Great Detectives

by Otto Penzler

  I gave in to him, as you see, and that was all he needed. From that point on, the book became his book rather than mine. I managed to adhere to the format I had laid out—that it would be the story of a police investigation into a crime. The rest of the book went his way and, in fact, he even encroached on my preserve, for the book isn’t really so much the story of “a” police investigation into a crime as it is “his” investigation into a crime.

  What is interesting is that he pulled all of this off without being a soft-hearted, gentle, sympathetic, caring type of guy. He did care, that is true, but you’d have to look damned hard to find any signs of it. Most of the time he was irascible and he was dogged. He had an inferiority complex because he’d never gone past high school (in a girl’s college town yet!) and Cameron had had some higher education (either a minor college or a junior college). He and Cameron bantered, but it wasn’t always good-natured. Only Cameron dared talk back to Ford and, as a result, their barbs were sometimes sharp. In fact, at one point, as the pressures grew great, Ford really blew his stack at Cameron and it is to Cameron’s credit that he knew how to handle it.

  Thus came into being the prototype of my sequence of procedural detectives. One small aside might be made here. Ford was the father of a 16-year-old daughter, which is interesting since he was 58 himself. His wife was younger but, though I don’t know her age, I doubt that she was much younger. This means they produced their only offspring late in life. I don’t know why they had no other children nor had their child earlier. It’s a subject I never sought to, nor thought to, explore. I wasn’t doing Ford’s biography, after all, and it wasn’t relevant to the matter at hand.

  For the next few years I explored other forms of the mystery, but eventually I returned to the small-town police procedural and, when I did, I was naturally drawn to the same type of detective team. I found myself in the market for another chief of police with another detective sergeant as legman and alter ego.

  Why couldn’t Frank Ford have done the job himself? Granted, eight years had gone by, but that wouldn’t mean Ford would be eight years older. Fictional series characters don’t age at the same pace as their readers.

  Frank Ford was, in fact, considered for the job, but not seriously. He was too obviously a one-shot hero. I feared that trying to use him in a sequel, or in a series, would dilute and alter him. His charm was the fact that he wouldn’t be manipulated and I was afraid that if I forced him to go the series route, he would no longer be his own man and thus would cease to be the same man. Besides, he was best in that one case and I was loath to sully his image. A calculated, small-town police procedural would require a new man for the new role.

  The result was the very brief appearance (one book, which appeared only in England) of an interim police chief, the offspring of Frank Ford, you might say, and father of Fred Fellows, though his presence was so fleeting that his impact upon Fellows is slight, and more physical than anything else.

  This chief’s name was Amos G. Camp and he held forth in the small community of Marshton, which is the definite forerunner of Fred Fellows’s Stockford. The town has the same traits and, for all I know, might even have had much the same map—my recollection of Marshton is too vague to give any assurances on that score.

  To get back to Camp, who had a couple of cohorts in a Lieutenant Willis and a promising officer named Ken Shevlin, he was notably different from Frank Ford in appearance. While Frank was on the short side, no more than 5’9” or 5’10”, Amos Camp stood 6’4” and “tipped the scales in the neighborhood of two hundred and fifty pounds, all of it muscle.” He had sandy hair, slate-gray eyes, smoked acrid cigars, and was in his forties. This physical difference was inspired, I now remember, by the actor, whose name I do not recall, who played a sympathetic sheriff in the movie The Defiant Ones. It was that man, and the kind of sheriff he played, who came to mind when I set about contriving Ford’s successor.

  Unfortunately, neither Camp nor his circumstances had what it took to survive in the world of mystery fiction and a replacement was needed. Here, at last, came Fred Fellows, and we can now begin to identify the structure of his being.

  His physical appearance can be traced more to Camp than to Ford. He’s over six feet, just under 6’2”, I’d guess. He doesn’t weigh 250, but would be more in the 225 area, some of it flab, though not as much as he’s afraid of. He could balloon without any trouble, though, so while he’s a quixotic dieter, the kind who worries about calories all the time, drinks coffee black and avoids sweets, but never systematically goes about the problem of weight control, this probably keeps his weight reasonable.

