Author;
Born: October 31, 1926; Died March 27, 2011;
HRF Keating, who has died aged 84, was one of Britain’s leading detective story writers and was best known for creating the unassuming Indian policeman Inspector Ganesh Ghote.
Henry Reymond Fitzwalter Keating, always known as Harry, was born in St Leonards-on-Sea, East Sussex, and educated at Merchant Taylors’ school in Middlesex. He left at 16 and became an engineer at the BBC before National Service in the Army and then going to Trinity College, Dublin, where he read English and French.
After training as a journalist with the Westminster Press Group in Slough, he joined the Daily Telegraph in 1956 and settled in Notting Hill, west London, where he was to remain in the same house for more than 50 years.
He was a sub-editor at both the Daily and Sunday Telegraph and also worked for The Times ,but in his spare time he began writing.
His first detective novel, Death and the Visiting Fireman, was published by Gollancz in 1959. He had never set foot in India when Ghote, who was based in Bombay (now Mumbai), first appeared in The Perfect Murder in 1964. It was to be another 10 years and a good few Ghote books later before Keating made his first visit to the sub-continent. He also wrote many non-Ghote crime stories, several general novels and other works under the pen-name of Evelyn Harvey.
But it is his Indian detective, with his perfect manners for which he will be remembered.In all there were 26 Ghote novels, a Ghote film and Ghote radio plays.
He gave up journalism for full-time writing and for 15 years he was crime fiction critic for The Times, and from 1985 to 2001 was president of the Detection Club, following in the footsteps of figures such as GK Chesterton, EC Bentley and Agatha Christie. He also edited a number of books on crime fiction.He married Sheila Mitchell, the actress, in 1953. They had three sons and a daughter.
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