detective novels – Lee Duigon

I have just read Doing Wrong, No. 20 in H.R.F. Keating’s Inspector Ghote mysteries, this one published in 1994. There would be a few more before Keating’s death, but not many.

This one is a corker.

Inspector Ghote was Columbo before Peter Falk was Columbo. Ghote works out of the Bombay C.I.D., although, over the years, his investigations have taken him all over India. Doing Wrong takes him to the Hindu holy city of Banares.

Yes, they still burn bodies on the banks of the Ganges, and throw the ashes in the river. If the deceased is too poor for a proper funeral, the body is thrown into the river as is. It is believed that the water of the Ganges has the power to wash away sins, from the dead as well as the living. Persons in search of holiness bathe in the Ganges. They also brush their teeth in it.

Ghote comes to Banares following up a clue in the murder of Mrs. Shoba Popatkar, once a personage in the Indian independence movement. He has very little to go on, and next to no support from his superiors: but Ganesh Ghote, once he has his teeth in a case, never lets go.

This time Keating tells you right up front who committed the murder, and why: a Banares politician, H.K. Verma, strangled Mrs. Popatkar to keep her from broadcasting some embarrassing information that would have ruined his hopes of being appointed a minister in the government.

So where’s the suspense? Well, did you ever have one of those nasty dreams in which you’ve committed a murder and you’re trying to escape the consequences? And the murder in the dream is a given, a fait accompli: it happened before the dream started, and you’re stuck with it.

We have H.K. Verma’s nightmarish experience as Ghote comes closer and closer to a solution to the crime. And we have Verma’s increasingly frantic attempts to rationalize the crime, to justify himself in his own mind. He searches for absolution in the Ganges. He must also deal with a bitterly ironic stroke of fate.

The narrative goes back and forth between Ghote’s point of view and Verma’s, tightly focused on the two of them. The result is suspenseful indeed.

Keating was one of a very few writers who could use dialect without distracting and exasperating the reader. Indian English is not quite the same as American English. Keating’s mastery of it is infectious–and I had better stop thinking-thinking of it only, or it will be seeping into my own writing.

For more than 30 years the Inspector Ghote series was one of the most consistently clever and entertaining mystery series around.

I think it always will be.

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Ready for some good old stuff?

In The Bachelors of Broken Hill (1950), by Arthur Upfield, a prosperous mining city in the interior of Australia is the hunting ground for some unknown person who uses cyanide–a deadly poison, but easily obtained in those days–to murder elderly bachelors: in broad daylight, and in public places. When the local police, inexperienced in such bizarre crimes, can’t crack the case, Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte (“Bony” to his friends) has to take over.

Bony, half-white, half-aboriginal, has never failed to finalize a case. He is one of the most fascinating fictional detectives ever created, on a par with Sherlock Holmes. I know, that’s easy to say, but I really mean it. Upfield wrote several dozen Bony books, from the late 1930s into the early 1960s, and all I can say is, I wish he’d written more!

Usually Bony works in the Australian Outback, a world which Arthur Upfield knew intimately, and which he excels in bringing to life for the reader. It’s as if Australia itself were a major character in these stories.

But this time Bony has to do his detecting in a city, where his special gifts seem to be inapplicable.

To complicate matters, there’s another killer on the loose–a criminally insane magician.

Now, I haven’t yet read the last two chapters, so I can’t spoil it for you by telling you how Bony solves the case. But it has been a wild ride. The mystery in hand is truly devilish: Upfield was a master of creating suspense, and in this book (as in a few others), a real sense of creepiness.

If you like mysteries, treat yourself to some of these novels. Many of them are available on amazon.com, kindle or paperback, even a few used hardbacks. Arthur Upfield was a great writer, whom Australia ought to have declared a national treasure. Thankfully, online book outlets have made him easily available to American readers. For a time there it looked like he was just going to be allowed to go out of print; but I think amazon and Alibris and the others may have saved him.

We cannot afford to lose books like this!