H.R.F. Keating, post-colonial detection

About this book

H.R.F. Keating: Post-Colonial Detection examines the entire oeuvre of the prolific and award-winning writer, but focuses on the novels set in India in which the bumbling but always human Inspector Ghote manages to solve crimes with a post-colonial mix of inherited Scotland Yard/Holmesian deductive methods and his understanding of his native country's cultural contradictions. This book is based on the premise that successful sleuths have much in common with cultural anthropologists - indeed the latter have often been termed detectives of cultures. In this respect, Keating's Ghote novels are in the tradition of Tony Hillerman's Navajo Indian and James McClure's South African novels which serve up the human, experiential aspects of the cultural and ethnic conflicts that newspaper reports scarcely touch on. Like Hillerman and McClure, Keating is not only an outsider, but as an Englishman writing about a former colony he is in grave danger of what Edward Said says western writers often do: construct the Orient as the mysterious Other. However, Keating's portrayal of India, complex, subtle and deeply humanistic in the E.M. Forster tradition, has been praised by Indians, as Hillerman has been honored by Navajos, for the fairness of his portrayals.