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BOOKS
Not
a Perfect Murder
A weak
link in a great crime series
By
Ashok Banker
BREAKING
AND ENTERING
By H.R.F. Keating
Macmillan
Price: £16.99
Pages: 266
Another
one of the delicious ironies of life: an English crime novelist found
fame in the US with a detective novel set in India. The novel, The
Perfect Murder, later made into a film of the same name by Merchant-Ivory,
achieved what Henry Reymond Fitzwalter Keating's other English detective
novels could not-transatlantic sales and critical acclaim. Almost 30 years
and as many novels later, Keating's Inspector Ghote series occupies a
permanent corner of the large, comforting, country manor of the English
detective novel.
Keating's
latest, Breaking and Entering, is not the best Ghote novel. But
it's the best to start with if you're just discovering the series which
he began without having visited India. Just as another British crime writer,
James Hadley Chase, began writing thrillers set in the US without having
visited the country.
The sense
of contemporary Mumbai life-the housewives watching a daily soap, the
city's name change, the humid October heat-remain the most endearing feature
of any Ghote novel. In a city largely abandoned by Indian writers in English
barring the occasional Rushdie, it's always pleasing to read familiar
sights and sounds in fiction.
But despite
the few instances of local detail, the Ghote novels are not realistic
crime fiction. They are instead novels of manners with detective plots
in the tradition of the "cozies" and "armchair mysteries"
that continue to be so hugely popular in America. 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 and 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
pulp 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 bhasha is relegated to dialogue.
Breaking
and Entering is about two separate criminal cases, one, a series of
jewellery thefts, the other, a "locked-room" murder. And Keating
pulls out old aces from a worn sleeve: the baffling murder in a high-security
bungalow and the reappearance of Ghote's Swedish friend, among other clues,
underline the story's resemblance to the first and best Ghote novel. But
sadly, this one doesn't quite live up to the debut freshness of that novel.
Still, it's
hard to dislike it. Short, pithy, immensely readable if you come to it
without bias, it's a pastime romp through a westerner's notion of what
contemporary Mumbai 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 fiction, you'll have to pick up Keating's English mysteries,
notably the Rich Detective, Bad Detective series. Mumbai still
awaits a truly great detective series to explore the city's unique beauty,
charm and sleaze. Ghote was just one attempt, the only commercially successful
one. Surely our great brood of Indo-Anglian writers can do better?
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