Flint started writing books when she could not find a suitable title that was relevant from a cultural context to read to her daughter. She muses, “I remember the sense of dislocation reading Enid Blyton in Kuantan and wondering why we didn’t run away from home or have boats or eat trifles or have midnight feasts. None of these things actually made sense in the context of my life.” Being young, she assumed that the books she read were right and this was the ideal way to live. “I thought I was just functioning around the fringes of what proper life should be. And I didn’t want my daughter, especially because she’s half white, to have that sense of dislocation and grow up imagining that Western culture is superior or that its lifestyle is superior.”
Flint decided that she had neither the talent nor inclination to write the Great Malaysian Novel. “There were all these writers who had already done a fairly good job of covering that and I didn’t want to because I don’t like being pigeonholed.”
“Asians are so defensive. When you read about New York serial killers, I suspect the New Yorkers are not writing to the authors saying, ‘How dare you suggest we have killers on our streets! It’s only one, it happened last year and nobody knows who did it and it was probably the Russians,’” she laughs. Flint says she is not denying the progress in any of the countries she writes about. “I’m just saying, ‘Let’s take everybody with us and not rape and pillage as we go on.’” The Straits Times of Singapore did a nasty review of her Singapore book, saying that she did not focus on issues that were important to the country, such as prices of HDB flats. At this point, she bursts into peals of laughter. But like Inspector Singh, Flint prefers to decide for herself. It goes without saying that Singh is her alter ego in these stories. But why did a half-Sri Lankan Tamil, half-Malayalee choose a Punjabi Sikh inspector to represent her? “Itu lah!” she exclaims. “I wonder to this day. Why did Agatha Christie choose a Belgian? Because she didn’t expect to write 45 books and I didn’t expect to write seven.” Flint wanted her main character to be Indian so she could bring in the wider family structure that she both grew up with and rebelled against. “From my discussions, I gathered it is pretty much the same for Sikhs. And I wanted someone who was physically noticeable. We all have an image in our mind, whether it’s the guy sitting outside the jewellery shop with a shotgun across his lap or that Sikh cop. We all know what he looks like, so I don’t have to overwrite to get the point across.” There was another bonus in making her hero a Sikh. “The whole thing about being a Sikh and being mistaken for a Muslim suddenly became a complication I am sure they didn’t envisage 500 years ago when they started wearing turbans. “This comes up in Bali, where he’s mistaken for being a Muslim. So, you get a sense of what it must be like to be yelled at randomly for your religion, even if it’s not really your religion. Hopefully, it gives people an idea of what it’s like to be on the receiving end of this sort of non-specific abuse,” Flint says. Then, there’s Mrs Singh, the only person who can effectively cow the great inspector. Where he is Flint’s alter ego, his wife is effectively her enemy. “She and I literally quarrel our way through a book. She’s the counterpoint to my belief system. A character like Mrs Singh is rather like a terrorist. She has an intrinsic structure that is plausible in her world — conservative, family-oriented, status- conscious,” she says. Flint is just beginning to reassess the way she sees such people. “Only now when my dad is ill, I suddenly realise what this community I’ve been dismissing all my life means. These people who attend the weddings and funerals and worry about things like house prices... My cousins are stepping up, my aunts are helping; everybody is trying to make this process of dealing with my dad easier.” And now she realises that all those weddings and funerals she did not want to attend are the reason she has a bond with these people who show up to help in an emergency. “Of course, this should be extremely obvious, but, because I’ve spent my whole life fighting against it, I’ve only discovered in the last three weeks that you need family. I’m late to the party.” Mrs Singh is much more visible in her latest book, A Frightfully English Execution, where her character is developed further and the real affection that exists between her and her difficult husband is actually brought to the forefront. Flint found it especially difficult to write this book, having moved out of her comfort zone, which was focusing on the large and small countries in Asia. “For instance, there is the fact that Scotland Yard is competent, so I couldn’t do what I do in Asia, which is pretend that all the cops are not very good. “I had to get Singh to work in parallel with Scotland Yard, but not make it the story. I actually found it technically quite a difficult book to write,” she admits. Her next book in this series is set in South Africa. “I love researching and exploring history and politics, so I’m looking forward to doing South Africa. I want to write about apartheid, the slave quarter in Cape Town, the slave immigrants from Asia. “When you feel a genuine desire to read and research and think and visit and plot a story, you can’t abandon it just yet to write whatever might sell a bit more. Unless I get really greedy, and there is always the possibility. I do like money. I gave up a lot as a lawyer to do this, right?” she laughs. For now, she will continue writing whodunnits that are a little different. “I don’t want a book in which the bad guys are obvious, because I don’t think that is what life is like. I think people do bad things when they find themselves in unfortunate situations, or small bad things lead up to big bad things,” she says. Some of her criminals are guilty, first and foremost, of a sense of entitlement, which, as she points out, is not a crime in itself. “But how it can escalate... that’s what I want to capture. I think there should a redemptive element in writing. A suggestion to the reader that if you make better choices, maybe you won’t end up in that place. And, if you do end up there, maybe you can find some way to atone a little bit.” For Flint, life is not black and white and she wants her characters to embody this ambiguity. So far, people have responded in a positive way. “People who like Singh tend to like him a lot. But every once in a while, there will be a nasty review... I’ve learnt to roll with that. You can’t please everyone,” she says. Jennifer Jacobs is section editor of Personal Wealth at The Edge Malaysia This article appeared in the Options of Issue 754 (Nov 14) of The Edge Singapore.