इब्न-ए-साफी (Ibn-e-safi)

Some random browsing about spy fiction landed me at this strange Wikipedia page about an Indian-Pakistani writer of pulp fiction in Urdu. You'd probably want to compare the covers that were printed in Allahabad and Karachi. Most of them are simply mind blowing art. Here's the gallery.

Mid Day columnist Mahmood Farooqui has the dope on him:

He grew popular in the years immediately before partition although his novels continued to be set in a politically neutral terrain long afterward. I was especially keen to tease out the lineaments of the utopian and the secular state that emerges in most of his early novels. The country�s head is never mentioned by name, nor are any other international facts or names.

Unlike a Forsyth or a Le Carre, Ibn-e Safi is not after verisimilitude; instead he invents his terrain with great confidence and boldness. In his work, India stretches from the Hindu Kush to the Far East, though South India is rarely invoked.

There is an international dimension to the battles and there is a too palpable desire to show the goras their place and uphold India�s greatness and integrity.