settled in Karachi. He was ten
years old in his hometown Nara in Allahabad when he read his first thriller,
Qaisi Rampuri’s Talismi Fawwara and was fired by the
urge to write detective fiction. His other source of inspiration was
Talism-e-Hoshruba, the mammoth treasury of Urdu fable, which he read
regularly throughout his life and which gave him the elegant style so
admired by his readers.
While still a student Ibne Safi wrote his first
detective story in a magazine called Nikhat in Allahabad in 1948, then
continued to write under various names, till 1953. Although he wrote good
humourous fiction and also contributed poems, it was his Shola Series of
stories that made his pen-name famous.
When he came to Pakistan to marry and settle
down, his hero Faridi was already an Asian counterpart of Perry Mason, Lemmy
Caution and James Bond. Ibne Safi fashioned him out of the European-American
heroes he had read. As he explained in an interview, Sir Arthur Conan
Doyle was the greatest crime writer and Sherlock Holmes the greatest
detective hero. Sherlock Holmes’ basic principle had been laid down in
1840 by Edgar Alan Poe, the first detective writer, and that principle was
‘ratiocination’. Ibne Safi's Faridi was reared on that principle but his
other ingredients came from other writers.
Next to Conan Doyle was Erle Stanley Gardner and
Ibne Safi thought that the first half of the 20th century belonged to him.
He wrote at the same speed, in fact bettered Gardner by writing two novels
a month as against one. But he followed his formula: no effort at
characterisation, no emphasis on background and a racy progression towards
climax. The professionalism of Faridi is of course similar to that of
Perry Mason.
Ibne-Safi's background is not realistic and that
is perhaps why his novels are never put on TV. He was a great admirer of
Rider Haggard and took from him alien backgrounds more suited to adventure
than detection. He wrote at Edgar Wallace's speed only he was less sloppy
than the Englishman in his style.
Consider Ibne Safi characters.
Faridi is from the landed aristocracy, is good-looking, strong,
intellectually versatile and very well dressed. He is an officer in the
police and has a hypnotic effect on his colleagues, especially attractive
to women whom he takes in his stride. He heads the Black Force, looks like
an outlaw but serves the law. Hameed, his valet and companion, is anti,
completely devoted to his master but soft on women. There is Qasim, a gangling aristocrat who joins
Faridi for adventure but is awkward with women. Anwar is a crime reporter
who does odd jobs for Faridi and has a strong relationship with Rasheeda.
Among them Faridi stands out as a perfect detective, impregnable and
seductive in the extreme.
The hero of Ibne-Safi's second series is Imran.
Imran is a maddening mixture of traits. He anticipates Columbo because he
is a dumb hero; yet, he has many more sides. His background is uncertain
and indefinite except that he has been driven into rebellion by a despotic
father. He is sharp, he is stupid; he is devilishly quick, he is plodding;
he is fearless, he is a coward; he is tender, he is ferociously animal. He
went to London to become a doctor but received training in detection
instead. His father considers him a good-for-nothing, criminals think him
a police informer. But he is a patriot, a nemesis of the underworld and
the espionage networks. He loves make-up and disguise, is a spendthrift,
fond of horseplay, constantly munching on a chewing gum. He is the most
feared X-2, an outlaw, but he is in fact an officer of the Foreign Office.
In the former guise everyone is scared of him and wants to know his real
identity; in the latter guise he is made fun of and considered a dumb
bureaucrat.
Imran is trained by a Chinese, Sung Hee, in the
martial arts. He knows how to dodge a bullet fired at him point-blank.
Julia, a Swiss beauty, is Imran’s frequent aide but she is in love with
him and finds the urge to explode his X-2 identity irresistible. But she
always fails; Imran is too clever behind his dumb facade. Fayyaz is the
local police inspector who gets all his good cases solved through Imran
but hates him and wants to somehow catch him out on an unlawful adventure
and put him in jail. Joseph, the black giant, who serves Imran faithfully
like a dog against the bosses of Zeroland... and Theresa, the Bumble-Bee
of Bohemia, the queen of the underworld who loves Imran as X-2 and wants
him to join her gang.
