[1] His first short story, 57 saal puraana aadmi (५७ साल पुराना आदमी, The Man 57 from Years Ago), was published in a Hindi magazine Manohar Kahaniyaan (मनोहर कहानीयां) in 1959.

His first full-length novel, Purane Gunah Naye Gunahgar (Sunil Series), was published in Neelam Jaasoos (a Hindi crime fiction magazine) in 1963.

A recent novel of this (in)famous series has been translated by Giriraj Sharan (uncredited) and published by Diamond Books under the title The Last Goal.

[citation needed] The Tandoor scandal in Delhi, in which a man had tried to dispose of the corpse of his victim in a furnace, was an idea taken from Pathak's non-serial novel titled Mawali (मवाली).

[2] In 2006 robbery at UTI Bank, Vikaspuri, a man called Sandeep Bhatnagar looted four million Indian rupees by pretending to be a human bomb.