‘Gunboy’: A Bombay underworld novel that falls a little short of the depth it demands

To me, the pleasure of reading good noir, written well, with style and substance, with attention to both the physical details as well as what they add to the characters being presented to us, a noir where you know the language deployed is deliberate – tough, peppered with well-observed similes, effortlessly but carefully building its world, offering crackling dialogues to drink from – for me the pleasure of reading such a novel trumps almost every other reading pleasure. And the better if that noir is set in India, written by an Indian writer who knows where they are taking us and what they are doing on the page, and why – though such an Indian noir, I must admit, is a very rare commodity indeed (Sacred Games is the GOAT, as they say; but Tanuj Solanki’s Manjhi’s Mayhem and Nilanjana Roy’s Black River are two good recent examples; as also novels by Ankush Saikia, a criminally underrated writer who has written about half-a-dozen, all worth your time).

Shreyas Rajagopal’s Gunboy is almost that novel. Almost. You could see it getting there in its opening pages, which describe the twin emotions that come to the victims of bullying – unbearably fearful and isolating loneliness, coupled with an intensely imaginative desire for vengeance – with such...

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