The Death of the Indian Detective Novel?

Interesting article about the slow death of detective fiction in India. I find it interesting that it's been sixteen years since the last super-detective hung up his magnifying glass--while in America it's been more like thirty.

The interesting experiments with the adventurer-detective figure —- from the intent Byomkesh, the suave Feluda, to the spirited quartet Gondalu (Nalini Das’ adolescent girl-gang with names ending with -lu), Samaresh Basu’s streetsmart Gogol, and the maverick old butterfly lover Colonel Niladrishekhar (Syed Mustafa Siraj’s nature lover who ends up trailing no-gooders) —— arguably had shown the way. Critics, writers and fiction lovers thus find no reason why few tread the path. Though not quite expected, there seems to be a socio-economic jinx to the Bengali detective. Aveek Majumder, lecturer at the department of comparative literature, Jadavpur University, finds the changing tastes of the Bengali middle class a possible culprit. “In their better days, the Bengali sleuth and his exploits found readers in Bengali children from the middle class. The same middle class which can now afford an English-medium school for its children, a school which reprimands a child found speaking in Bengali.”

A major theme in the article is the slow phasing-out of the Bengali language--so I wonder if it would be impertinent to wonder if any of these are available in translation?

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Reuters has an article about how the internet assists authors of crime fiction in their work; an interesting contrast to this piece, which claims that technology kills suspense, in movies particularly. So is what's good for the author bad for the art itself? One wonders.