Six Suspects by Vikas Swarup (2008)

I initially assumed Six Suspects to be a conventional mystery, because of the title. The crime is the gunshot murder of a playboy businessman at a party celebrating his acquittal for a crime which he actually committed. When the police close off the house, they find six suspects who have guns--a crooked bureaucrat who sometimes thinks he is Mohatma Gandhi, a Bollywood actress (This takes place in India.) who has had her identity stolen, a tribesman from a remote island who is searching for a sacred artifact which has been stolen from his tribe, a mobile phone thief who has fallen in love with the dead man's sister, a corrupt politician who just happens to be the dead man's father, and a clueless American forklift driver from Waco, Texas, who is looking for the actress. It's like the board game Clue: Who did it at the party with a gun?

The majority of the book consists of the backstories of the suspects, the events leading each one to attend the party carrying a gun. Here's where a problem arises. A good mystery writer provides all the clues, those that are valid along with those that mislead. Swarup does not follow this formula. Not even Miss Marple could guess the killer from the clues given here.

Then I decided that maybe this is not meant to be a mystery at all, but a lampoon of a mystery. The tone is humorous and many of the events are so unlikely as to be ridiculous. The characters are obviously all exaggerated stereotypes. Swarup particularly has fun with his Texas character, giving his first-person narration a constant stream of backwoods sayings, such as "the wind was blowing like a tornado in a trailer park" and "if brains were gasoline, he wouldn't have enough to run a piss ant's go-cart around the inside of a donut." But here's where a problem arises as to viewing this as a comedy. It takes more than ridicule and exaggeration to be funny.

The review blurbs on the inside book flap let me know that some of the events and characters in the book are thinly veiled references to happenings and people in today's India, and that some reviewers consider this novel to be a satiric social commentary. I obviously cannot speak to the accuracy of the commentary about India, but I can attest that I have known some pretty dense and backwoodsy Texans, but I have never met anyone like Swarup's character. His portrayal is so inaccurate as to be beyond satire. This makes me wonder how accurate his comments are about India.

I can't decide exactly what Swarup intended; maybe a combination mystery/comedy/social commentary. I don't find him very successful at any of those.