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Lawrence Blochman’s India stories grew out of an extended journey, not a brief stop: he and fellow traveler John Kretschmer set out expecting to be away for six months, but traveled for three years. In the early 1920s Blochman spent much of his time in Calcutta, working as a newspaper photographer and feature writer. India’s railways, princely households and varied settings later appeared in his mysteries, from Bombay Mail to the Terence O’Reilly stories.
This account follows the journey and its literary echoes as described by Anu Kumar in a 2024 Scroll feature.
From a student journey to three years abroad
Born in San Diego in 1900, Blochman was a student at Berkeley when a university choral group took him to Japan, China and Hong Kong in May 1920. A few months later, he and John Kretschmer left San Francisco for what they expected would be a six-month trip. They reached India via Himalayan passes; the journey lasted three years.
Blochman spent much of his Indian stay in Calcutta, where he worked for the English-language newspaper The Englishman as a photographer and feature writer. The job gave him opportunities to travel and, Kumar’s account says, familiarity with the Indian railway system. The experience would prove especially useful for a mystery built around a train.
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How India entered Blochman’s fiction
Bombay Mail: a railway mystery
Blochman’s 1934 novel Bombay Mail is described by Kumar as his most successful novel. Its Criminal Investigation Department inspector, Leonidas Prike, investigates two murders aboard a train; one victim is a maharaja. The railway setting drew on Blochman’s familiarity with India’s trains, acquired during his work-related travels. A film adaptation with the same title was also made in 1934.
O’Reilly and the fictional kingdom of Zarapore
India also furnished the backdrop for a comic-detective strand. Terence O’Reilly, a large New York policeman, first appeared in the 1936 short story “The Zarapore Beat.” He is sent to protect Vinayak Rao Bahadur, an Indian prince from the fictional northern kingdom of Zarapore. O’Reilly returned in six more short stories over the following five years.
These stories brought India-related detail into detective fiction: trains, maharajas, diamonds, Hindustani phrases, yogis, bulls and local police. The setting was a literary construction, not a documentary account of any particular Indian kingdom.
Indore, princely life and gems
Blochman and Kretschmer spent several weeks in Indore as guests of Maharaja Tukoji Rao Holkar. Kumar connects Blochman’s exposure to princely life there with his recurring interest in precious gems and royal intrigue. The source describes these as influences on his fiction, rather than citing a diary or direct statement by Blochman about particular scenes.
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A later visit to Darjeeling supplied material for Red Snow at Darjeeling, another of Blochman’s India-related works. Kumar reports that Blochman wrote four novels set in India, including three featuring Prike, but does not give a complete list of those four novels.
Dr Coffee and Motilal Mookerji
A later series carried the connection into forensic mysteries. Beginning in 1950, the Dr Coffee stories paired New York pathologist Daniel Webster Coffee with Motilal Mookerji, a Bengali scientist on deputation from Calcutta Medical College. The stories used poisons, forensics and botany; Kumar reports that they were adapted into the nine-episode television series Diagnosis Unknown in 1960.
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What Blochman’s Calcutta looked like on the page
In the O’Reilly story “Bringing up Babu,” Blochman set his fictional contrasts against a bustling Calcutta:
“Calcutta was a teeming city of a million population, a great metropolis although a strange one. There were sacred humpbacked bulls blocking the sidewalks and sleeping peacefully on the steps of the main post office and the National Bank of India, but there were also sleek motorcars full of distinguished Europeans in evening dress, brightly lit restaurants, crowded trams, bustling traffic. There were broad parks and majestic government offices, and there were beggars sleeping in alleys, and acres and acres of crooked mud hovels.”
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This is Blochman’s period fictional depiction, quoted in Kumar’s feature—not a verified population figure or a comprehensive portrait of the city. Kumar also notes that the stories’ use of “Babu English” may sound grating to present-day readers. That language is best approached as part of the author’s dated literary voice, not as a neutral representation of Bengali speech.
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Blochman did not draw on India in just one kind of story. His experience appears in a railway murder mystery, a run of stories about an American policeman and a fictional prince, and a later forensic series pairing a New York doctor with a Bengali scientist. Calcutta provided the working perspective of a reporter; travel supplied settings such as Darjeeling; and the Indore visit offered a glimpse of princely life. In Kumar’s account, the journey’s significance lies in how those observations became recurring fictional material.
Sources and scope
The travel narrative and the connections between Blochman’s India experiences and his fiction are drawn from Anu Kumar’s February 17, 2024, Scroll feature, “One visit to India was enough to inspire writer Lawrence Blochman for a lifetime.” A 1977 article, “The Blochman Saga in San Diego,” hosted by the San Diego History Center, provides family and hometown context; its reviewed opening material does not independently verify the India itinerary. Kumar’s feature does not give exact arrival and departure dates for Blochman’s stay in India.
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