Mobashar Qureshi

Mobashar Qureshi is a Canadian novelist and short story writer and was born in Benin City, Nigeria in 1978. When he was eight his family moved to Karachi, Pakistan, staying there for over a year and then moving to Toronto, Canada, where he now resides. Qureshi graduated from the University of Toronto with a degree in Economics.

Qureshi wrote his first novel, the unpublished sci-fi/horror thriller The Terror Birds at the age of eighteen. During university, Qureshi wrote a detective novel, An Unforgettable Mistake, about a detective mourning the loss of his wife. After many rejections from publishers and agents the novel was shelved away and remains unpublished. After graduating Qureshi wrote short stories for the amusement of himself and his friends and many are now available in a collection titled, Ten Typewriter Tales. As he entered the work force, he had to confine his writing to evenings and weekends, developing his writer’s voice, until he completed his first fully realized novel, R.A.C.E., published by The Mercury Press in 2007. R.A.C.E. is a comedy/mystery about a parking officer who is assigned by his precinct to save Toronto from radical criminals bent on developing black-market narcotics. The debut novel was critically acclaimed and the Canadian literary review magazine Quill and Quire named Qureshi one of the top ten Canadian emerging mystery writers for 2007.

During the writing of R.A.C.E. Qureshi began plotting his next novel which would eventually become The October Five published by The Mercury Press in 2009. The October Five, another mystery, is about the ongoing investigation into a series of brutal murders by Chicago Homicide Detective Karl Whaler. The novel has a unique cast of characters; principally, five Viet Nam veterans, who regularly meet secretly in a room.

Taking his police procedural narrative in a different direction, Qureshi’s most recent novel is The Paperboys Club. This mystery/thriller with a psychological twist again features intriguing characters including a troubled mental patient who possesses three extraordinary powers; three children who each have a different one of each of these powers and the mother of one of the children, a female police detective who must solve a cold case in order to earn a promotion.

The Paperboys Club marked an exciting new direction in publishing for Qureshi as he released the novel on-line as an e-book, along with his previous two titles, and his short story collection.

Qureshi, like most novelists, is an avid reader and he has had many influences on his writing career, including his favourite writer, Michael Crichton. As Qureshi explains it, he is inspired by the way Crichton continued to reinvent and challenge himself with each book he produced by moving from genre to genre. Qureshi made a conscious decision not to repeat himself after R.A.C.E. by publishing another novel featuring the affable lead character Jon Rupret. While the publishing world seems to encourage writers to develop a series of books based on one or two popular characters Qureshi prefers to pursue his own muse and see where that takes him.