Showing results by author "HRF Keating" in All Categories

Agatha Christie was not only the biggest selling writer of detective stories the world has ever known, she was also a mystery in herself, giving only the rarest interviews, declining absolutely to become any sort of public figure and a mystery too in the manner in which she achieved her astonishing success. HRF Keating, a crime novelist and respected reviewer of crime fiction, brought together a dozen distinguished writers from both sides of the Atlantic to throw light on this double mystery.

Inspector Ghote of the Bombay police has been regulated to antipickpocket patrol, where he promptly gets himself into one of those fearful fixes which are equally the product of his faults and his virtues.

In honour of H.R.F Keating's 80th Birthday, his fellow Detection Club Members and the leading lights in crime fiction serve up a new selection of tantalising conundrums. Edited by Peter Lovesey. Foreword by Dick Francis. Stories include: Lionel Davidson's Tuesday's Child; Len Deighton's Sherlock Holmes and the Titanic Swindle; Reginal Hill's Uncle Harry; P.D. James' Hearing Ghote; H.R.F Keating's Arkady Nikolaivich and many others.

An American visitor to India is killed on the road from Bombay to Poona. Called in to investigate the murder, Inspector Ghote soon makes the acquaintance of the victim's brother, Professor Gregory Strongbow. But the professor is both stubborn and evasive, refusing to tell Ghote what he knows about the events leading up to Hector's death. Soon Ghote finds his own life in danger, as he is faced with a conspiracy that reaches to the very highest levels of Indian politics... This is the third book in the hugely popular 'Inspector Ghote' series from H.R.F. Keating.

In a small, provincial town in the heart of India, a politician’s wife has done her husband’s career a great service, by dying under suspicious circumstances. That the corpse and the trail have been cold for fifteen years hasn’t saved Inspector Ghote of the Bombay CID from being sent to investigate. But what chance does he have when his chief suspect is so powerful, when the whole district is against him, and when a holy man is fasting to the death to protest his prying?

Who wanted him? What for? Why was Roger Farrar (if that was his name) on the run in Dublin? Was he a traitor and deserted? The innocent target of a kidnap plot? Or a lonely persecuted paranoiac? One thing is certain: he is likely to suffer a fate worse than death if he is caught by the gross villain who specialises in brain-washing.

For London the worst has happened. There have been riots, uncontrolled fires, outbreaks of savage looting, artillery battles, mass flights. The great city lies three parts deserted, open to marauding gangs and beast-wild individuals, its highways and landmarks tumbled like ruined temples. To Mark, comparatively safe in less troubled Highgate, there comes a message that his estranged wife is dying in Wimbledon, right across on the far side of the dangerous bowl of the devastated city.

Detective Superintendent Harriet Martens resolves to resign after the new assistant chief constable at the head of the CID makes her feel inferior in her job. However, her thoughts of resignation are abruptly interrupted when the pro-hunting politician Robert Roughouse suspiciously collapses during one of his vehement speeches at an antihunting demonstration. Sensing that someone has deliberately attempted to murder Roughouse, and seeing an opportunity to prove her worth to the ACC, Detective Martens determinedly takes charge of the investigation. 

Detective Superintendent Harriet Martens took great pride in her twin sons deciding to follow her into the police by moving to London and joining the Met. Imagine her horror when, as she sits with her husband over evening drinks, the phone rings and she learns that Graham has been killed by a terrorist bomb and Malcolm is in hospital, gravely injured. Her world falls apart around her.

Val Leary is handsome, charming and broke. On the morning of April Fool's Day 1871, while walking through one of London's wealthiest districts, he notices a young maidservant scrubbing the steps of 53 Northbourne Park Villas. In that instant he conceives the idea for a remarkable case of burglary. The set-up seems perfect, but chance intervenes in a succession of coincidences that place the jewels further and further beyond the reach of Val and his cronies - until...

The singers who have come to perform at the Flinwich Festival have large temperaments as well as large voices, and cannot readily be diverted from the furious feuds and obsessive quarrels that are essential to their natures. To detect which of these exotic creatures has committed murder become the task of Superintendent Pryde of Scotland Yard. Luckily, or unluckily, for him his work falls under the unsparing scrutiny of Mrs Craggs, the charlady.

For a respectable governess like Harriet Unwin, her first few weeks in the shabby, inhospitable home of the Partingtons were as unhappy as any she could remember. The bone-chilling cold, the grim sparseness of the meals, the embittered meanness of old Mr Partington: But for the kindness shown by his son, her spirit must surely have been crushed. But worse was to come for Harriet. Her chance discovery of the old man's cherished secret was, she felt sure, the cause of the attack that finally stilled his heart. The doctor, however, thought otherwise. It was neither illness nor old age that killed poor Mr Partington. It was poison....

It was six-thirty in the morning when Detective Superintendent Harriet Martens took the call that informed her that Britain’s number one tennis star and media darling, the wonderfully pretty Bubbles Xingara, has been murdered in the grounds of her big country house. Harriet is now in charge of a case that will have the world’s media – already massing for the start of Wimbledon out in force.

Harriet Martens, named ‘The Hard Detective’ by the media because of her unrelenting opposition to every sort of evil-doing, has been secretly summoned to London to investigate corruption in the country’s most prestigious crime-fighting team, the elite Maximum Crimes Squad. And she suddenly finds herself under fire. Not only is she opposed at every turn by the head of the Squad, but she is menaced by other, more mysterious, figures.