  Fellows is between Camp and Ford in age, too, totaling about fifty-three years at the beginning of the series, but aging year by year as the series progresses. The aging, however, is more applied to his children than to him. It is desirable, in other words, not to think of Fred in terms of his age.

  As for children, there are four: Larry, Shirley, Katie, and, three years behind Katie, Peter. Fellows is a family man and though the period of his active work was late Fifties to mid-Sixties, he and his gently plump, bland wife, Cessie, do not suffer from a generation gap. In fact, when Larry marries a cute young girl named Denise, who calls him “Pops,” he’s delighted with the addition.

  What else can we say about Fred Fellows? He chews tobacco. He had nude calendar art on the wall over his desk at a time when the only nudes were on calendars. He has a close relationship with Sid Wilks, his detective sergeant. They are good friends as well as co-workers and if they don’t banter the way Ford and Cameron did, there are no knife-edges in their relationship either.

  Fellows is also mellower in manner than Ford, quieter, less animated, more relaxed, certainly more philosophical. There was something of the bantam rooster about Ford. He was a doer, not stopping to reflect, but getting the job done. Fellows shows the influence of Camp and the movie sheriff. He’s of the opinion that if one pauses to reflect, one is less apt to make mistakes. He also has a sense of humor, something totally lacking in Ford. Fellows’s humor usually illumines itself in a Lincolnesque tendency to illustrate his views or make his points with homely little stories. As a sample, one time he says: “I’m just reminded of this guy who had a BB gun he liked to play with. So one day he fired a shot into the ceiling and the whole ceiling fell in on him. At the hospital, one of the doctors asked him why he did it and he said he didn’t think the ceiling would fall in, he’d been shooting BBs into it for three years and it never happened before.”

  This trait of Fellows is totally his own. There’s no trace of it in any of his forebears. In fact, I have no idea where he got it unless from Lincoln himself.

  Lastly, Fred Fellows is an imaginative thinker whose flights of fancy often take him into what Sid Wilks calls “stratosphere stuff.” This quality was bred into Fred to enable him to cope with those problems that would resist all the scientific know-how and manpower available to him.

  Unlike Ford, who exploded on the scene with all his warts and moles, virtues and vices firmly in place, Fellows was carefully groomed to fit the town he worked in and fulfill the needs of a cop who must solve a great many difficult crimes over a good many years without running out of resources or wearing the readers’ patience thin.

  He seemed to thrive as a result and, at last reports, is still thriving.

  Inspector Ghote

  H. R. F. Keating

  GANESH V. GHOTE, PRONOUNCED GO-tay, is not the sort of arrogant, brilliant, infallible detective who fills the majority of volumes devoted to mystery fiction. Although he is good at his job as inspector in the Crime Branch of the Bombay Police Department, he gets pushed around a good deal—by his superiors and even at home by his forceful wife. But it would be a mistake to think of Ghote as a weakling. He is intelligent and, just as important, wily. Furthermore, he has a toughness which makes him able to cope with his superiors, his wife, Protima, and the villains who always seem intent upon figuratively sitting on him.

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bsp; The books about Ghote are unusual in that each is based upon a philosophical theme. The first Ghote novel, for instance, is about perfectionism. Explains Keating, the question is “whether you should strive to be perfect, or whether you should settle for the halfway, which applies in even the smallest things of life. You’re typing a sheet of paper and make one mistake; do you rip it out of the typewriter, and retype it, or do you erase the error?” The novel, called The Perfect Murder, is about—naturally—an imperfect murder; it won the British Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger as best novel of the year in 1964.

  H. R. F. Keating, 51, began his career as a journalist and keeps his hand in as a free-lance, often book reviewing for The Times of London, where he lives with his wife, Sheila Mitchell, an accomplished actress.

  Inspector Ghote

  by H. R. F. Keating

  IT IS BIO-DATA YOU are wanting? Bio-data on Inspector Ghote? Well, well, no one here at Bombay Crime Branch is knowing all that much about the fellow. Not at all. He is meant to be working here, but all the time no one is ever seeing him. Only from those books which that writerwallah in England is always publishing am I at all knowing that Ghote is a colleague of mine only.

