The Murder of the Maharajah (1980)

Blurb:

My review:

For the fiftieth anniversary of the Collins Crime Club, Keating wrote a detective story of the type published in the period, transported to India: The Murder of the Maharajah at his country estate (a palace), by one of the assembled relatives and guests, including a rakish heir, his flapper mistress, a half-witted solider or two, and a dyspeptic American millionaire.  Unfortunately, many of the characters—two ghastly Americans, who believe that “if it ain’t done the way it is back in the States, then it’s done wrong,” and a pompous British official who ought never to have had children, let alone his Kipling-spouting child, a nauseating concession to sentiment—are so annoying that the reader regrets that they do not die, and die like Vitellius and Edward II.  In fact, there is a singular dearth of sympathetic characters: only DSP Howard and his Watson-Schoolmaster are at all likeable.  India is seen from the outside, and hence as “India the exotic,” rather than the everyday India of the Ghote novels.  Thankfully, the plot is one of the author’s best, although the detection is rather wishy-washy, with more psychology than cast-iron facts.  In short, a detective story like Marsh’s Death and the Dancing Footman, in which annoying characterisation is at odds with an excellent plot.

Interestingly enough, the theme of the novel seems to be whether progress, as represented by Henry Morton III, is any good if we are unable to appreciate beauty and painstaking craftsmanship rather than mass-produced “efficient” goods, a parable of the detective story itself in these benighted days.

To the Bibliography.

To the H.R.F. Keating Page.

To the Grandest Game in the World.

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