Not the Perfect Murder: HRF Keating’s Breaking and Entering

This review first appeared in India Today, several years ago.

What I didn’t mention in the review, as it didn’t seem relevant, was that I had met Keating a few years earlier.

In fact, he had recommended me strongly to a British literary agent who flew down to Mumbai to sign me up, convinced (based on her reading of Vertigo and my other books) that I was going to be the Next Big Thing.

As it turned out, I didn’t become the Next Big Anything. Partly because she expected me to produce a crime novel and it took me a long while to realize that I just wasn’t interested in the structure and limitations of a generic crime story – what did interest me were the realistic details, especially of life in urban India, as you can see in my novels Vertigo and Byculla Boy.

Anyway, to make (another) long story short, the agent later retired, and I went on to write my Ramayana series and signed on with another agent. This one expected me to write formula fantasy fiction for an American readership, again something I wasn’t in the least interested in doing.

But to come back to Keating. He was very warm and endearingly English, hugely encouraging – he praised my books highly in every interview he gave in India at the time – and gave me a much-needed morale boost at one of the low ebbs in my writing career. (Come to think of it, most of my writing career was just low ebbs.) I blessed him for that, even if the agent he recommended me to didn’t work out for me, and I wish him well wherever he is now.

That meeting with him was one of the only interactions with another practising writer I’ve ever had, and it helped me believe that it was possible for someone, even someone like me, to make a living at this precarious profession.

I didn’t let any of that affect my writing of this review though. I’m like that. You can be my best friend, but if I have to write about you, well, sorry, I’m going to call it like I see it. And it mostly won’t be pretty, but it’ll be tough and fair. Better than soft and false, right?

The only thing I don’t stand by anymore is that last line. I have no intention of writing more crime fiction, regardless of how well it sells or gets reviewed. I simply don’t have the kind of mind that can shape a story to fit genre formulas.

What’s more, shaping any story to fit any kind of structural expectation, in my honest opinion, is a crime in itself. Which is perhaps why I no longer read much crime fiction, or respect it very much.

BREAKING AND ENTERING
By H.R.F. Keating
Macmillan
266 pages
Hardback
£16.99

In one of the delicious ironies of life, an English crime novelist found fame in the USA with a detective novel set in India.

The novel was The Perfect Murder, later made into a film of the same name by Merchant Ivory, and it achieved what Henry Reymond Fitzwalter Keating’s other English detective novels could not: transatlantic sales and critical acclaim.

Almost thirty years and as many novels later, the Inspector Ghote series now occupies a permanent corner of the large comforting country manor of the English detective novel.

Breaking and Entering is not the best Ghote novel.

But it’s the best to start with if you’re just discovering the series. Keating began the series without having visited India just as another British crime writer, James Hadley Chase, began
writing thrillers set in America without having visited there. But, like Chase, Keating did in time visit India, and brought back armloads of detail and local colour to festoon later novels in the series.

The sense of contemporary Mumbai life – the housewives watching a daily soap, the city’s name change, the humid October heat – remains the most endearing feature of any Ghote novel. In a city largely abandoned by Indian English writers barring the occasional Rushdie, it’s always pleasing to see familiar sights and sounds used in fiction.

But despite these few instances of local detail, the Ghote novels are not realistic crime fiction.

This has always been the chief cause of dismay to any Indian reader. They are rather more novels of manners with detective plots. In the tradition of the ‘cozies’ and ‘armchair mysteries’ that continue to stay so hugely popular in the USA.

Instead of the English manor or country club, Ghote prowls Mumbai thoroughfares. Instead of eccentric inbred English aristocrats, he encounters eccentric inbred Parsi socialites, gossip columnists, fraudulent jewellers. Beneath the descriptions of dusty roads and ever-so-slightly tweaked ‘Indian’ names – Ajmani, Latika, Dinkarrao – this is a very English novel.

Keating’s by-now irritatingly familiar attempt to capture the broken-English patois of Ganesh Ghote is another deterrent. This kind of patter is bad enough in the juvenile pulps of authors like Anurag Mathur and the poppish new breed of Hinglish films like Bombay Boys and Hyderabad Blues. It’s painful to trudge through pages of internal monologue that try hard to amuse and entertain Western readers.

Thankfully, the narration quickly settles into a more readable style and the tapori baasha is relegated to dialogue. This comic device, one of the most-admired qualities of the series abroad, has not aged well.

Breaking and Entering is about two separate criminal cases, one a series of jewellery thefts, the other a ‘locked-room’ murder. Keating is pulling out old aces from a worn sleeve: The baffling murder in a locked high-security bungalow, the reappearance of Ghote’s Swedish friend and other clues underline the story’s resemblance to the first and best Ghote novel. But sadly, B&E doesn’t quite live up to the first debutante freshness of that novel.

Still, it’s hard to dislike this novel. Short, pithy, immensely readable if you come to it without expectations, it’s a pastime romp through a Westerner’s notion of contemporary Bombay life must be like. It’s a reasonably amusing detective mystery too. Don’t expect too much and you’ll come away mildly entertained. For better crime novels, you’ll have to go to Keating’s English mysteries, notably the Rich Detective, Bad Detective series.

Bombay still awaits a truly worthy detective series – or several of them – to explore the city’s unique beauty, charm and sleaze. Ghote was a worthy attempt, and certainly the only commercially successful one abroad. Now, what we need is a detective series that Indians will enjoy and buy in great numbers.

Even if I damn well have to write it myself.