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H. R. F. Keating | |
|---|---|
 Keating in 1981 | |
| Born | Henry Reymond Fitzwalter Keating (1926-10-31)31 October 1926 St. Leonards-on-Sea,Sussex, England |
| Died | 27 March 2011(2011-03-27) (aged 84) London, England[1] |
| Resting place | Mortlake Crematorium |
| Other names | Harry Keating Evelyn Hervey |
| Alma mater | Trinity College Dublin |
| Notable work | The Perfect Murder (1964) |
| Spouse | |
| Children | 4 |
| Website | hrfkeating |
Henry Reymond Fitzwalter Keating (31 October 1926 – 27 March 2011) was an Englishcrime fiction writer most notable for his series of novels featuringInspector Ghote of the Bombay CID.[2]
Keating, known as "Harry" to friends and family, was born inSt. Leonards-on-Sea,Sussex and typed out his first story at the age of eight. He was educated atMerchant Taylor's School in London and laterTrinity College Dublin.[3] In 1956 he moved to London to work as a journalist onThe Daily Telegraph. He was the crime books reviewer forThe Times for 15 years. He was chairman of theCrime Writers' Association (CWA) (1970–71), chairman of theSociety of Authors (1983–84) and president of theDetection Club (1985–2000). He was a fellow of theRoyal Society of Literature.
He received theGeorge N. Dove Award in 1995. In 1996 the CWA awarded him theCartier Diamond Dagger for outstanding services to crime literature. He also wrote screenplays, was a reviewer and edited the essay collectionAgatha Christie: First Lady of Crime. He died in London on 27 March 2011, aged 84.
On his 80th birthday in 2006, members of the Detection Club honoured him with an anthology,Verdict of Us All, published byCrippen & Landru. He lived inLondon with his wife, the actressSheila Mitchell, until his death in 2011, aged 84. He was survived by his wife, four children, and nine grandchildren.[3]
Keating's first four novels were published byGollancz. With his fifth novel,Death of a Fat God (1963), he moved toCollins Crime Club, with whom he stayed for the next twenty years.
Inspector Ganesh Ghote is aninspector in the Bombay (Mumbai) Police who appeared in twenty-six novels. The first wasThe Perfect Murder (1964), which won a Crime Writers' AssociationGold Dagger Award and was nominated for anEdgar Award. It was later made into afilm byMerchant Ivory. Keating intended Ghote's final appearance to be in the novelBreaking and Entering (2000), but brought the character back inInspector Ghote's First Case (2008) andA Small Case for Inspector Ghote (2009).
Keating did not visit India until ten years after he started writing about it.[4] In the introduction toInspector Ghote, His Life and Crimes, Keating stated that he was contemplating setting his next detective novel in India because "American publishers had rejected my previous four titles as being 'too British.'" He did research (he later acknowledged, "from books, from the occasional Indian art-film featuring the city [Bombay], from scraps of friends' talk, from TV glimpses, and from the pages of the Sunday edition of theTimes of India, which I had begun to take"[5]) and consulted with a friend that he described as "an Englishman just back from Bombay." He had intended the first book as a one-off, butThe Perfect Murder "unexpectedly won the Golden Dagger award for 1964, and an Edgar Allan Poe award in America where, yes, it did get published." As Keating describes in the introduction toInspector Ghote, His Life and Crimes: "...one morning, sometime in 1974, I got a letter from Air India saying they had heard of this author writing about Bombay without ever having seen the sub-continent, so would I like a flight there in exchange for whatever publicity there was to be made?" He accepted and landed in Bombay on 12 October 1974, spending three weeks there.
In the mid-1980s Keating published three novels withWeidenfeld under the pseudonymEvelyn Hervey.
Harriet Martens is a detectivechief inspector who earns the nickname "The Hard Detective" because of the tough image that she adopts to survive in the masculine world of UK policing. This toughness inspired her to start a "Stop the Rot" campaign that successfully reduced local crime but angered some violent criminals to the extent that they started murdering her officers. In the second book, she falls in love with a fellow officer while investigating the murder of the UK's top tennis player. With her job under threat, she fights to prove her worth in the third book.
In 1978 Keating publishedA Long Walk to Wimbledon, ascience-fiction novel about a man trekking across a ruinedLondon to save his estranged wife.
In the 1990s Keating wrote several novels about UK police detectives whose human weaknesses adversely affect their work. The first of these wasThe Rich Detective (1993) in which Detective Inspector Bill Sylvester of South Mercia Police investigates an anonymous allegation that a local antiques dealer is murdering old ladies after persuading them to change their wills in his favour.
InThe Bad Detective (1996) Detective Sergeant Jack Stallworthy is a corrupt police officer who is planning his retirement to Devon when a businessman offers him ownership of a hotel on a tropical island in return for stealing an incriminating file from the Fraud Investigations Office at police headquarters.
In September 1999Flambard Press published his verse novelJack, the Lady Killer.
His guide toWriting Crime Fiction (1986) was based on his analysis of the development of the genre from the 1920s to the 1990s. It includes guidance on fictional structure, the plot and its characters, and on submitting a script to publishers.
Partial bibliography
