Arvind Ethan David

Arvind Ethan David has written seven graphic novels, including most recently his adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s Trouble Is My Business (May 2025) and the Bram Stoker Award–nominated Darkness Visible with Mike Carey. David has also written multiple hit audio originals, including the science fiction anthology series Earworms, The Crimes of Dorian Gray, and the nonfiction audiobook Douglas Adams: The Ends of the Earth.

In theatre, David’s plays include The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, both based on the novels by Douglas Adams, and he received an Olivier nomination for his family musical The Boy With Wings, based on Lenny Henry’s children’s book. He also contributed additional material for David Baddiel and Erran Baron Cohen’s musical The Infidel and was a lead producer of the Grammy and Tony Award–winning Broadway musical Jagged Little Pill.

David has written and produced extensively in television, including Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency for Netflix, Anansi Boys for Amazon, and the Asian Academy Award winner The Garden of Evening Mists for HBO.

The Great Game is his debut prose novel.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

Titles are hard, man, really hard. The title was literally the last thing that got done on this book, and it is not the title I started with. The book starts as a historical murder mystery. It escalates into a conspiracy thriller and then gradually evolves into a rather pointed examination of empire and imperialism.

Oh, and amongst its major characters are an aging Sherlock Holmes and a young Winston Churchill. It was a challenge to get all of that in a title.

Other contenders included The Dread and the Envy, which I thought he had a certain Imperial cadence, but was dismissed for being too niche. For a while, I was very keen on The Good Colonial, which felt reminiscent of Graham Greene and John le Carré, in whose tradition I would be delighted to sit. Ultimately, The Great Game won because it conjures a certain Sherlockian tone whilst also explicitly referencing the historical spy craft and statecraft between the great imperial powers in the 19th century (while also paying tribute to Rudyard Kipling and his book about another spy caught between two cultures, Kim).

Now that we have it, it feels like the only possible title for the book.

What's in a name?

The narrator and protagonist of the novel is first introduced to us as “Bunny”. That is the name by which his best friend and co-conspirator in crime, Raffles, refers to him. In this, I am paying homage to a pair of historical characters. The original Raffles and Bunny were created by E.W. Hornung in 1895 and this pair of society cat burglars quickly became as famous as their law-enforcing predecessors, Holmes and Watson.

Ten pages into The Great Game, however, Bunny makes a confession. “Bunny” is not his real name. It is simply a nickname that Raffles has given him in honour of the late Bunny Manders, Raffles' former partner in crime. So, who is our hero?

“My name is Lt. Balvinder Dev Singh, an alumnus of Government College Lahore, where I was schooled in Latin, Philosophy, Mathematics, and English Literature. Late of the Second Patiala Infantry, assigned by His Highness the Maharaja of Patiala at the request of the British to serve an auxiliary role in the Second Boer War. Honorably discharged and, at the time of this narrative, thirty-six years of age, unmarried and a pupil barrister at Nine Stone Buildings, Lincoln's Inn.”

So yes, his name matters because it tells us exactly who he is and how he differs from the traditional narrator of tales such as this. In turn, that gives you a hint at how this book is going to subvert your expectations.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your new novel?

It was as a pre-teenager that I first read all the books that inspire this one: the Sherlock Holmes mysteries, most obviously, but also H.G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling, J.M. Barrie, and Oscar Wilde. Then, a few years later, in my late teens and early twenties I started reading the work of Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi, Kazuro Ishiguro, V.S. Naipaul and Zadie Smith. In a way, this novel puts all those influences in a blender. The ingredients are literature of Empire as told by the imperialists, mixed in with the story of the Colonials, told from the other side of the coin. I wanted to use the methods of all my biggest influences and put them into a dance with each other.

So I think teenage me would be pretty pleased.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

Both are bastards. If you don't grip your reader in the first couple of pages, really ideally in the first paragraph, you're in trouble. They won't go any further. If you don't leave them deliciously satisfied in the final chapter, in the final image, then they won't tell their friends that they have to read it too.

For The Great Game, I knew I had to start with a murder and also with the singular personage of Raffles, but I also wanted to play a little literary game with the secondary mystery of who our narrator really was. Playing both games at once—the mystery of the murder and the mystery of identity—was a way of immediately signaling what type of book this was going to be.

As for the ending of The Great Game, I'm incredibly proud of it, but also can say absolutely nothing more about it, as it is a massive spoiler. It does exist, exactly to the word as I first wrote it.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

For me, most characters start grounded in a real person. Sometimes myself, sometimes a public figure, sometimes others I know. The process and art of writing means that once you dig deep into them, you imbue them with an essence of their own, and they grow into being their own people. No longer copies of the real world, but real in a deeper sense.

In the case of The Great Game, though, something different and rather unexpected happened. When I first created Balvinder, all I knew about him were the facts of his life, which he quotes above.

Then, the more I wrote him, the more I started to empathize with him. The more I realized that he is who I might have been if I was born a hundred and fifty years ago. In writing the book, he and I went on similar journeys of exploration, and we became very angry at a world we had previously too easily accepted.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

I read a lot of history, and in the case of this book in particular, it reflects my long obsessions with the lives of Winston Churchill and Oscar Wilde. I'm also absorbed with both contemporary and historical politics, interested in how what seems like contemporary problems to us are actually just new manifestations of old and deep patterns. Historians of Empire William Dalrymple, Caroline Elkins and, on the opposite end of the political spectrum, Niall Ferguson have all informed both my worldview and this particular book.

I'm also a screenwriter and playwright, and so some of my biggest influences come from those worlds. Oscar Wilde, of course, and his near contemporary George Bernard Shaw, the recently late but always great Tom Stoppard, Billy Wilder, Aaron Sorkin and Diablo Cody (with whom I've had the honour of working). All those writers elevate dialogue to music, and that's the thing I try hard to chase in all my writing.

Visit Arvind Ethan David's website.

--Marshal Zeringue