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Chatterjee, Deepak. Deepak Chatterjee was created by the Indian author Swapan Kumar and appeared in dozens of novels from 1953 to the early 1980s, beginning with Adrishya Sanket.

Deepak Chatterjee is an Indian private detective working in Calcutta, although some of his cases take him across India and even into China. Chatterjee is of the upper classes and although he often uses revolvers in both hands he has a scientific bent, with a laboratory in his house to carry out tests. He is Watsoned by Ratanlal, although Chatterjee also gets help from his female assistant Tandra and his younger student Rajat Sen. Chatterjee’s Lestrade is Inspector Gupta. Chatterjee takes on a wide range of criminals, from Femmes Fatale to Mad Scientists to dacoits. Many of these have names from Indian religion and mythology, although none have supernatural powers. However, nearly all of them escape from Chatterjee or from jail at story’s end, and nearly all are masters of disguise. Many are also Robin Hood-style outlaws.

In one novel, Prithibi Theke Durey, one of Chatterjee’s enemies, the master thief Bajrabhairav, teams up with a Mad Scientist in an attempt to CONQUER THE WORLD! The scientist has created a force field which is impervious to force and intends to use it to make the countries of the world disarm and establish a global utopia. Chatterjee is disdainful of Sundar Babu, scorning the concept of the cases which could be solved without working the streets.

* I'm including the Deepak Chatterjee novels in the Best of the Encyclopedia category because of their historical importance and because of the ideasplosions in them. Historically, Chatterjee lasted for around thirty years--a more than respectable lifespan for a fictional detective, especially in India, where series characters rarely last that long. Because of the number of his appearances and the length of time of his fictional lifespan, Chatterjee was influential on other Indian detective characters, becoming something close to an icon for other Indian detective characters to be modeled on. In terms of ideasplosions, Swapan Kumar's novels were chock full of great concepts and villains for Chatterjee to fight and capture. His Rogues Gallery was a memorable, colorful, and imaginative set of criminals and wrongdoers. 

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