Now Only Memories Remain

(Editor’s note: UK crime novelist and scholar H.R.F. Keating died on March 27 at age 84, but it wasn’t until today that he was finally laid to rest. His friend and fellow author, Mike Ripley, was among the mourners and brings us this brief report on the event.)

The funeral took place today of British crime writer H.R.F. “Harry” Keating, at Mortlake Crematorium in west London, on the banks of the river Thames.

Baroness P.D. James gave the opening tribute, recounting her friendship with Harry and praising not only his Inspector Ghote as one of the “great creations of detective fiction,” but also his work as a critic and reviewer of crime novels and the many books he wrote outside the crime genre.

Family tributes came from his widow, Sheila (who wore Harry’s Cartier Diamond Dagger pin in his memory), as well as their children: Simon, Bryony, Piers, and Hugo.

Many colleagues from The Detection Club and the Crime Writers’ Association attended, including Margaret Yorke, Simon Brett, Peter Lovesey, Donald Rumbelow, and Andrew Taylor.

At numerous times during the remembrance service, reference was made to Harry’s pleasure at being seen as something of an eccentric. To celebrate this, those attending were asked to sing not a dirge or a hymn, but Harry’s favorite Christmas Carol, “Good King Wenceslas”!

Gentleman and Crime-Fiction Scholar

My feature-ish obituary of British novelist H.R.F. “Harry” Keating appears this morning at the Kirkus Reviews Web site. It begins:

British novelist and books critic H.R.F. (Henry Reymond Fitzwalter) Keating--who died last week at age 84--provided an excellent contradiction to that all-too-familiar instruction, “Write what you know.” He knew next to nothing about India when, in the early 1960s, he began penning a mystery series set on the subcontinent.

I think the piece turned out pretty well, though if I’d actually known Keating, I probably could have brought something extra to it. Nonetheless, I think it’s worth checking out, when you have some free time. Click here to read the full posting, and leave a comment, if you have any thoughts on Keating or his books that you’d like to share.

It Was the Best of Crimes: Critics’ Choice

In the summer of 2000, British critics H.R.F. “Harry” Keating and Mike Ripley were commissioned by the London Times newspaper to conduct a survey of the best crime novels (mysteries/spy stories/thrillers) of the 20th century, choosing one per year, 1900-1999. This, said the two critics, couldn’t be done so neatly, but what they would do was select 100 books to represent a century which began with the recall of Sherlock Holmes and ended with the death of Inspector Morse.

In the end, Ripley cheated a bit by nominating 101 titles to include Keating’s own The Perfect Murder from 1964, which modesty had forbidden its author from suggesting.

The survey, with a brief justification for each title, was published in a 16-page supplement to The Times on Saturday, September 30, 2000. The basic list of titles selected is republished here for the first time as a tribute to author and scholar Harry Keating, who died earlier this week at age 84. (Titles and years are as when published in the UK.)

