The intention of the project is to look closely at those crime thrillers in Bangla which do not have the same recognition as Satyajit Ray's 'Feluda' or Sharadindu Bandyapadhyay's 'Byomkesh' series. These crime thrillers were published in numbers with their grotesquely illustrated covers, cheap quality printing, cheap paper; they were very cheaply priced too. They were a huge hit specially among the pre-adolescent age group even a decade ago. The books no longer exist in significant proportions, but they have left a series of questions relevant for cultural study: what made them successful in their good old days; how were the images of the crime, chase, violence etc., portrayed in those books related to the urban phenomena of the big city; why were they aimed at a particular age group; how did they relate to the tradition of pulp fiction in the West; what were the local inventions of technique in terms of narrating a crime thriller, if any; and how did they imbibe the pulse of their time.

The project wants to initiate these questions and intends to collect and document a representative body of these crime thrillers published. The research will focus on people related to the production of this genre and, by careful classification, scrutiny and analysis of the collected material, try to see this phenomenon in a larger context.

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