It is surprising how Ibne Safi managed to create
a credible fictive world out of such a mixture. His Faridi is a
professional like Perry Mason, not terribly forensic but definitely based
on the Holmesian principle, reasoning things out in an armchair before
taking action. Once action is indicated, he leaves Perry Mason and Holmes
behind. Here Ibne Safi is not following the intellectual,
non-action-oriented example of Doyle and Gardner; he follows the
Anglo-Chinese writer Leslie Charteris, creator of the: 'Saint'. The
elegance and suppleness of Faridi is that of the Saint and his willingness
to identify himself with the underworld is that of Lemmy Caution, Peter
Cheyney's hero. Then, in respect of style, Ibne Safi rejects the slang of
Cheyney and favours the almost literary excellence of Charteris.
In Imran too there are shades of the Saint and
there is Fayyaz the police inspector who is very much like Inspector Teal,
the much-abused official detective of Leslie Charteris. The confusing
identities of Imran are no doubt borrowed from the Superman who is a dumb
journalist when he wears his tuxedo. Ibne Safi wrote a number of spoofs on
James Bond in his Karachi magazine Nae Ufaq but the influence of. Fleming
is unmistakable in Imran. The world of espionage and spy-versus-spy
depicted in the ‘Imran Series’ is clearly the world of Bondiana. The women
too are there but the liaisons are all toned down and there are no torrid
scenes because Ibne Safi has an eye to his own Asian readership.
Crime fiction is a direct borrowing. When it came
to India adventure had already made its inroads. Rider Haggard’s She had
been translated and read; most of Edgar Wallace had been read by the
writers. In Allahabad, they caught the fancy of Ibne Safi; in Hyderabad,
Zafar Omer produced his famous Neeli Chattri novels. Then Teerath Ram
Ferozpuri created his popular modern, Robin Hood; a hood with a heart of
gold. In 1932, the Detection Club had held its session in London and vowed
to keep their fiction clean; but in 1930 James Hadley Chase had already
embarked on his journey into the dark hinterland of the criminal mind with
his No Orchids for Miss Blandish. In America, Dashiell Hammett and Dickson
Carr broke away from the Detection Club resolution and began to explore
the gangland reality.
It would be in order here to trace the
limitations of Ibne Safi. He took the outlandish background from Rider
Haggard and Edgar Wallace with the result that his backdrops are more like
Talism-e-Hoshruba than contemporary detective fiction. He has definitely
been impressed by Agatha Christie’s plots and her easy, flowing style but
not her subtle emphasis on the locales. He has followed Gardner's cue on
characterisation and eschewed the detailed inner scrutiny of Chase or even
Dorothy L. Sayers. He consciously set his face against writers who chose
their heroes from among the criminals. James Hadley Chase was not for him;
Georges Simenon, minus Maigret, was also not for him. His heroes accepted
transgressions only to the extent the Saint did; they were all morally
immaculate, sexually virginal. Yet, he was no pastiche-writer. His humour
and his style are native to him. He wrote a wonderfully elegant but fluid
Urdu, somewhat like Manto, totally organic to what he wanted to describe.
He wrote for 30 years, two books a month, till he
broke down in 1960, like Edgar Wallace and Dorothy L. Sayers, out of sheer
strain. Meanwhile, imitators kept catching up on him. At a given time
there were seven or eight imitators snapping at his heels. Much addicted
to Hitchcock's mystery films, he tried to go into the Urdu movies and
actually made a film called Dhamaka but it was flopped. He also wrote a
play for radio. TV showed no interest although he was once invited to the
Zia Mohyeddin Show.
Ibne Safi is truly the only real bestseller in
Urdu. His novels have been translated into six languages of India and have
sold more than any other novel. Out of a borrowed genre he created new
cultural heroes, built his own microcosm of fiction that readers willingly
accepted. He introduced humour into the rather serious world of detective
fiction. And, above all, he wrote an Urdu style rarely seen in popular
fiction.
