Thank you, Rohit De!

We are so fortunate to have had Professor Rohit De with us these past weeks. He offered a thoughtful series of posts on "Murder Mystery and Legal History." Explaining this choice of subject, De wrote about the challenges of working as usual under pandemic conditions, and how he found himself "regressing to comfort reading, consisting of historical novels and mid 20th century murder mysteries."

As I was contemplating what, then, to write for the blog, Surabhi Ranganathan suggested that instead of seeing reading for comfort as external to my research, I should think about the links between the two.

In the series of post to follow, I draw upon three sets of mid 20th century detective novels, both as sources to think about legal history and as worldbuilders for the terrain that the figures I am studying operated in. I am neither a literary scholar nor a book historian, so my explorations should be taken as akin to the amateur detective, often treading over ground already covered by professionals.

A roundup of these posts:

• Murder Mystery and Legal History: Part I
• Murder Mystery, Legal History Part II: Death in the Colony
• Murder Mystery, Legal History III: The Afterlives of Empire in MM Kaye and Agatha Christie

Thank you, Rohit De!

-- Karen Tani