  They are saying that one time they are making a TV film about the fellow here, and he is supposed to be seen in that. But no one in Bombay has witnessed any such film, so what I am always wondering is: is the fellow a real top-notch CID inspector at all? Sometimes I am thinking he must be no more than an idea in that writer fellow’s head. And I was reading in Times of India that this Mr. Keating had not been to India even, not until he came here in 1975 only. But he had begun to put out those books in 1964. Well then, I am asking you: how could he know what like was the life of a CIDwallah? Was he for ever reading books about India? And watching films and television also? Did he obtain even such magazines as Illustrated Weekly of India on regular basis? Well, I am unable to say. But there can be no doubt at all that all this constitutes suspicious circumstances. Isn’t it?

  And I am not at all sure how much this Mr. Keating is knowing about Ghote even. Why, in the first books he was writing—I have gone through them all because I am wanting to find out just exactly what this fellow Ghote is doing in Crime Branch when there are questions of relative seniority arising—well, in those first books it is altogether clear that this Mr. Keating is not even knowing what are Ghote’s forenames. He is called “Inspector Ghote” all the time. And then one day all of a sudden we are learning that he is named Ganesh, and not until Case No. 10, wherein he investigates certain nefarious activities in the Bombay film studios, do we find that the “V” of his second name is standing for Vinayak. Well, well, Ganesha is the god of wisdom, but I am often wondering just how much of wisdom this fellow Ghote has. And, please to remember, Ganesha is the god of success also. Well, I am telling you, a lot of bloody help from above this Ghote seems to be needing in his cases. A lot of bloody help.

  But, I am telling you also, I am thinking that this notable British author is not knowing what Ghote looks like any more than any of his fellow inspectors in Crime Branch, who are always just missing seeing him round some corner or other. If what I am all along suspecting is right, Mr. Keating in the beginning saw a pair of shoulders only, thin and bony shoulders with a burden always upon them. I am believing he saw no more than that, and even now when we have nine-ten of Ghote’s cases I do not believe the fellow altogether knows what like are Ghote’s feet. And sometimes Ghote is having a mustache and looking very like that Pakistani actor known by the name of Zia Mohyeddin, and sometimes he is not having a mustache at all.

  Well, I am hearing that this notable British Mr. Keating when he was coming to Bombay at last is saying that one day a fellow is asking to see him at Taj Hotel where he is then resident and he is saying that he is a private inquiry agent and former Sub-Inspector of the Bombay Force. And Mr. Keating is alleging that when he saw this fellow he said to himself, “He is the spitting image of Inspector Ghote.” Well, well. That is as may be. But there are still matters to be cleared up.

  For example, how old is this fellow Ghote? There is a great deal of conflicting evidence on that. He is reported to have a son known by the name of Ved who seems now to be about twelve years of age. But he has grown from five years to twelve only during the whole eleven-twelve years of Ghote’s cases. And I am asking: where is the arithmetic in that? And, after conducting scrupulous examination of every part and parcel of the evidence, I am still not at all in a position to give an accurate account of Ghote’s physical characteristics in accordance with the methods of Dr. Hans Gross, the German criminologist who is frequently referred to as a be-all and end-all by Ghote himself. If you are asking me, I am believing that there are as many pictures of Ghote and as many ages for him as there are readers of those books of Mr. Keating. And I am wondering: is this a plot only? Is the said Mr. Keating deliberately withholding information? And, if so, is there a case to be brought under Indian Penal Code Section 179 “Refusing to answer a public servant authorised to question” or under Section 202 “Concealing evidence”?

  And there is the question of Ghote’s wife also. With her name of Protima. Well, that is a very beautiful name, I am granting, and altogether suitable for a beautiful and elegant woman. But it seems to me that Mr. Keating could not at all have been knowing that this is a Bengali name. But then all of a sudden he is making out that Ghote after all married a Bengali lady. Well, I am wondering only how that came to happen. No explanation have we had.

