THRILLED MEMORIES

may be nowadays thriller and Sidney Sheldon or Robin Cook is synonymous to me. But in my childhod the picture was totally different.not only me, but most Bengali people(specially who has been grown up reading benglai books of all kind) would relate to this. Till my teens, thriller mean The books of "PROHELIKA SERIES"(the enigma series), "KANCHANJANGHA SERIES" , the adventures of lady detective Krishna and Shika. but the most famous detective was DIPAK CHATTERJEE and his asistant RATANLAL, created by SWAPANKUMAR. all thse books were published long ago.my grandma once told me that she has read some of them in her maiden days.but they were still selling at a good rate at the 80s and 90s. but Swapankumar was the most famous of all the thriller Writers. probably he was the first one to introduce helicopter in bengali thrillers. his detective Mr. Depak Chatterjee was expart at everyting from speaking many languages to martial arts.in some spinechilling moments he was described to carry two pistols in his two hands and a dagger at the other hand. but you need to overlook such trivial faults when the dectective is like indian James Bond. and there was a great variation among the villains,too. the most cunning was "BAAJ PAKHI"(the hawk). next was "KALNAGINI"( the queen cobra). always they used to have a breathtaking encounter with the detective but finally they always managed to escape. but Depak Chatterjee never failed to caught the other villains, most of which were burmiz. due to some unknown reason at that time black ambassador means the villain's car and the 90% villains were burmiz. it would be very mean of me not to mention "FELUDA" by Satyajit Ray, "BYOMKESH BOKSHI" by Saradindu Chatterjee, The "joker dhon" and "abar joker dhon", 'KIRITI" by Neharranjan and last but not the least "DOSYU MOHAN"(Mohan the Bandit) by Sasadhar Chatterjee. no doubt, most of them (including the books mentioned at the begining) were better in quality than the ones written by Swapankumar. but none was as thrilling as his ones, too.that's the reason inspite of all the flaws in his book he was the most cherished author of thrillers at his time.my chilhood bows before you, mr.Swapankumar.