1902: The Hound of the Baskervilles – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
1903: The Riddle of the Sands – Erskine Childers
1905: The Four Just Men – Edgar Wallace
1907: The Thinking Machine – Jacques Futrelle
1908: The Circular Staircase – Mary Roberts Rinehart
1911: The Innocence of Father Brown – G.K. Chesterton
1912: Trent’s Last Case – E.C. Bentley
1915: The Thirty-Nine Steps – John Buchan
1918: Uncle Abner – Melville Davisson Post
1926: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd – Agatha Christie
1928: Ashenden (The British Agent) – W. Somerset Maugham
1929: Little Caesar – W.R. Burnett
1929: Red Harvest – Dashiell Hammett
1930: The Maltese Falcon – Dashiell Hammett
1930: The Documents in the Case – Dorothy L. Sayers, Robert Eustace
1931: Malice Aforethought – Francis Iles
1932: Before the Fact – Francis Iles
1933: The Nine Tailors – Dorothy L. Sayers
1934: Murder on the Orient Express – Agatha Christie
1934: The Postman Always Rings Twice – James M. Cain
1934: Death of a Ghost – Margery Allingham
1935: They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? – Horace McCoy
1935: The Hollow Man – John Dickson Carr
1935: The League of Frightened Men – Rex Stout
1936: The Wheel Spins – Ethel Lina White
1938: Lament for a Maker – Michael Innes
1938: The Beast Must Die – Nicholas Blake
1939: The Mask of Dimitrios – Eric Ambler
1939: Ten Little Niggers (And Then There Were None) –
Agatha Christie
1939: Rogue Male – Geoffrey Household
1940: A Surfeit of Lampreys (Death of a Peer) – Ngaio Marsh
1940: The Bride Wore Black – Cornell Woolrich
1942: Calamity Town – Ellery Queen
1943: The High Window – Raymond Chandler
1944: Green for Danger – Christianna Brand
1946: The Big Clock – Kenneth Fearing
1947: The Moving Toyshop – Edmund Crispin
1948: Devil Take the Blue-Tail Fly –
John Franklin Bardin
1949: My Friend Maigret – Georges Simenon
1949: The Asphalt Jungle – W.R. Burnett
1950: Strangers on a Train – Patricia Highsmith
1950: Smallbone Deceased – Michael Gilbert
1950: The Stain on the Snow – Georges Simenon
1951: The Daughter of Time – Josephine Tey
1952: The Tiger in the Smoke – Margery Allingham
1952: Last Seen Wearing – Hilary Waugh
1953: Five Roundabouts to Heaven – John Bingham
1953: The Long Goodbye – Raymond Chandler
1953: The Burglar – David Goodis
1956: The Talented Mr. Ripley – Patricia Highsmith
1956: Mystery Stories – Stanley Ellin
1957: From Russia with Love – Ian Fleming
1959: The Manchurian Candidate – Richard Condon
1962: The IPCRESS File – Len Deighton
1963: Gun Before Butter – Nicolas Freeling
1963: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold – John Le Carré
1964: The Deep Blue Good-by – John D. MacDonald
1964: Pop. 1280 – Jim Thompson
1964: The Expendable Man – Dorothy B. Hughes
1965: Black Money – Ross Macdonald
1967: Roseanna – Maj Sjöwall, Per Wahlöö
1968: Making Good Again – Lionel Davidson
1968: The Glass-Sided Ants Nest – Peter Dickinson
1969: Blind Man with a Pistol – Chester Himes
1970: Jack’s Return Home – Ted Lewis
1971: The Day of the Jackal – Frederick Forsyth
1972: The Friends of Eddie Coyle – George V. Higgins
1972: Sadie When She Died – Ed McBain
1972: The Players and the Game – Julian Symons
1974: Other Paths to Glory – Anthony Price
1976: The Wrong Case – James Crumley
1976: A Demon in My View – Ruth Rendell
1976: A Morbid Taste for Bones – Ellis Peters
1977: A Judgement in Stone – Ruth Rendell
1977: Laidlaw – William McIlvanney
1978: SS-GB – Len Deighton
1979: Whip Hand – Dick Francis
1979: Skinflick – Joseph Hansen
1979: Kill Claudio – P.M. Hubbard
1981: Red Dragon – Thomas Harris
1981: Thus Was Adonis Murdered – Sarah Caudwell
1982: The False Inspector Dew – Peter Lovesey
1982: Indemnity Only – Sara Paretsky
1982: The Artful Egg – James McClure
1984: Stick – Elmore Leonard
1984: Miami Blues – Charles Willeford
1986: A Perfect Spy – John Le Carré
1986: A Taste for Death – P.D. James
1987: The Black Dahlia – James Ellroy
1988: Double Whammy – Carl Hiaasen
1989: Lonely Hearts – John Harvey
1990: Postmortem – Patricia Cornwell
1991: Devil in a Blue Dress – Walter Mosley
1991: Dirty Tricks – Michael Dibdin
1993: The Sculptress – Minette Walters
1993: In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead – James Lee Burke
1995: The Mermaids Singing – Val McDermid
1998: On Beulah Height – Reginald Hill
1998: The Hanging Garden – Ian Rankin
1999: The Remorseful Day – Colin Dexter

Now, what do you think? Are there other books from the 20th century that you believe belong on this rundown, or some mentioned here that you think ought not be included? And how many of these works have you actually read? Sound off by clicking on “Comments” below.

A Grateful Association

After I heard yesterday that distinguished British novelist H.R.F. “Harry” Keating had died, I dashed off an e-note to critic and author Mike Ripley, a friend of Keating’s. Ripley had already penned a fine obituary of the author for The Guardian, but I wondered whether there was anything else he’d like to add. He replied by sending me the photograph of Keating featured on the left, along with this note:

I first met Harry Keating 21 years ago at a publisher’s party. I had published two novels and become crime-fiction critic for The Daily Telegraph. There was Harry, who’d written dozens of prize-winning novels, was chairman of the Detection Club, and had been crime critic for The Times. To say I was in awe was putting it mildly.

I had no need to be. Harry was polite, gentle, and kind, and I was to discover he was always so.

On many occasions we appeared on public platforms together--as critics and as members of the Dorothy L. Sayers Society--and in 2000 we were asked jointly to produce a list of the Top 100 Mysteries and Thrillers of the 20th Century for a special supplement in The Times. We did so without argument and only minor disagreements over a couple of titles, and the whole exercise was conducted over two weeks by exchange of letters--Harry’s notes being delicately written using a fountain pen given to him by Len Deighton. (He was never one for computers.)

I think he was genuinely pleased when I described his best-known fictional character, Inspector Ghote, as “the Maigret of Mumbai” and I was delighted to hear that four of his earlier novels were to be reissued by Penguin in stylish new covers. Typically, Harry made sure I was sent an advanced set straight from the publishers, but sadly died only days before they appeared in bookshops.

