Amita Murray is the author of two series of mystery novels: Her Arya Winters series, begun in 2021, has been optioned for TV, and her historical series featuring the Marleigh sisters just debuted this year with the novel Unladylike Lessons in Love (Avon/Harper Collins). The London-based author is a winner of the Exeter Prize and received a Leverhulme grant from University College London. Her first short story for EQMM, “A Heist in Three Acts,” appears in our current issue (September/October 2023). It stars a diverse cast of characters, whose conception Amita discusses in this post.  —Janet Hutchings

My fiction, contemporary and historical, is full of what we call “diverse” characters.

In my short story, “A Heist in Three Acts,” three women, one British Indian, another British Korean and the third African American, plan to pull a heist on their boss, who is not only casually racist and a misogynist, but also has terrible judgement when it comes to designing environmentally-sound policies for his clothing empire.

Similarly, in my Regency novel, Unladylike Lessons in Love (Avon/Harper Collins, 2023), the main character, Lila Marleigh, is the daughter of an English earl from the East India Company and his Indian mistress. Lila’s best friend is gay, a hanging offence in nineteenth-century England. Her old friend, Maisie, is the daughter of a nanny from the Caribbean. We also meet Sunil, a lascar from colonised India, and various other ‘diverse’ characters. Lila’s love interest, Ivor, is white-British, and comes from a troubled and scarred family background.

A previous novel series, Arya Winters (Agora, 2021), doesn’t only have diversity based on race and sexuality, but the main character, Arya, is neurodivergent and mixed-race.

I don’t write these characters to satisfy some kind of political or moral stance. Or, I should say, I don’t only write these characters to satisfy some kind of political and moral stance. Of course, I have a political stance. Any writer who says they don’t have one is either lying or hasn’t made it a conscious act. We all have a politics. It might be big, world politics: what government you want, what your views and actions are on the climate crisis, what you think of space travel, your stance on police brutality. Or it may be everyday politics: how you treat disabled people, how you talk to servers in a restaurant, what your relationships with men and women look like. But we all have a politics.

Writing fiction can give us the chance not only to draw the world we know, a believable world based on our real world, but it also gives us a drawing board to carve out a world we imagine and want, where things are a little bit closer to our politics, where women have space to fight for justice, where people of colour don’t have to battle for every role and position of power, where our characters can create magic or reimagine society. Even when things don’t end well for our characters, the spaces and imaginations we create have some element of politics in them.

But, back to my previous point. I don’t write these characters only as a political act, only to fill a gap that has existed in fiction for a very long time and that many writers (R.F. Kuang, Sara Collins, S.A. Chakraborty, Tomi Adeyemi, Stella Oni to name only a few) are trying to fill. I write these characters because they are who I know.

I’ve lived in London, Delhi and California, and I call London, England home. I’m surrounded by people that define themselves in all sorts of ways. The best thing about London is that people don’t stare at you because you look different. You get into a carriage in the tube and no two people look and sound the same. You hear languages and accents from all around the world. When you say your job is that you paint a little, you knit doll shoes for Barbie, feed llamas in your free time, after you’ve done your three-hour trapeze class and learnt ancient Valyrian, no one even blinks. I can’t write anything but diverse and interesting characters, doing diverse and interesting things. I can’t not try to fill the blinding gaps in fiction that have existed forever, where class, race, sexuality, disability are white-washed out. I have no choice.

But if I imagine that in writing these characters, I can stay in a safe zone, I’m woefully wrong. If my characters can’t remain the same-old, neither can my stories. If I write Regency England, I must write about the lascars from India, the nannies from the Caribbean, the mixed-raced daughters of English earls and their Indian mistresses and about white characters, straight and gay, with or without disabilities. I must write about how these characters ended up in London in the first place. What are their backstories? How did the mixed-race daughter of an English earl and his Indian mistress end up living with her father’s first (and in fact, only) wife? How did her younger sister, Anya, land a gig playing the sitar in Queen Charlotte’s court? What on earth are some of these characters doing going to a rat pit in Covent Garden one fine old evening?

I write romance and mystery. As someone who grew up reading Austen and Heyer, Dickens and the Bronte sisters, Christie and Sayers, my tropes for romance and mystery remain very recognisable. That’s my literary schooling. Those are the authors I used to turn to, when in need of escape and comfort, when feeling lonely and in need of companionship. My narrative arcs haven’t necessarily changed too drastically. But the stories within these arcs absolutely have. I can’t write a mixed-race British Indian woman or an African American woman and not talk about race. And no, this isn’t because I’m compelled to forever talk about race. The truth is I’d rather do almost anything than to talk about race. I hate talking about race. But I can’t write these characters and not talk about race. Because to imagine that you can be British Asian or African American or gay or disabled or any minoritized community and not have your experiences coloured by those characteristics is to live in denial. Not all our experiences will be affected by those characteristics, absolutely. But some will be.

As a fiction writer, I have choices. I can write contemporary fiction and look at minoritized characters in as realistic a way as possible. I can write historical fiction and try my best to fill the gaps that exist in writings about my chosen era, through research and imagination. Or I can write futuristic, speculative fantasy where I create worlds that mimic our own but that allow me freedom from some of the politics and constraints of our world. Where I can fight the fight but I can fight it not exactly as people fight it in our world. All those choices are open to me. But to pretend that I can be a writer in today’s world and not have to make these choices is denying reality.

I write diverse characters not as types but as people. They are people with rounded experiences and full back stories and names. I think of people I know. I think of what I understand about people. I draw on my experiences and those of my friends. I write fiction, but maybe a fiction that has more kernels of truth in it than truth itself does.