Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
Author’s Note: His Life and Crimes
One: The Test
Two: The Miracle Baby
Three: The Not So Fly Fisherman
Four: The River Man
Five: Inspector Ghote and the Noted British Author
Six: The Wicked Lady
Seven: The Cruel Inspector Ghote
Eight: Murder Must Not At All Advertise, Isn’t It?
Nine: The All-Bad Hat
Ten: Hello, Hello, Inspector Ghote
Eleven: Nil By Mouth
Twelve: A Present for Santa Sahib
Thirteen: The Purloined Parvati and Other Artefacts
Fourteen: Light Coming
INSPECTOR GHOTE, HIS LIFE AND CRIMES
H. R. F. Keating
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First published in Great Britain in 1989 by Hutchinson.
This eBook edition first published in 2020 by Severn House Digital,
an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited.
Copyright © 1989 by H. R. F. Keating.
Introduction copyright © 2020 by Vaseem Khan.
The right of H. R. F. Keating to be identified as the author of this work and the right of Vaseem Khan to be identified as the author of the introduction has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-0401-1 (e-book)
Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.
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INTRODUCTION
Sitting on my bookshelf in my east London study is a twenty-year-old and somewhat dog-eared copy of The Perfect Murder. Some of the pages are marked by my own all but illegible scribbles, others are crinkled by a combination of damp and rainwater; not just any rain, mind you, but honest-to-goodness monsoon rain. I bought the book from a roadside seller while living in Mumbai in my twenties, the sort of grinning, roadside sprite that is as much in evidence in H.R.F. Keating’s 1960s vision of India as he was in the India I found myself in. I’d gone there in 1997 to work as a management consultant, and ended up spending ten wonderful years ‘in-country’. My parents hailed from the subcontinent but I’d grown up in Thatcher’s Britain – all I knew of India came from hazy memories handed down to me by my father (he’d been unceremoniously shunted across the newly-created border to Pakistan as a child during Partition) and bits and pieces I’d gleaned from Bollywood movies.
The India that I discovered was a nation on the cusp of transformation, a country beginning the journey from a semi-industrialised agrarian economy – the post-colonial India that Keating introduced to us decades earlier and that had largely stagnated since – to the status, today, of superpower-in-waiting. A country of swamis and snake charmers – as it had always been – but now, increasingly, a country of call-centres and coffee shops, of shopping malls and software firms, of MTV and McDonald’s. A country that Inspector Ghote would find both recognisable and wholly beyond his imagining.
By the time I returned to the UK, a decade later, I had already decided that I would encapsulate those incredible memories of India into a novel. The result was The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra, the first in my Baby Ganesh Agency series. These crime stories, featuring a policeman forced into early retirement from the Mumbai police service and subsequently compelled to ‘adopt’ a one-year-old baby elephant, are my attempt to chronicle the tumultuous landscape of the India that I observed first-hand. Five novels and two novellas in the series later, I can admit that these tales of the subcontinent owe a debt to H.R.F. Keating’s Inspector Ghote series.
Back when I was casting around for a suitable template upon which to base The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra, my eye alighted on that old copy of The Perfect Murder. I had already had the idea of a policeman who inherits a baby elephant, but I was seeking inspiration that such a work – a crime novel set on the subcontinent – might find an audience. The modern publishing industry was not prone to experimentation, or so my investigations at the time informed me.
As I reread Keating’s novel and recalled the success that his series had enjoyed, I was emboldened. Two years later I completed my manuscript and whizzed it off to a small selection of agents. The rest, as they say, is history.
My protagonist, Inspector Ashwin Chopra, could not be more different to Inspector Ghote. Whereas Ghote is a timid, sometimes obsequious fellow, often forced to bend to the prevailing winds of authority, Chopra is a rigid, bristly-moustachioed man, unfailingly honest, and intractably unyielding. And yet in their DNA we find a common gene – an unwavering commitment to that dark flame that flickers so elusively on the subcontinent – justice. For India is a place where justice is often at the mercy of those with wealth and power. This did not sit well with Ghote, and neither does it sit well with Chopra.
Both Keating and I set out to bring to life these two policemen and the city that they inhabit – Bombay/Mumbai – India’s city of dreams. Yet the respective roads that we travelled to do so could not have been more different. I spent ten years living and working in India; Keating only visited India for the first time a decade after The Perfect Murder was published.
That being the case, one might rightly ask why he chose the subcontinent as his muse in the first place? The answer: he picked up an atlas, flicked through it, and randomly chanced upon a map of India. From such moments of serendipity are legends born.
