Forget it, Jake. It’s Rajasthan.

S.V. Randhawa (Abhay Deol), protagonist of Manorama Six Feet Under (2007) is no Philip Marlowe. He’s a petty bureaucrat, currently suspended for taking bribes. (He’s absolutely guilty, just like the rest of his department, but S.V. is the one who got caught.) He’s a frustrated writer; his only novel, Manorama, sold only two hundred copies, and he’s been reduced to writing for a sleazy pulp detective magazine. And he’s a family man, though he and his wife Nimmi (Gul Panag) are going through a rough patch.

And then the wife (Sarika) of P.P. Rathore (Kulbhushan Kharbanda), Irrigation Minister and the man responsible for the upcoming Rajasthan Vikas Canal, shows up at S.V.’s door and asks him to find out whether her husband is having an affair; as she explains, it’s hard to find a private investigator in small-town Rajasthan, so a writer of detective fiction is the next best thing.

S.V. agrees, because he could use the money, because he’s intrigued by the notion of being a detective for once, and because she’s apparently one of the few people who actually read his book. So he sneaks onto Rathore’s estate, takes a few pictures, hands the film over to the wife without developing it, and congratulates himself on a job reasonably well done.

And then it is time for plot twists. S.V. sees footage of Rathore’s wife on the news, and it is clearly not the woman who hired him. The mysterious woman stops him on the street and tells him that if anything happens to her, he should remember that her name is Manorama, just like in his book, and she’s thirty two. The next morning, the newspaper reports that social worker Manorama Shukla ran into the street and was run over by a truck; the police consider the death a suicide.

S.V. is convinced that Manorama was murdered, and is determined to investigate the case himself, even though his best friend and brother-in-law Brij (Vinay Pathak), a police officer, warns him not to gert involved. S.V. isn’t a trained detective, but he’s a reasonably smart guy, good at improvising, and genre-savvy, and thanks to his magazine work he has a press pass, so his investigation is just successful enough to bring him to the attention of a pair of thugs who are very interested in a) finding out what Manorama told S.V. the night she died, and b) breaking fingers, and the thugs are delighted at the opportunity to combine their two interests.

S.V. refuses to give up the investigation, so a disgusted Nimmi takes their son to her parents’ house to celebrate Diwali. Meanwhile, S.V. meets Sheetal (Raima Sen), Manorama’s roommate, and when she’s attacked and her apartment is ransacked, he allows her to stay with him, which proves to be a mixed blessing; on the one hand he finally has a sympathetic ear and someone who wants to help with the investigation, just as it starts to lead into some very dark places, but on the other hand, keeping an attractive coed in the house while your wife is out of town is a recipe for real trouble.

Manorama Six Feet Under works on a number of levels. Most importantly, it’s a well-crafted and tightly plotted mystery with an engaging cast and a strong sense of atmosphere. The plot twists are surprising, but make sense given what has preceded them. The writing is exceptional.

The film also works as a conscious homage, a sort of meta-noir. As a writer, S.V. is very aware of noir conventions, rather than blindly falling into them. (And yes, he does provide the occasional voice-over narration.) To a certain extent, it’s S.V.’s expectations that push the story in a noirward direction, though the big reveal is genuinely dark. And while the movie is certainly not realistic, S.V. is believably ineffective as an untrained but intelligent amateur detective; he solves the case in the end, but up until then he’s always two steps behind, and he’s absolutely useless in a fight.

To top it all off, the movie is also occasionally very funny, without ever verging on parody. Manorama Six Feet Under is a fine example of having your cinematic cake and eating it too.