Murder in the City (Twelve Incredible Case Files of The Kolkata Police)

The Kolkata Police is one of the oldest and most illustrious police forces in the country. In Murder in the City, Supratim Sarkar digs deep into their archives and chooses twelve astonishing cases to recount, bringing investigators, criminals and indeed the city to life in startling detail. Among the cases described in these pages are one where the method of photographic superimposition' was used for the first time ever in India to identify a body; another, where a single word led the police to a ruthless killer's hideout; and an extraordinary case of a kidnap and murder that was solved even though the body was never found.

Initially written in Bengali for the Kolkata Police Facebook page and website, these stories went viral, accruing thousands of likes and being shared widely. Here, they have been translated and compiled into a book that is as utterly gripping as it is fascinating.

Supratim Sarkar, a 1997 batch officer of the Indian Police Service, is presently Additional Commissioner of Police, Kolkata. A voracious reader and an erstwhile journalist, his passions include cricket and ancient history. He is an alumnus of Presidency College, Kolkata. He lives in Kolkata with his wife and two children.

Swati Sengupta is an author and journalist based in Kolkata. Her published books are Out of War (Speaking Tiger, 2016), Half the Field Is Mine (Scholastic, 2014), Guns on My Red Earth (Red Turtle, Rupa, 2013) and The Talking Bird (Tulika Books, 2014). Swati studied English at Jadavpur University and then worked as a journalist for fourteen years for various newspapers in Kolkata. She runs a workshop on gender for the young called Elephant in the Room and spearheaded the much talked about Dear Boys project in Kolkata schools supported by the Kolkata Police, in which she addressed gender issues with teenage boys. She loves small towns, tea and the chirping of birds, and lives in a brave and beautiful world in which girls and boys do not carry out gender-specific roles.

Writing a foreword for a book written by Supratim Sarkar who has been eulogized in cyberspace as the best thing to happen to Bengali detective story writing in recent times, put me under a lot of pressure. I searched for tips on the Internet and found that if you have been asked to write a foreword, it means that you are already a published writer or have accomplished something in life. I realized that none of these holds true for me. I have no books to my name and I have been asked to write the foreword because I head one of most distinguished police forces in the country. And then suddenly, I noted that of all the books written by brilliant writers which I have read, I don't remember even one name of the person who wrote the foreword or the contents of that foreword. That was quite a liberating thought and instantly the pressure vanished.

In fact, the 'storm' that the stories in this book created, when they were put on the Kolkata Police Facebook page and Kolkata Police website, literally forced us to bring these out in a book form. The reaction about the writing style was truly overwhelming. And let truth be told, it is difficult to leave a story in the middle once you have started reading it. It is no mean achievement considering the fact that the writer did not have even the slightest liberty of playing with the facts and basic line of investigation. Here before you is the English translation of these stories done by Swati Sengupta, an author in her own right, which I am sure readers will like as much as they have enjoyed reading the original Bengali version.

**Contents and Sample Pages**