Points and Lines

"To see what isn't true is easy. But to see what is true will take some doing."

- J.W. van de Wetering (A Glimpse of Nothingness, 1975)

The now-late H.R.F. Keating emerged as a mystery writer at the tail end of the Golden era, publishing his first novel in 1959, but didn't made his name until five years later with the creation of a downtrodden, Bombay policeman, Ganesh Ghote, whose trials as an underdog made him a fan favorite.

In those intervening years, Keating accumulated experience as a novelist by cutting his teeth on a handful of standalone detective/thrillers and his second foray, Zen There Was Murder (1960), impressed me as a farewell to a previous, by-gone era. The setting is an old-fashioned, English country mansion converted into a school for adult educational courses (e.g. philosophy) conveniently occupied with a closed circle of suspects and a Japanese artifact that ends up being swiped from the premise – presented to the reader in the guise of a locked room mystery. However, don't expect too much from its explanation, because that's the only part of the solution in which contemporary attitudes rears it ugly head.

Mr. Utamaro has the task of lecturing a small, but argumental, assembly on Zen Buddhism. There's a visiting schoolmaster, Alasdair Stuart, and a clergyman in limbo, Rev. Cyprian Applecheek, alongside the misses Flaveen Mills and Olive Rohan, but Honor Brentt is there hunting material for her weekly column in The World with her husband, Gerry, in tow – in order to help him abstain from women. Zen is discussed for the first couple of chapters, when the first disturbance happens: a Japanese small-sword, wakizashi, vanishes from underneath its glass showcasing that was hotwired to a burglar-alarm.

They had to install an alarm system after the media picked up on a story attached to its bigger brother, the katana, now residing in an American police museum and confused the swords. However, the age of the small-sword gives it a bloody history of its own, because it was the blade used for hara-kiri. As I said above, you shouldn’t expect too much from the theft of the sword and stands out in the story as a small piece of anti-detective material in what’s otherwise a respectful send-up of the genre. The group decides to keep the police out of the affair and conduct their own sanzen interviews, in which Mr. Utamaro materializes as the Asian compeer of the Hungarian historian, Dr. Bottwink, from Cyril Hare's stand-alone mystery An English Murder (1951).

Mr. Utamaro is unable to prevent the small-sword from turning up protruding, predictably, from the body of one of his students, but he's able to solve the case and Keating gave his readers a surprisingly fair opportunity to do the same. Granted, it's not all that difficult to solve and I was put on the right track, early on, by what might have been unacknowledged joke in the story. There were also ideas planted here that took shape in succeeding novels. Here two German maids regularly interrupt the story to comment on the characters and events taking place in that sprawling mansion and they may have paved the way for Mrs. Cragg, a charwoman and occasional sleuth, from Death of a Fat God (1963) and a number of short stories. The seemingly impossible disappearance of the Japanese short-sword and how it came to disappear was revisited and improved upon with a vanishing one-rupee note in The Perfect Murder (1964).

Zen There Was Murder stands as a fair-play detective story as well as allowing the readers of today to examine the ideas a young writer was working with and a writer who, evidently, never seems to have lost that youthful spark of enthusiasm for writing and mysteries. I have said in the past that Keating was as a mystery writer at his best when he wasn't trying to write mysteries. Keating was at his best when he hurled Ghote into a David vs. Goliath-style battle-of-wits, but he wasn't completely inept with the form and I'm glad to discover that The Body in the Billiard Room (1987) wasn't a one-off as a good example of classic, English drawing room mystery. 

By the way, I really love the title of this book. 

Other H.R.F. Keating reviews: 

Inspector Ghote Plays a Joker (1969)

Filmi, Filmi Inspector Ghote (1976)

Inspector Ghote Draws a Line (1979)

Under a Monsoon Cloud (1986)

Why So Serious, Inspector Ghote?

"Clean up your act, Joker."

- Batman: The Animated Series (The Last Laugh)

I'm familiar with the term "hobby deformation" and the symptoms that escort this twist of the mind that makes us, devoted mystery enthusiasts, associate Gaston Leroux and A.A. Milne with Le Mystère de la chambre jaune (The Mystery of the Yellow Room, 1907) and The Red House Mystery (1922) instead of La Fantôme de l'opéra (The Phantom of the Opera, 1910) and The House at Pooh Corner (1928), but never expected that a simple news item about a zoo, who're expecting their first baby flamingos in over a decade, would direct me to my shelves to pull out my unread copy of H.R.F. Keating's Inspector Ghote Plays a Joker (1969).

Not at all how I imagine Ghote!

