Mark Scheffler from New Delhi at GlobalPost:
Surender Mohan Pathak owes his life to crime.
He’s one of the best-selling authors in the Hindi language, with some 300 titles to his name and more than 25 million books sold. But he’s no literary lion. Instead, Pathak writes pulp fiction novels that are sold at drugstores and seedy railway stations.
His tales feature an array of sordid characters and dirty dealing, but up until now, you couldn’t read them unless you could read Hindi. That changed in March, when Blaft, an upstart boutique publisher in Chennai released the first-ever English translation of a Pathak book – one his most famous, called “Painsath Lakh Ki Dakaiti.”
It first came out in 1977 and has since sold 300,000 copies over 15 reprintings. The English version is called “The Rs 65 Lakh Heist” (that would be “The $6.5 million Heist” in American money). More:
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