Abir Mukherjee is a British crime novelist best known for historical mysteries set in the final decades of British rule in India. He grew up in Scotland and now lives in Surrey. Mukherjee’s fiction combines detective plotting with a sustained examination of empire, race, nationalism and the unequal structures of colonial society. His books have won several major crime-writing awards, including the CWA Historical Dagger, the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year and the Wilbur Smith Award for Adventure Writing. He also co-hosts the Red Hot Chilli Writers podcast with Vaseem Khan.
Mukherjee’s principal historical sequence is the Wyndham & Banerjee series, beginning with A Rising Man, set in Calcutta in 1919. The novels follow former Scotland Yard detective Captain Sam Wyndham and Indian police officer Surendranath “Surrender-not” Banerjee as they investigate murders against the background of growing resistance to British rule. A Necessary Evil, Smoke and Ashes, Death in the East, The Shadows of Men and The Burning Grounds broaden the series across princely states, Assam, Bombay and the increasingly unstable politics of the early 1920s. Mukherjee uses the detectives’ contrasting positions within the colonial system to explore political violence, racism, communal tensions and Indian nationalism while retaining the structure and pace of a traditional historical crime series.
