myth. They also have a wide range of emotions, which is important to me as a writer because my novel isn't just about the crimes but about the dynamic between Inspector Chopra, this rigid, middle-aged policeman, this baby elephant who he is forced to adopt, and his irrepressible wife, Poppy."

In 2020, Midnight at Malabar House was published, introducing India’s first female police detective, Persis Wadia. The story is set in Bombay, 1950. As India stands on the eve of becoming a republic, Persis is tasked to investigate the murder of senior British diplomat Sir James Herriot. Khan won the Crime Writers Association Historical Crime Dagger award for 2021 for this novel.

In 2021, the second novel in the Persis Wadia series, Dying Day, was published. It was also set in Bombay in 1950 and it is about the theft of a copy of the Divine Comedy.