The novel that Keating subsequently wrote was published in 1964 and entitled The Perfect Murder. It featured Inspector Ganesh Ghote (pronounced Goh-té) of what was then known as the Bombay crime branch, a detective of considerable resourcefulness and tenacity. Ghote is not your typical western policeman. There is little of the maverick about him, no melodrama, no bitter divorces in his past (he is dedicated to his wife Protima), no hard-charging, hard-drinking machismo. He is a minor cog within a vast engine of bureaucracy and at the same time accepts this and chafes against it. He is set above the common man – by virtue of his uniform – and yet condemned to forever belong to the lower echelons of that vast stratified populace that gives India such colour and depth. Time and again in these immensely readable novels we see Ghote at the mercy of bombastic senior officers, villainous landlords and wealthy industrialists. In the face of abuse, obstacles and evil machinations, Ghote remains undeterred, finding his way to resolution in every case through a combination of understated intellect and quiet bloody-mindedness. When asked about the genesis of his seminal character, Keating would later reply, ‘Inspector Ghote came to me in a single flash: I pictured him exactly as he was, transposed as it were by some magic arc from Bombay to London. It was a tremendous piece of luck really, because I don’t think Inspector Ghote will now ever die. At least he’ll liv
e as long as I do.’
Prophetic words. The Perfect Murder has met with enduring success. Upon publication it won the Crime Writers’ Association’s Gold Dagger in the UK and claimed an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America. Keating was on his way. And after twenty-five wonderful books and a short story collection, Inspector Ghote has joined the pantheon of great sleuths: Holmes, Poirot, Maigret. In his own way, Ghote has that shimmering of Golden Age stardust about him.
The first Ghote arrived more than half a century ago. The world has changed since then and literary sensibilities have moved with the times. Today, controversies abound under the banner of ‘cultural appropriation’, some justified, others perhaps trumpeted beyond the merits of the case by vested interests. Seasoned literary commentators and social media trolls alike are quick to pronounce judgment on writers they feel have not earned the right to depict a particular lived experience. No doubt they would make much of the fact that H.R.F. Keating, by his own admission, knew very little about India when he began researching these novels. His portrayals of India and Indians might offend some, an example of what they might term post-colonial hubris.
I think this is missing the point. That was a different era, with different dynamics at work. Yes, there will be some who find offence merely in the fact that a middle-aged white man who had never been to India should achieve literary acclaim for novels set in the country. Personally, I believe that writers must have the licence to write that which inspires them. Whilst diversity and cultural authenticity in publishing is something I fervently believe in – for obvious reasons – I will also stand by the right of authors to be authors, that is, to journey on those fantastical oceans of the imagination that make writing such an enjoyable endeavour. For me the key to all such quasi-moral quandaries is whether or not an author has treated his subject matter with respect and empathy. And in his treatment of the subcontinent and its people Keating did more than simply create a series of intriguing crime novels. He brought the India of that time – in all its grit and glory – to the attention of the wider world.
We only have to look at how appreciative Indian readers themselves were of his portrayal.
In a 1981 article for India Today (updated in 2014), Sunil Sethi tells the story of Keating’s third visit to Bombay. He is mildly astonished when a young woman, a fan of his books, approaches him to express her admiration. Keating, Sethi tells us, can’t quite believe the reception he received in India: ‘There you are quietly writing away at your desk, and you produce this little book. Your wife likes it, but she’s an interested party. Your agent approves, but he’s also an interested party. Then you come 5,000 miles from home, and people stop you on street-corners to tell you how much they love reading your books. Isn’t it wonderful?’
Of course, the country has changed dramatically since then. I wonder what Keating would make of this modern India? And what would modern Indians make of him and his work? More importantly, how would Ghote fare? I have a feeling that the inspector, a beacon of decency in a sometimes indecent world, would find himself quite at home as India continues its struggle to undo millennia of entrenched social attitudes: corruption, inequality, nepotism, and the debilitating effects of the caste system.
Ultimately, as a lifelong crime reader and now a relatively seasoned writer in the genre, I believe that there is nothing so likeable in the annals of crime fiction as an honourable detective. And in Ghote we find just such a man, a man for the times in which we live.
Vaseem Khan
London, 2020
AUTHOR’S NOTE
His Life and Crimes
Inspector Ghote came to life one day in 1963. I was sitting in my study, in the red armchair by the window – I have told this story so many times that some of it must be true – reading a geography book. I had decided that my next detective novel was to take place in India, a country I had never set foot in, and I was hard at work mugging up some facts.
Up until that moment I was convinced that my reason for taking this odd and even hazardous step was a strictly commercial one. American publishers had rejected my previous four titles as being ‘too British’. So how to avoid that stigma, and enter the lush transatlantic pastures? India seemed one answer, especially as I had had it in mind to write a crime story that would be somewhat of a commentary on the problem of perfectionism, and one of the few notions I had about India was that things there were apt to be rather imperfect. Good symbolic stuff.
Then, out of nowhere, into my head there came this man. Or some parts of him. A faintly worried face. Certainly, a pair of bony shoulders. A certain naïvety, which should enable him to ask the questions about the everyday life around him to which my potential readers might want answers. And he also brought with him a name: ‘Inspector Ghosh’. Oh, gosh, he would keep saying, wide-eyed.
