Genre Hybridization in Leonardo Sciascia’s The Day of the Owl and Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games

The rise of an original Indian detective novel can be dated back to the 1950s. Like its European predecessor, the genre was initially considered strictly popular; books were sold at railway stations as cheap reading matter for commuters. During the Sixties, however, thanks to the rising importance of the middle class, detective novels became increasingly popular. For years the detective genre had been on the wane and it was only in the first decade of the 21st century that new detective and noir stories appeared.