In the New York Times, Jason Goodwin reviews Paul Theroux’s A Dead Hand.
The novel’s subtitle, “A Crime in Calcutta,” nods toward the current vogue for exotic detective stories and suggests that Theroux has absorbed the interesting fact that detective fiction has turned out to be the new travel writing. A great deal of place and history can be smuggled into the lush confines of the crime novel; people who might rather see foreign sights on YouTube or the Travel Channel than read a book devoted to them can still be jolted into pursuing a thriller that happens to be set in, say, Iceland or Istanbul.