I will keep them next to my copy of The Murder of the Maharajah, which won Harry his second Gold Dagger in 1980 and which is inscribed: H.R.F. Keating signs, with gratitude over the years, for Mike Ripley.

Ripley adds that he’s “still slightly in shock about Harry--I was with Peter Lovesey on Wednesday and we were talking about him and the history of the Detection Club.”

READ MORE: “Fond Farewells: H.R.F. Keating (1926-2011),” by J.F. Norris (Pretty Sinister Books); “H.R.F. Keating, R.I.P.,” by Martin Edwards (‘Do You Write Under Your Own Name?’); “H.R.F. Keating, 1926-2011,” by Chris Routledge (The Venetian Vase).

H.R.F. Keating Passes Away

Word has just reached us that British crime-fiction novelist and scholar H.R.F. Keating--the creator of Indian detective Inspector Ganesh Ghote--died yesterday of cardiac failure at age 84. Mike Ripley has a fond look back at Keating’s life and career in The Guardian, and there’s another obituary worth reading in The Telegraph.

A funeral for Keating is being planned for Friday, April 15.

An Old India Hand

British novelist, columnist, and persistent humorist Mike Ripley has a fine piece up in the e-zine Shots right now, an “appreciation” of renowned author H.R.F. Keating. The most enjoyable segment of Ripley’s profile might be his explanation of how Keating finally got to India, after sitting in his London home for many years and happily writing about a policeman, Inspector Ghote, who worked in Bombay--a city he’d never ventured near.

It may seem that Harry was defying the old maxim that you should write about what you know and he cheerfully admits that “it was all going quite nicely without having to face the actuality,” but then one morning the actuality came calling. It was at the breakfast table with the morning post (those were the days!) that Harry opened a letter from Air India, which basically said: You’ve been writing about India, now come and see it and offered him a ticket, thankfully [also a] return one, on one of their flights to Bombay, as it was then. It was an offer Harry, in all conscience, could not afford to refuse.

The Ghote books were known and read in India but still, the prospect of confronting the “actuality” of a world he had created in the safety of Notting Hill several thousand miles away, must have been daunting if not nerve-wracking. Harry spent the entire Air India flight there calming his nerves and rehearsing an appropriate speech for that dramatic moment when he landed and stepped for the first time on to Indian soil. It went, as he recalls, “Something along the lines of ‘One small step for Inspector Ghote …’” but in reality the speech was never delivered. As the Air India jet landed and Harry stepped on to the tarmac of Bombay airport, his first historic words were: “My God, it’s hot!”

You can find Ripley’s full story here.

And So Say All of Us

I’m delighted to report that England’s venerable drinking and writing group called the Detection Club has decided to celebrate one of its founders’ 80th birthday with a collection of stories in his honor--The Verdict of Us All, edited by Peter Lovesey (Crippen & Landru). H.R.F. Keating, known simply as “Harry” to friends, fans and colleagues, is a rare talent, author of the Inspector Ghote series of mysteries set in India as well as less-exotic but equally sleek and sly crime novels.

Prominent club members who celebrate him here include P.D. James, Lovesey (who also does an ace job of editing this book), Reginald Hill, and Colin Dexter, along with Len Deighton, who contributes his first published story in recent memory, “Sherlock Holmes and the Titanic Swindle.” It’s a jaunty, strange, occasionally baffling tale of swindlers and publishers (though its sometimes hard to tell the difference), which, at 30 pages long, begins and anchors the collection in way that Keating must have chortled to see.

Not Yet Put Out to Pasture

Today is Halloween, of course, but as Elizabeth Foxwell notes, it’s also the 86th birthday of former Queen’s jockey Richard Stanley Francis, better known as mystery novelist Dick Francis.

It wasn’t so long ago that I finished reading Under Orders, Francis’ 39th novel and the third (after Odds Against and Whip Hand) to feature private detective and ex-jockey Sid Halley. This is also the first novel Francis has produced since the death of his wife, Mary, in 2000--a passing that reignited rumors (made public in an unauthorized 1999 biography, Dick Francis: A Racing Life, by Graham Lord, that Mary had in fact written much if not all of her hubby’s award-winning novels). Hmm. I, for one, didn’t notice any deviation of style or slackening of pace in Under Orders, which finds the increasingly happy Halley trying to solve the murders of a Cheltenham Gold Cup-winning jockey as well as the victorious horse’s owner, at the same time as he probes the potential for abuse of Internet gambling technology. If his wife did, indeed, write his previous books, Francis obviously learned along the way how to do it himself, when that became necessary.

Besides Francis, Inspector Ghote creator H.R.F. Keating, celebrates his 80th birthday today, while Richard S. “Kinky” Friedman--novelist and independent Texas gubernatorial candidate--turns 62 years old. Congratulations to all three.