The much-plagued inspector of the Bombay police, Ganesh Ghote, is summoned to his superiors and asked to play the fool in an almost impossible task: protect the last remaining flamingo left in the Bombay Zoological Gardens. The birds were a gift from the American Consulate and a sniper has been picking them off, one by one, and, sure enough, Ghote arrives just in time for his assignments swan song. But worst of all, the epitome of incompetence, Sergeant Desai, will lend him an "assisting" hand in his inquiries, however, it's this same incompetent fool who puts Ghote on the trail of the joker. Desai knows that three months previously a popular racing horse was substituted for a donkey and uncover that a malicious prankster is picking on the proud and prominent members of society.

Among the victims who involuntarily played the fool are a scientist and the owner of the racehorse, Anil Bedekar, all of whom prefer to forget their embarrassments, but with his superiors breathing down his neck for results, Ghote pushes through and finds an unexpected ally in the Rajah of Bhedwar, known to his friends as "Bunny" Baindur, who fancies himself an amateur detective. He drags Ghote along to watch the yogi Lal Dass perform a miracle in public, walking across the surface of a brimful water reservoir, exactly the kind of place where the joker would strike, which he does, and Dass is saved thanks to the rapid intervention from Ghote. I have to point out that, before this happened, Dass walked on water and Keating provides the most simple and logical explanation for this miracle and thus qualifies as an impossible crime novel – even if it’s only a tiny fraction of the plot and immediately supplies a solution.

The joker is pulled from the pack halfway through the game, but most of the readers will have picked up on that punch-line before its delivered, because this person is exactly the kind of opponent Keating likes to pit against Ghote: affluent, influential, powerful, smart and charismatic. Pretty much the exact opposite of the timid detective and this series is at its best when Ghote is barking like an underdog at a towering tidal wave. It seems futile, but, somehow, he manages to come out on top and prefer the cat-and-mouse games of Inspector Ghote Goes by Train (1971) and Inspector Ghote Draws a Line (1979) to the "solved-by-inspection" novels like Inspector Ghote’s Good Crusade (1966) and Filmi, Filmi, Inspector Ghote (1976). I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Keating was at his best, as a mystery writer, when he wasn't writing mysteries. As Wakko Warner once famously observed, "the mind boggles."

Anyway, back to the review, where the book, incomprehensibly, contorts itself into a regular police procedural when Ghote's opponent is murdered just when an interesting development had presented itself: how can he stop the prankster now that he knows this persons identity? They even had a confrontation, in which the joker wondered out loud how Ghote was planning to put a stop to all the tom foolery. It would've made for a classic Keating novel! This book is a good demonstration of Keating's strength and weaknesses (a wonderful and promising first half vs. duller second half), but I prefer to watch Ghote overcome seemingly insurmountable odds when he takes on influential town bosses, stubborn ex-judges and cunning master criminals. They tend to be more fun, but walking the beat of Bombay alongside Ghote never feels like a chore.   

One more thing that should be mentioned, is that I suspect Inspector Ghote Plays a Joker of being secretively being an homage to Conan Doyle. Sherlock Holmes is referenced and the business of the stolen racehorse calls to mind the affair of "Silver Blaze" and the dead flamingos of the work of Moriarty's henchman in "The Empty House."

A Darkening Horizon

"A policeman's lot is not a happy one."

- Gilbert & Sullivan

Well, I have now officially tagged more blog entries with the post-GAD label than with the GAD one, which goes to show that things seldom turn out the way you envisage them – and how fitting that today's subject of discussion is H.R.F. Keating's Under a Monsoon Cloud (1986).

The long-suffering Bombay police inspector, Ganesh Ghote, has faced many formidable adversaries, from an infamous confidence trickster to a vexatious ex-judge, but the dueler he'll be crossing swords with in this book may be the toughest opponent he has ever faced: himself!

Inspector Ghote is temporarily transferred to a small place named Vigatpore, several miles removed from his familiar stomping ground, to take charge of its police station and whip it into shape for an important inspection by the referred "Tiger" Kelkar – whom we've met before in Bats Fly Up for Inspector Ghote (1974). Over the course of that book, he became an example to the servile Bombay detective and this respect, dangerously crossing the border into blind hero-worship, drove him into making one of the biggest mistakes of his career: covering up a murder committed by his fiery tempered senior officer! In a fit of uncontrolled rage, the respected policeman chucked a brass inkwell at the head of a clumsy and exasperating police sergeant – leaving one of their own dead on the floor of the police station. Ghote voluntarily becomes an accessory after the facts by coming up and providing a helping hand in staging an elaborate accident.

Upon his return to Bombay, he quells his conscience with the conviction that he saved an important policeman for the force, whom he allowed to return to his invaluable duties in service of their country, and as the weeks turn into months the unfortunate incident is stored in the attic of his brain – where it rapidly starts accumulating a layer of dust that obscure most of our memories. But then one day, a new challenger appears a relative of the unfortunate sergeant turns up, one who doesn't buy the official story of a tragic accident, and a new investigation is launched that prompts "Tiger" Kelkar into taking his own life. He graciously takes full responsibility for the murder in his suicide note, but it's obvious to everyone that Ghote, at the very least, must have known about the murder – and he's suspended pro-tempore.

