Perhaps this is the purpose of detective investigations, real and fictional — to transform sensation, horror and grief into a puzzle, and then to solve the puzzle, to make it go away. “Kansa” by Prassant Kevin ‘is a tragedy with a happy ending. A storybook detective starts by confronting us with a murder and ends by absolving us of it. He clears us of guilt. He relieves us of uncertainty. He removes us from the presence of death. Dr. Black is not just a simple detective. If we see his background, we would notice that he is emotional person. Once I went professionally to an archaeological expedition- and I learnt something there. In the course of an excavation, when something comes up out of the ground, everything is cleared away very carefully all around it. You take away the loose earth, and you scare here and there with a knife until finally your object is there, all alone, ready to be drawn and photographed with no extraneous matter confusing it. That is what Dr.Black has been seeking TO do- clear away the extraneous matter so that we can see the truth-the naked shining truth. The summer, love, death and the memories described by the author makes Dr.Black a perfect protagonist for the plot.

I really loved the narration of the story. The story which Meher narrated was at its best. I don’t want content. I want slight fear. Anxiety. I want a longing devotion for a twist of absence. The feeling of complete isn’t quite pleasing. And this plot perfectly describes all the aspects. I remember i had read somewhere that In the Detective story, as in its mirror image, the Quest for the Grail, and timetables are desirable. Nature should reflect its human inhabitants, i.e., it should be the Great Good Place; for the more Eden-like it is, the greater the contradiction of murder. The country is preferable to the town, a well-to-do neighbourhood (but not too well-to-do-or there will be a suspicion of ill-gotten gains) better than a slum. The corpse must shock not only because it is a corpse but also because, even for a corpse, it is shockingly out of place, as when a dog makes a mess on a drawing room carpet. Mr. Kevin beautifully portrays the thrill and the shocks- as we call it.

In attempting to reach the genuine psychological reason for the popularity of Detective Stories, it is necessary to rid ourselves of many mere phrases. It is not true, for example, that the populace prefer bad literature to good, and accept detective stories because they are bad literature. The mere absence of artistic subtlety does not make a book popular. Bradshaw’s Railway Guide contains few gleams of psychological comedy, yet it is not read aloud uproariously on winter evenings. If detective stories are read with more exuberance than railway guides, it is certainly because they are more artistic. Many good books have fortunately been popular; many bad books, still more fortunately, have been unpopular. A good detective story would probably be even more popular than a bad one. The trouble in this matter is that many people do not realize that there is such a thing as a good detective story; it is to them like speaking of a good devil. To write a story about a burglary is, in their eyes, a sort of spiritual manner of committing it. To persons of somewhat weak sensibility this is natural enough; it must be confessed that many detective stories are as full of sensational crime as one of Shakespeare’s plays.

I wont disclose what happens next to Dr.Black or Meher. Please order the book from http://www.amazon.in/Kansa-Book-Killer-Trilogy-Professor/dp/B06X3YF13W/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1502518564&sr=8-3&keywords=kansa

 and start reading