Asrar Ahmad, widely known as Ibn-e-Safi, is one of the most popular detective novelists in South Asia. He was born on July 26, 1928, in Nara of Allahabad District, Uttar Pradesh. In August 1952, Ibn-e-Safi migrated to Pakistan with his mother and sister. He founded Asrar Publications and started publishing Jasusi Duniya series simultaneously in Pakistan and India. Why have Ibn-e-Safi’s jasusi (detective) novels been so popular since the 1950s across the South Asian subcontinent and in various languages? The author, inspired by the “distant reading” approach and Marxian political economy, tries to understand the social relations and structure that are underneath the popularization of his novels. This article argues that the popularization of Ibn-e-Safi’s novels should be explained in terms of a larger process of social (re-)reproduction, in which the production and circulation of Ibn-e-Safi’s books benefited from a particular set of social relations embedded in the historically developed commercial publishing industry and reading culture. And, Ibn-e-Safi took advantage of the material conditions for the production and circulation of reading materials available at the time in Karachi.