The second half of the story consists of a disciplinary inquiry hearing, with all the trimmings of a courtroom drama, in which the cross-examiner creates a convincing case against the always-downtrodden police inspector and squires off with his legal representative. However, the real battle waged in that semi-courtroom is not between the accuser and defender, but between Ghote's conflicting sense of duties to the truth and his family and it's fought out in the confines of his own mind. Ghote is well aware that he must be found innocent, not only to cling on to his beloved job, but also to safeguard a future for his wife and son, whose horizons have been darkened by black clouds gathering in the sky above them. But he's also painfully conscious of his own guilt and the lies he's been telling and wishes he could unburden himself without ruining his career and his family.

The story came very close to matching Inspector Ghote Draws a Line (1979), but I felt that the ending wasn't handled with the same skill as the rest of the book. In the end, Keating wanted it both ways and that just didn't work – not for me anyway. But in spite of the botched ending, this is an engrossing read that allows you to peek in the darkest nooks and niches of Ghote's psyche and demonstrates why its author was one of the most innovative crime writers of the previous century.

On a final note: this is one of four books currently brought back into print as Penguin Modern Classics.

The Perfect Murders (1964)

Inspector Ghote Breaks an Egg (1970)

Inspector Ghote Trusts the Heart (1972; didn't like this one, though)

Under a Monsoon Cloud (1986)

Not Your Typical Victim

In an earlier blog entry that was dedicated to the memory of H.R.F. Keating, I mentioned that he was an unusual writer in the field, who excelled when he wasn't attempting to pen down a formally plotted detective story, but when he focused his direction on the battle-of-wits between his subservient police inspector, Ganesh Ghote, and a powerful adversary.

The best example I could provide at the time was Inspector Ghote Goes by Train (1971), in which the poor inspector is locked in a mental standoff with a cunning confidence-trickster, but also remarked that Inspector Ghote Draws a Line (1979) and Under a Monsoon Cloud (1986) apparently took a more interesting and earnest approach to this form of story telling, however, I was unable to comment on them then since neither book had yet come into my hands – a glaring omission that has now been rectified.

In the past two weeks, I added both titles to my ever-growing collection and have just finished reading Inspector Ghote Draws a Line, in which Keating puts a nifty spin on the old cat-and-mouse game between protagonist and antagonist.

Lest You Be Judged

The servile Inspector Ghote is ordered off to the heat sweltering abode of Justice Asif Ibrahim, situated in a secluded spot of the sultry country side, to find out whose been leaving the old judge threatening letters and prevent any attempts on his live. But the pensioned-off judge, who earned himself an unpopular reputation by condemning the plotters in the Madurai Conspiracy Case to death shortly before India's independence, is obstinate in his refusal to accept any help and is determined to make Ghote's job as difficult as possible, by obscuring information and attemps at restricting him in his investigation.  

Ghote's presence is only tolerated on insistence of a two relatives and because he's in the guise of a Doctor of Philosophy, there to assist him in committing his memoirs to paper, which conveniently strips him of his official status and privilege of asking importunate questions – and before long it begins to dawn on the inspector that his foe is not the nebulous would-be killer, but his prospective, unyielding victim-to-be.

This makes for a satisfying and original artifice on the authors' part, in which the solution to the case at hand is not revealed by peeling away the many layers that cover-up a murderous plot, but the ones that encumber the character of Sir Asif Ibrahim – resulting in one of the rare triumphs of characterization over plotting.

Nevertheless, even with the characters emerging triumphantly from the book, its plot is nothing to sneeze at, either, offering both misdirection as well as a properly clued solution – proving once again that he wasn't completely inept with the traditional format and makes for an overall gratifying reading experience.

Inspector Ghote Draws a Line is perhaps not as fun a read as Inspector Ghote Goes by Train, even plodding in parts, but it shows Keating at the top of his game in what undoubtedly is his masterpiece.

H.R.F. Keating (1926-2011): His Life and Crimes

H.R.F. Keating: His Life and Crimes

H.R.F. Keating

Last Saturday, March 27, 2011, the mystery community was saddened to learn that H.R.F. Keating, author of over fifty detective novels and former president of The Detection Club, had started sleeping the big sleep. He will be missed by many, but, with the immense body of work he leaves behind, he will never stray far from our thoughts.

Keating was one of only a handful of contemporary mystery writers who managed to catch my attention, and perhaps the only one who was at his best when he wasn't attempting to write a formal detective story. The more traditionally crafted stories, from his hand, often suffer from transparent plotting and easily perceptible culprits, but excelled when he solely concentrated on the battle-of-wits between Ghote, a downtrodden Bombay detective, and his opponent – usually a person who, in one way or another, wields much power.

