Vee (Vijaya) Kumari is known for her work as executive producer and lead on HALWA, which received HBO's 2019 APAV award. She has also been a co-star in TV shows that include GLOW, Anger Management, Teachers, and Criminal Minds, among others. Vee spent over three decades as a neuroanatomy professor, a neuroscience researcher and for ten of those years was an Associate Dean for Medical Education at the University of California Davis Medical Center in Sacramento, CA. In 2012, she retired to pursue a career of acting and writing and calls this "a journey from the left side of my brain to the right."
In her debut novel, Dharma: A Rekha Rao Mystery, Rekha Rao is a thirty-something Indian American professor of art history who becomes disillusioned by academia and is haunted by the murder of her father. She believes police convicted the wrong person and moves away from her match-making family. As she tries to manage her PTSD and heal her broken heart from a previously abusive boyfriend, she gets entangled in a second murder, that of her mentor and father figure. Rekha is attracted to the handsome detective Al Newton, who is investigating the murder but steers clear of him because of her distaste for cops and fear of a new relationship. When police arrest one of her students and accuse her mentor of theft, Rekha is left with no other choice but to look for the killer on her own.
Vee stops by In Reference to Murder to talk about writing the book:
In my novel, Dharma: A Rekha Rao Mystery, Rekha’s beloved mentor, Professor Faust is murdered.
I’m unclear how I came up with the name ‘Faust’ for the murdered professor.
Once I did, I looked up what I could find of the details of the story, FAUST by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1808,1832). If you read the novel, you’ll realize that the name truly doesn’t fit the man my protagonist revered, because he was gentle, kind and humble despite his many achievements. However, one of Rekha’s students, Neil, clearly perceives him as evil.
The original 1808 German title page of Goethe's play read simply: "Faust. / Eine Tragödie" ("Faust. / A Tragedy"). The addition of "erster zweiter Teil" (in English, "Part One") was retrospectively applied by publishers when the sequel was published in 1832 with a title page which read: "Faust. / Der Tragödie zweiter Teil" ("Faust. / The Tragedy's Second Part").
The two plays have been published in English under a number of titles, and are usually referred to as Faust, Parts One and Two.
I was able to find the English version online and it provided the source for the verse that Neil’s mother includes in the book she left for him.
“Oh, came a magic cloak into my hands
To carry me to distant lands,
I should not trade it for the choicest gown,
Nor for the cloak and garments of the crown.”
I Googled the verse innumerable times to make sure that it would bring up the original text and it did. In the novel, Neil not only figures out his father’s name using the verse, but also considers it an apt inscription for his mother’s tombstone and a meaningful farewell to him before she dies.
The idea of Neil’s mother leaving a cryptic message for him came from a less well-known mystery novel by P. D. James, An Unsuitable Job For A Woman, in which a private detective, Cordelia Gray, embarks on a journey to find the killer of the son of a prominent scientist. The son receives a book from his nanny left for him by his mother. And it has an inscription that he doesn’t decipher, but Cordelia uses it to find the identity of the killer.
You can learn more about Vee via her website and also follow her on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Dharma: A Rekha Rao Mystery is available via Amazon in both digital and paperback formats.
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