  So is it after all true what I am hearing that Mr. Keating once said that while he was sitting there in his armchair in his house in London thinking about how he would write a book about India since he was not able to write any that were thoroughly pleasing to American publishers but were altogether too English, that while he was sitting there, and perhaps chewing a paan which his servant had brought, I am not knowing, suddenly there came strolling into the room—or was it into his head only?—this fellow Ghote. Only, if what I am hearing is true, then the fellow’s name was not then at all Ghote but Ghosh only. Well, as everybody who is at all understanding India must know, that is a Bengali name only. It would be like saying that that so famous Commissaire Maigret of the Paris police force was called all the time Boris Ivanovich. Well, well, I am not at all knowing.

  But, if you are asking me, Ghote was not at all intended to have a career in our Branch. No, no. Just one case only this Mr. Keating intended to describe. But then some sort of prize was given to Ghote, some sort of a Crime Writers’ Association Golden Dagger. And that was the year that I myself was having my promotion to inspector rank when I had nabbed the gang responsible for the theft of seven hundred and twenty-six bicycles. And not a word was written by Mr. Keating about that.

  But he is altogether a damn cautious fellow about what he is writing about Ghote also. What I am suspecting is that he does not want anybody to meet with Inspector Ghote or otherwise they might be discovering that the fellow is a fraud only. So he is never telling just where his office is and just where is his house or anything like that. I mean, first of all Ghote was said to be living in a Government Quarter house. Well, it is well known that for the Bombay police there are no such houses. In Delhi there are. But in Bombay, no. But then, after this notable writer from U.K. visits Bombay, all of a sudden he is seeming to say that Ghote after all stays in a flat like every other inspector in the Branch. Yet he is cunning also. He is never quite saying it is flat. “Home” only he is saying. And that could be flat or it could be house. And that, I am saying, is altogether unfair when an officer is attempting to make investigation into this chap Ghote’s present whereabouts. I am after all wanting to give the fellow a clean chit only. I have absolutely no malafide intent in the matter, I am assuring you. But all the same I am wondering whether the fellow is persistently doing the bunk in office hours. Otherwise why is it I have not found?

  Sometimes I am wondering even if the fellow has obtained extended leave for the purpose of visiting Ameri
ca. He is already U.K.-returned, you know. And that was a very very bad business. There are a great many officers senior in rank to Ghote, but he is the fellow who is sent to investigate some sort of a case of missing peacocks in London. Well, I am certain he is planning to make a trip to U.S.A. also. And that is another thing. I am having a cousin of a cousin in U.K., and he is telling that he has heard on the radio there a certain Inspector Ghote visiting the country to act against smugglers of immigrants. Yet nothing whatsoever has been put about that in these books that Mr. Keating has written. So what I am asking now is: are there two of this chap Ghote? Is it that one of them does what is written in the books and another altogether is carrying out those activities that are reported on the wireless waves only? One thing is certain: it is all a damn mysterious business.

  And this is something else. Why is it, I am always considering, that whether it is on the radio or whether it is in these books, the chap Ghote always and invariably has a hundred percent success? I am having a very good record myself, none better among any of the inspectors of Crime Branch, but I have had cases where in the end I have had to admit total and utter defeat. “Left open upon the file.” That is the best I have been able to do.

  But this Ghote fellow, never one single failure. But it is not as if he appears to have very very good qualifications of a personal nature to be solving cases. Not at all. He is most persistent, that I am admitting. And he has learnt his police procedures. He is shrewd sometimes also, agreed. But nevertheless he is always being exploited and put upon by rascals and miscreants of all sorts. And he seems also to be in a state of holy terror of his superior officers. And they themselves have an attitude of altogether very little trust in Ghote, and I am sure that such views are very much justified. They are after all senior officers. So why is it then that despite all and sundry Ghote ends up every time successful? Why is that? Is it because he has to do so for the purposes of literature only? Or is it because the gods are wishing to show us that Good always in the end must triumph? Well, if that is the case, it is frankly bloody damn unfair.