It was only when I sent the outline of my Inspector’s adventure to a friend, an Englishman just back from Bombay, that I learnt that Ghosh is a Bengali name. It would be as unsuitable for a Bombay detective, at the other side of the Indian sub-continent, as Ivan Ivanovitch would be for a Parisian sleuth. He suggested the similar, but appropriate Maharashtrian name of Ghote. So, from birth we had advanced to christening or, more correctly, to the naam-karana, the name-giving ceremony.
At that point, however, I saw Ghote’s life as being a short one, a single book’s span. My speciality in 1963 was detective novels without a running hero, but with in each a different, more or less exotic background. There had been a coach-and-four trip, Zen (if in an English country house bleakly devoted to further education), the playing of croquet and a provincial opera venture. I saw India as just one more in that series. But the book, called of course from that running-thread of perfectionism The Perfect Murder, unexpectedly won the Gold Dagger award for 1964, and an Edgar Allan Poe award in America where, yes, it did get published. Ghote was granted an indefinite extension of life.
So in 1966 he underwent Inspector Ghote’s Good Crusade, in which he investigated the murder of an American philanthropist, was harassed by a fearful squad of Bombay street urchins, was grossly deceived when he gave all he had saved for a refrigerator to the apparently poverty-stricken ‘paramour’ of a fisherman and learnt (alongside, I hope, the reader) that giving is not always a straightforward business. He also solved the case. This was something he was contracted with his public to do, and because of that I was beginning to realise he would have to lose a little of his naïvety. Or, rather, he would have to develop an inner toughness and shrewdness not at first apparent.
I once heard the distinguished and delightfully reticent novelist, V. S. Naipaul, pronounce – in answer to a television interviewer who had asked what was the most important quality a novelist needed – the one word ‘Luck’. I think he was right. Certainly, it was my immense luck that the man who entered my head that day as I sat in my armchair proved to be a person with enough of myself in him to be able to turn this way and that, confronted by new aspects of life, and find new things in himself to match up to them.
So, in 1967 it was Inspector Ghote Caught in Meshes, when he looked at life as a tugging of different loyalties and became involved for the first and only time in something approaching the espionage novel. In 1968 it was Inspector Ghote Hunts the Peacock, where he came to London and discovered not only who had murdered a distant relation of his wife, a young woman known as ‘the Peacock’, but also the pluses and minuses that go with a sense of pride (Pride = peacock. Geddit?).
It was in the course of this book that I hit on a nasty little snag which I had in my innocence – or indeed sheer ignorance – created for myself. Needing a name for the wife I found that Ghote had, or had to have, while writing The Perfect Murder, I had chosen at random the pretty ‘Protima’. Only to be told later by one of the kindly readers who send me what I call ‘But’ letters – Dear Mr Keating, I much enjoyed … But I must point out an error … – that Protima is a Bengali name. So in Hunts the Peacock I boldly stated that Maharashtrian Ghote
had, unusually, married a Bengali.
It was twenty years later, while I was writing the script for the film of The Perfect Murder with the director, Zafar Hai, that I learnt there is in fact a Maharashtrian version of the name, Pratima. So in the film Ghote’s wife is a Maharashtrian, as different from a Bengali as Spaniard from German, and is deliciously played as such by Ratna Pathak, the wife of Naseeruddin Shah, our star. So is the film-Ghote not the book-Ghote? Knotty philosophical point. Certainly, in Naseer Shah’s performance he is very much the Ghote I had in mind. Or perhaps the Ghote I had inside, because Naseer said once that he had been given the clue to the man by looking in the eyes of his creator.
But there is a complication, or even two: a radio-Ghote and a TV-Ghote. In 1972 I was asked (I think) to write a radio play about Ghote and produced Inspector Ghote and the All-Bad Man, followed by Inspector Ghote Makes A Journey and Inspector Ghote and the River Man. Feeling with the latter that I could not see the situation sufficiently without being able to describe its setting as well as entering into Ghote’s head, I began to write in narrative form before making it into radio dialogue. That torso tale, completed, is one of the stories here. In the second play I had Ghote coming to London a second time, as a planted stowaway among a party of illegal immigrants; and in a television play I wrote in 1983 (a semi-pilot for an abortive series), Ghote came to London yet again as a paying guest in the home of an ancient British Raj couple.
There was, too, an earlier television appearance in a version of Hunts the Peacock written by the Irish playwright, Hugh Leonard (who kept Ghote mercifully as he is in the book), with my hero acted by Zia Moyheddin. (Incidentally, he gave Ghote a moustache, which he just has in Inspector Ghote Goes By Train, but which he has never had at all by the time of the following books.) Now did he, my Ghote, book-Ghote, come to London more than once? His other visits certainly do not seem to be in my mind when I embark on the business – absurdly daring if you let yourself think about it – of holding in my head that whole different world in which there is a person called Ghote who has a wife called Protima, perhaps Pratima, and a son called Ved.
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