But he was also a noted reviewer, critiquing crime books for The Times for fifteen years, served as president on the board of several literary societies, such as the Crime Writers Association and The Detection Club, and won several prestigious prices – among them an Edgar for his first Inspector Ghote novel, The Perfect Murder (1964), and a Cartier Diamond Dagger for outstanding services to crime literature.

From the Casebook of Inspector Ghote

The best example I can give of the intellectual dueling is the very entertaining novel Inspector Ghote Goes by Train (1971), in which the long-suffering inspector finally seems to have landed himself an easy assignment: escorting an infamous confidence trickster back to Bombay, while he enjoys the air-conditioned comforts of the Calcutta Mail train, however, his traveling companion has his own ideas of a fun train ride. The result is a delightful battle-of-wits between Ghote and the legendary conman. Briefly put, a nifty and unusual crime story that lacks any detection and crimes, but just shows two men constantly trying to top one another in a struggle of wits and wills. 

Inspector Ghote Draws a Line (1979) and Under a Monsoon Cloud (1986) take a more earnest approach to the intellectual duel between the inspector and his adversary, but I have yet to read either of these books – which make it impossible for me to comment on them.

Nevertheless, he wasn't completely inept with the conventional detective story, as he demonstrated in The Body in the Billiard Room (1987) – a spoof on Agatha Christie, in which Ghote is packed off to a mountain district, unaffected by the ravages of time, to investigate the murder of a billiard marker at a well-to-do gentlemen's club. The poor inspector not only has to find a murderer in unfamiliar territory, but also has to deal with an exasperating mystery buff, who sees in him the image of "The Great Story Book Detective," and constantly tries to make him read Christie's Mrs. McGinty’s Dead. It's a diverting mystery and better plotted than most of his other orthodox detective stories I've read. Definitely recommended!

As you can see, I really enjoyed reading most of his stories. So when I heard of his passing, I decided to pull one of his novels from my stock of unread books, and actually had a hard time choosing between Filmi, Filmi, Inspector Ghote (1976) and The Murder of the Maharajah (1980), but ended up picking the former - because it featured Ghote. 

Foul Play in Tinsel Town 

Filmi, Filmi, Inspector Ghote opens with the inspector being dispatched to Talkiestan Studios, where Dhartiraj, India's favorite on-screen villain, was found crushed under a Five-K Light, and the ropes bore the tell-tale marks of being cut. It's not as ritzy as a sabotaged crystal chandelier, but hey, it got the job done. And despite that the fact that the film rogue was very popular among his peers, there's a surfeit of potential murderers with a motive to kill the beloved movie star. The list of suspects range from the fading star of Jagdish Rana, who was kicked from his comfy spot as the definitive big screen bad boy, to the popular hero Ravi Kumar, who had seemed to have a deep seethed hatred for Dhartiraj.

But the hustle and bustle of tinsel town overwhelms the timid policeman, and when he's swooned off his feet by a famous actress it really starts to affect his thinking – dreaming of the spotlight and glory that could befall him as the man who avenged Dhartiraj's death by bringing his killer to justice. The thing is, that's easier said than done, because murderers have a habit of taking a shot at getting away with their dirty deeds, and this one is helped by the unwillingness of his fellow suspects to cooperate with Ghote.

The book is a perfect showcase of Keating's strength and weaknesses as a detective writer. He vividly paints a picture of a part of modern Indian pop-culture, the world of filmi, and the story barely has a dull moment – in spite of mainly consisting of interviews conducted one after another. The suspects being questioned, like a disillusioned director and a pushy producer, are interesting enough to hold the readers attention, as well Ghote's fascinating discovery of the glitter and glamour world known as Bollywood and how tries to deal with it.

That's all great and fun, but this makes the book more a story about a detective than a detective story, since the plot is threadbare and the few clues, that actually indicate the killers guilt, are too thinly spread around – and while that doesn't make the book a prime candidate for best mystery ever written, it still has plenty to offer for fans of the series or someone who's just looking for a diverting read.

Keating was someone who tried to do something new with the detective story format, without betraying it, and while not every attempt was a howling success he should be commended for trying and staying true to the heart and soul of the genre.

We truly lost a remarkable man and writer, but for us, his readers, his lives on in his work, and Penguin Modern Classics has announced four reprints of his books: The Perfect Murder (1964), Inspector Ghote Breaks an Egg (1970), Inspector Ghote Trusts the Heart (1972) and Under a Monsoon Cloud (1986).

So grab this opportunity and read one of them in Keating's honor (or any of his other books currently residing on your to-be-read pile or local bookshop/library). 

In Memoriam: H.R.F. Keating

1926-2011

R.I.P.