He married Byomkesh off (an almost unheard-of thing for detectives across the world) in only his tenth outing, and thought that was the end of it. Saradindu-babu, as he revealed in a 1969 interview, was a much kinder man. Public outrage forced him to bring Holmes back to life. Doyle tried it the nasty way-by killing off Sherlock Holmes in the story The Final Problem. Like Conan Doyle, he wanted at some point of time to retire his sleuth. I do not know how many of them are available in translation for a broader non-Bengali audience, but they are truly stunning achievements in storytelling, and certainly much better than Doyle’s tomes. Now, sorry, an aside I’m unable to avoid-like Conan Doyle, Saradindu-babu also wrote historical novels. Having read all of Byomkesh, all of Sherlock Holmes and all Philip Marlowe novels by Chandler (and all of them several times), I can confidently assert that at his best, Saradindu-babu was as good as anyone in the world working this genre. So, the annals of Byomkesh should be viewed in the context of the works of the international masters of mature detective fiction, such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Raymond Chandler. The mysteries that confront Byomkesh quite often hinge around lust, adultery, promiscuity, even incest. The Feluda stories were written for teenagers so Ray had to work within a set bandwidth-no crime could have a sexual angle to it (Ray even complained that this significantly restricted his freedom to plot the stories). However, there is a crucial difference between the two. Saradindu-babu took that secret with him.įor 80 years, Byomkesh has been Bengal’s favourite literary character, his only competition coming from Satyajit Ray’s Feluda, who made his debut in 1965. Unfortunately, he died before he could complete the last one, Bishupal Badh (The Killing of Bishupal), and so perfect seems the murder described in that story that I know no one who has come up with a plausible solution. Over the next 38 years, Saradindu Bandopadhyay wrote 32 more stories-including several novellas-featuring his hero. Byomkesh first appeared in the short story Satyanveshi in 1932.