By mentioning all this I am not pretending to make a virtue of my ignorance. But I must confess I am certainly not qualified for this trip by having any expert knowledge of India or her people (I hope it goes without saying that I am tremendously excited about acquiring some). So my journey is observable. I am travelling around the world to experience Indian culture and society and hospitality first-hand, as a guest, and on my return I will be infintely the richer for it. I am the apple. 

Exactly how India and her teeming billion will benefit from having me around for the best part of a fortnight I fear will be a lot harder to measure. But, taking heart from my plucky application of out-dated seventeenth century physics, I reckon that one journey must be met with another, even if it is immeasurably small. If I give India a double-barrelled blast of contemporary Welsh noir, then maybe somebody, somewhere will get a little taste of something new and exotic. 

I don't know how neatly my own sub-sub-genre will transplant into the Indian literary scene. It's pretty small, for starters. You could comfortably fit every Welsh noir writer that has ever lived into a lift, and with plenty of room to spare for beer, fags and sausage rolls, which would be a necessity if you hoped to keep them there for any length of time.  Also, I have some concerns about the easy signposts that all (proper) crime writers use to weave in our familiar motifs of social injustice and disenfranchisement. 

A late-night doner kebab in a shop doorway, a bedsit with a three bar-electric fire, an afternoon in the bookies putting on one quid bets: I am not sure, in a country that has such extremes of poverty, that these things will be commonly understood to reference a life gone slightly wrong. 

Or worse, they will be understood, and people will look at me like I'm a tool. 

Currently reading: Maximum City, by Suketu Mehta