Ibne Safi was born in Allahabad in 1928. He was a prolific and popular writer of Urdu crime fiction. He migrated to Pakistan soon after independence and continued to be popular in India for close to three decades owing to the availability of  high quality translations.He passed away in 1980 in Karachi. He has extensive body of work — around 125 novels in the Jasusi Duniya series dealing with the exploits of Col Ahmad Kamal Faridi and his sidekick Capt. Sajid Hameed. There are another 120 odd books dealing with Imran, a buffoon who is a secret service chief. In all he produced around 241 detective novels. He put two novels a month at his peak. In 2010, a few Indian publishers approached his Karachi-based son for rights to translate his novels into English. Ahmad Safi, his son, has launched recently the translations of four of his father’s novels into English. These are Poisoned Arrow, Smokewater, The Laughing Corpse and Doctor Dread. The translator is Shamsur Rehman Faruqui. These books could be seen as the origins or at least the foreshadowing of some of the coventions of popular Hindi cinema of the 1970s and 1980s. The heroes were pitted against the villains. There were extravagant action scenes. There was a dose of comedy and romance. Javed Akhtar was inspired by Ibne Safi while creating larger-than-life characters such as Gabbar Singh and Mogambo. The sub-continent thought the West to be morally lax and a foreigner was not easily acceptable.