KEATING’S PASSAGE TO INDIA

Henry Reymond Fitzwater Keating is H. R. F. Keating to his readers and Harry to his friends, a bright-eyed and gentle man of 61 with a full, Walt Whitmanesque beard that gives him slightly the air of a relocated guru, an impression heightened by his sandals and Nehru-style shirt. You could suspect a link to India, and there certainly is.

Keating is assured an important place in the history of crime fiction as the creator of Inspector Ganesh Ghote of the Bombay Criminal Investigation Department. Ghote (pronounced Go-tee) is as characterful and characteristic a figure for his nation as, to make the closest comparison, Georges Simenon’s Jules Maigret of the Surete is for France.

There are differences between the two figures: Maigret is a commanding figure in his world; Ghote is rather meekly deferential before his superiors, sympathetic but quite naive and almost comical. But both men have in common that they are good at their work because of their instincts and insights about men and women.

What the detectives also have in common is a keen awareness of their own humble origins, so that they are particularly sensitive to all the nuances of class in their societies. Thus Keating, like Simenon, provides in his fictions an accurate if peripheral slice of social history.

Simenon is a Belgian who had lived and worked in France, so Maigret’s milieu was close at hand. The wonder of Keating’s Ghote, and the sensitivity and accuracy with which his city and country are captured, is that Keating had never been to India when he wrote the first Ghote in 1964.

“I’d been writing fairly conventional detective stories about the settings I knew, in England,” Keating says. “But the American publishers had been saying, ‘Too British, too British!’ And I determined not to be. So, India was in the air. And then also I vaguely wanted to write about how perfect you should be. And I saw India as a marvelous symbol of being perfect.”

Fortuitously, a man who came to drive Keating and his wife, the actress Sheila Mitchell, to a literary party proved to be an Englishman just back from India, who offered to give Keating whatever background he could.

Keating debriefed the man, did library research, watched television and caught Indian movies at London’s art houses. He wrote “The Perfect Murder,” introducing Ghote, in 1964 and then held his breath.

As it happened, Bombay loved Keating and Inspector Ghote, and so did American publishers. Keating wrote seven more titles in the series before he actually got out to Bombay a decade ago to look around. “Of course, I then filled notebooks with stuff I’m still drawing on,” Keating says.

Indian readers delight in catching him out on small points. “One of the books is ‘Inspector Ghote Goes by Train,’ and a reader sent me a great map showing how I’d got it wrong.”

Another of the books, “Filmi, Filmi, Inspector Ghote” (1976), was nicely prophetic. Ghote was called to solve the murder of a popular but nasty star at a Bombay film studio. Now Ghote himself is making the transition to the screen, as Maigret often has.

Ismael Merchant (“Room With a View” and the forthcoming “Maurice”) has produced a film of that first Ghote, “The Perfect Murder,” and it is scheduled for release in England in January. It was directed not by Merchant’s longtime partner James Ivory but by Zafar Hai, who collaborated on the script with Keating. Ghote is played by Naseer Uddin Shah, who won best-actor honors at the Venice Film Festival a few years ago in a film called “Paar.”

Keating went out to Bombay in February to work on the script and again in April for the actual filming, filling more notebooks along the way.

Keating was born at St. Leonards-on-Sea, Sussex, went to the excellent Merchant Taylors School and, after service in World War II, attended Trinity College, Dublin.

“When I left college, I decided that I was going to be a gentle failure. About the age of 20-something. And then I met my wife and she said, ‘Nonsense. You will not be a gentle failure. You like detective stories. Why don’t you write one of those? They say nothing’--because I had said I had nothing to say. And so, under orders, I wrote. And actually the third mystery I wrote was the first one published. Not until I was actually able to hold a finished copy in my hand did I realize that, yes, you could use these things to say a certain something.”

To earn a living, Keating had gone to work on provincial newspapers (initially at 7 a week) as a desk man, working his way up to what English papers call copy taster, roughly a news editor. He also did the occasional drama review, and met his wife when she was performing in the repertory company at Swindon.

Keating reviewed mysteries for the Times of London for 15 years and then for the Daily Telegraph before he felt he could give full time to his own books. He has a new Ghote due out here in England in November and is at work on the next one, which he calls a tongue-in-cheek version of the classic timetable mystery, to be titled “Dead on Time.”

Of the timetable mysteries, he once remarked dismissively, “Dullness in everything except the riddle.” He does not intend to be dull; the inspector never is.

Later this year, St. Martin’s Press will publish the U.S. edition of “Writing Crime Fiction,” which Keating undertook as a commission for the firm that also does the British “Who’s Who.” It was one of a series on doing genre fiction, and Keating’s is notable for its good sense, practicality and charm, and for its range of specific references to existing crime novels.

“I’m a 9-to-5 writer,” Keating began to explain as we talked.

His wife hooted. “Nine to 5!” she said. “He’s a weekend writer; he’s an all-the-time writer. He’d write on Christmas Day if I’d let him.”

Keating grinned and looked, of all things, guilty.