Press Mentions
The Venetian Vase
April 2020
HRF Keating: A Life of Crime – Review
Shots Crime and Thriller Magazine
June 2020
Mike Ripley’s Getting Away With Murder
Martin Edwards’s Blog
June 2020
‘Do You Write Under Your Own Name?’
Two excellent reviews – January 2020
Crime Time – The classic Inspector Ghote mysteries – now in digital
Shots – The Return of Inspector Ghote
Readers might be interested in an exploration of the more serious aspects of Harry’s writing, in a paper delivered by Peter Widulski, an American lawyer, to a literary conference at Pace University, NYC, looking at the links between Religion and Literature. You can download a PDF of his paper in its entirety by clicking here.
Mr Widulski titled his paper ‘The Religious Dimension in HRF Keating’s Under a Monsoon Cloud’ but his paper is equally devoted to the fact that Monsoon is “very definitely a novel about the discovery of truth – about exposing oneself to searching scrutiny and about the discovery of truth as a spiritual force that profoundly affects one’s highest ideals about how one should live.” He suggests that the book is in the same genre as Crime and Punishment where Raskolnikov tests his beliefs by confronting the judgement of others.
Click here to download an article by Vikram Doctor, ‘Where’s Inspector Ghote?’, published in Time Out India.
For those who can read Bengali we hope you enjoy this article (click here to download a PDF version) from the 3-18 September 2009 edition of ‘Edkin Live,’ a news and current affairs magazine from Calcutta. For those unfortunate enough not to have that skill I would add that I am always delighted when Ghote is noticed by those living in the sub-continent and appreciated by speakers of Indian languages. — Harry
As Harry said it is great to have Inspector Ghote appreciated in the languages of his own sub-continent but it is also good to have something written in English by a native born Indian. We hope many of you will take pleasure in Sarmila Bose’s article from The Telegraph.
BBC 7 has done a serialized radio version of Inspector Ghote’s First Case. Please visit their website to listen.
Keating passes the Page 69 Test for Inspector Ghote’s First Case. (Also at the Campaign for the American Reader blog.)
An appreciation of Keating, written by Mike Ripley for Shots Ezine Online.
Extract from an article by Alexander McCall Smith in the London ‘Times,’ 2008
“Americans call crime novels mysteries, which has always struck me as a bit misleading, some crimes are clearly not mysteries at all, and some mysteries have not the slightest element of crime in them. But it does broaden the genre, and allows one to pack a crime suitcase with at least some books that do not necessarily fit the classic mould.
My own preference in the genre is for books that are only incidentally about crime and which really focus on character and place. (He then goes on to praise two American authors, John Berendt and his ‘Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil’l and Patricia Highsmith. He then talks about Julian Barnes and his ‘Arthur and George’ which involves the exploration by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle into a real series of crimes and goes on to talk about Vikram Chandra’s ‘superb epic novel, Sacred games’ which is set in Bombay. This leads him into his thoughts on Harry:) … those beautiful little classics by the former crime fiction reviewer of this newspaper, H.R.F. Keating. The Inspector Ghote books are hard to come by now, but are quite exquisite, gentle novels that should find their place on any list of good crime fiction.”
(He then goes on to talk about John Buchan ‘The Thirty-Nine Steps’ and Robert Louis Stevenson ‘Kidnapped’. So Harry is in excellent company).
