Bram Stoker Award–nominated Darkness Visible with Mike Carey. David has also written multiple hit audio originals, including the science fiction anthology series Earworms, The Crimes of Dorian Gray, and the nonfiction audiobook Douglas Adams: The Ends of the Earth.In theatre, David’s plays include The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, both based on the novels by Douglas Adams, and he received an Olivier nomination for his family musical The Boy With Wings, based on Lenny Henry’s children’s book. He also contributed additional material for David Baddiel and Erran Baron Cohen’s musical The Infidel and was a lead producer of the Grammy and Tony Award–winning Broadway musical Jagged Little Pill.
David has written and produced extensively in television, including Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency for Netflix, Anansi Boys for Amazon, and the Asian Academy Award winner The Garden of Evening Mists for HBO.
He applied the Page 69 Test to The Great Game, his debut prose novel, and reported the following:
On page 69 of The Great Game, we find ourselves in a government office. Specifically, the offices of a Government Minister, the (unnamed) Under Secretary of Colonial Affairs. It’s London, 1905 and the Minister has summoned a small group of men for a meeting and is in mid-flow, describing a series of grotesque murders and his suspicion that these crimes are linked to each other and to an international conspiracy against the British Empire.Visit Arvind Ethan David's website.
Our narrator, Balvinder dev Singh, an Indian war veteran, is somewhat in awe of the august surroundings and personages he finds himself amongst, but then the Minister is suddenly and rudely interrupted by one of the other guests who, opening his eyes from an apparent nap, languidly declaims:“You are telling us nothing that I do not already know. All the cases you mention have been well documented in the press, and I have taken a note of them. That they are connected is a matter of obvious inference. If you would have me be of use to you, either rapidly get to the heart of the matter, or, if you have nothing new to impart, then pray stop wasting our time and allow me to make my own inquiries.”The minister splutters in surprise and indignation at the man who dared to interrupt him, at which point it is revealed that the man who made the interruption is none other than an aging Sherlock Holmes…
In this, as in so much else, Marshall McLuhan is bang on the money. Page 69 of The Great Game is the moment the plot thickens and the game can truly be said to be afoot…
In the run-up to it, our heroes, the cat-burgling duo of A. J. Raffles and his sidekick, Balvinder “Bunny” dev Singh, have crossed paths with a mysterious murderer who not only kills but also arranges his victims in macabre tableaus. Until this moment, though, the "why" of it all is mysterious, now the Minister is hinting at a political motivation.
It is also the moment when the novel plays its trump card, introducing Sherlock Holmes into the proceedings. Holmes’s legend has cast its shadow over the previous 68 pages: but this scene is where he is first revealed in the flesh. The Great Game is not exactly a Sherlock Holmes mystery; it is, rather, a resurrection and an interrogation of British Imperial adventure stories, of which the Holmes Canon is a core exhibit. I wanted to tell they type of story I loved as a boy, but I wanted to insert a colonial subject into the heart of my tale to make explicit the subtext of empire that informs all British literature of the period.
Page 69 perfectly illustrates this method. Students of British political history will know that the Under-Secretary for Colonial Affairs in 1905 was in point of fact, the young Winston Churchill. Much of the book’s thematic drama (and comedy) arises from smashing this real-life legend against the fictional legend of Holmes and subjecting both to Balvinder’s inquiring skepticism.
Q&A with Arvind Ethan David.
Writers Read: Arvind Ethan David.
--Marshal Zeringue
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