Mohan Menon’s ‘The Ninja Never Knocks’, is a fast-paced detective novel set in Kolkata

Mohan Menon kills people as he goes along. Thankfully, only in his fictional world. The former advertising savant is an author now. In real life, he is a jovial man, with a repertoire of dad jokes, and eyes sparkling with ideas . How then, does someone like him come up with dark stories and murder mysteries? “It comes from what I see around and some just pop up in my head,” he says. “There is violence and deaths in my new book, but it is not as dark as my first,” smiles Mohan, who has just launched his detective novel, The Ninja Never Knocks (published by Adisakrit). His previous work — Nail in the Pillow — was a collection of short stories that came out in 2020.

From an advertising background, Mohan has always been a creative person. Creativity runs in the family — his wife Minnie Menon, is also from an advertising background and is a jewellery designer, while his daughter Anuradha Menon, aka Lola Kutty, is a stand-up comedian and theatre artiste. “In advertising, I started as a copywriter. Writing is in my blood,” says Mohan, adding, “The object then was to make a person change their mind or make a purchase. Now, there is no such object to my writing.”

When Mohan embarked on this journey as an author, he says it was like opening Pandora’s box. Ideas kept coming to him. “I wanted them to fly,” he says. He used to go for walks to a university nearby, where he saw an old man waving a branch of neem over a girl, as her mother looked on. “From there came a story idea that ended with werewolves in it,” he laughs. That was part of his first book. When he completed that book, he took it to various publishers. They told him, short stories were not in vogue and suggested he do a novel instead. So Mohan went ahead and published it on his own.

A couple of years later, that itch to write surfaced again. And he started work on The Ninja Never Knocks. “I like detective novels. I’ve read a whole host of authors like Raymond Chandler, Ken Follet, Alistair MacLean… I used to devour them. I didn’t want to do a romantic, pulp or a Dracula kind of book,” he says.

Mohan’s novel is set in Kolkata — the city that has seen iconic fictional detectives like Satyajit Ray’s Feluda, and Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay’s Byomkesh Bakshi. His friends did point that out but Mohan was determined to have the City of Joy as the backdrop to the action. His Bengali detective is not dhoti-clad. He is a suave guy named Bikram Banerji aka Bando, who flies down from London to Kolkata after his father’s demise. Here, he is saddled with his father’s chemical plant that he sells and then goes through a hedonistic phase before his girlfriend cuts him down to size.

“Bikram likes to read and every book he reads he is able to detect who the culprit is in 100 pages. So, he starts writing novels too,” says Mohan, offering a little peek into the world of Bando. Soon, people think since Bando is such a great writer of the detective genre, he must be a detective himself. Odd enquiries start coming up. “The Calcutta police start invoking him. Bando has friends in high places and starts getting involved in cases. He also has an assistant, Sabina Sahani, who was a hedge fund executive in London, but moves to Kolkata. Together, they set out to solve the case of the ninja who is terrorising the city. “The ninja enables people to satisfy their bloodthirsty whims. That’s his job. He’s given his contracts via the dark web and he instructs his assistants to fulfil them,” he says.

Despite Bando and Sabina’s fights and screaming matches, they stick together. After barking up many wrong trees they manage to unearth who the ninja is. “There are many twists, red herrings, a bit of history from 1852…”,says Mohan.

When Mohan started writing this story, he admits he did not have an ending in mind. There were many changes and iterations. “I had to introduce an extra character half way through to create an ending,” he says, and adds, “I build as I go along.”

The Ninja Never Knocks is available at bookstores and online