INSPECTOR GHOTE
-
HIS LIFE AND CRIMES:
The Detective
Fiction of H.R.F. Keating
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“Lively and witty, and, though
highly
artificial and contrived, grips as a really good set of false teeth
should.”
–
Maurice Richardson,
Observer, 23rd August 1959
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H.R.F. Keating is a mild and agreeable writer. His
early books are highly eccentric and diverting,
outré in setting (the philosophy school of Zen There Was Murder), motive (A Rush on the Ultimate,
in which a desire to win a croquet match becomes a good enough motive
for murder)
and method (the falling stage-car of Death
of a Fat God). (Of these, The
Dog it was that Died, a particularly
tense thriller, is easily the best, and remains sadly forgotten.) It was not until the invention of Inspector
Ganesh
Ghote, his downtrodden Bombay detective, that he really found the form which suited
him best: the
detective story as moral fable and the triumph of the underdog. His skilful use of these generally make up for
the weakness of the detection and the fact that his themes and handling
of them
can be rather trite. At his best – as in
The Perfect Murder, Inspector Ghote Draws
a Line or The Body in the Billiard-room – Keating
is
quite a charming, thought-provoking writer.
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What's New:
These pages copyright Nicholas Lester Fuller,
2000--2010. Created 5th December 2004.
