Those of us into reading kids urdu literature in the 80’s would immediately recognize this name. I have arbitrarily put the year as 1980. I think he did write some stuff in late 70’s too but started a series of novel (3/4 novels every months!) around 1980.
The novels were “jasoosi” in nature and also taught love of country, love of religion, and cultural values. There were 3 separate teams. A novel for each of them was written every month and they would combine once a year for a Khaas Number. The most popular team was Inspector Jamshaid, Mehmood, Farooq, and Farzana. The other team was Inspector Kamran Mirza, Asif and Aftab(?). The third was more of comedy and more real and it was known as Shauki series. I have forgotten their exact names.
Ishtiaq Ahmed was an immensely popular writer in a large cicle of kids who had book reading as their hobby. With the advent of cable, vcr/dvd, video games, and the likes, book reading amongst teens is not so popular but till a few years back, I heard that Ishtiaq Ahmed was still writing, though at a somewhat reduced pace.
i read every ishtiaq ahmed novel i could get my hands on i loved them.....does he still write?
I'am not sure does he still writes or not but Ishtiaq Ahmed was one hell of a prolific writer. His books were published at a rate faster than I could save money from my lunch allowance to buy them (hence the need for the Mohalla library!).
ishtiaq ahmed was a dabba writer, i read his stuff and then I guess the quality went down exponentially as he started writing many books every month. he had quantity and not quality..
I cant even begin to count the lameness in his books, but one book comes to mind which we had a good laugh about..
book- hawa kai qaidi
the hijackers- tie up the crew and put them in 'the' bathroom. as if there is some 'hamaam' in the airplane..or maybe the flight stewards were all 50 lb bulimics
the microfilm- it was hidden in a 'martaban' in the kitchen, abay..airplane na hua, bawarchikhana ho gaya, garam masalay lay dabbay mein micro film thee
farzana- crawls under the seats to get to the hidden hijacker with the bomb on his ankle and cuts the straps. errrr really, how the hell can anyone go under the airplane seats..really..maybe a 2 yr old but certainly not a grown kid.