Jack, The Lady Killer

The Punjab in India. 1935. The sub-continent under the Raj. Fresh from his English boarding school, Jack Steele is a new recruit to the Indian Imperial Police and soon begins to acquire the attitudes of old India hands towards the people under their rule. Only a few months into his posting, Jack has to conduct a murder investigation when one of the British community at his Station, the sexually rapacious widow Milly Marchbanks, is found strangled. To Jack's consternation, the only clue implicates a member of the Briton's Club. But which one? While Jack goes round and round in circles, his self-effacing Indian sergeant, Bulaki Ram, discreetly nudges him along the way he needs to go.

Publishers Weekly

Prolific British mystery-maker Keating returns to the India of his well-received Inspector Ghote novels, but this time with new characters and a new form: a detective novel in rhyming verse, the first in recent memory. Set in the Punjab in the last days of the British Raj, Keating's story follows young Jack Steele, an idealistic policeman new to imperial ways. Keating's picture of colonial life can look all too familiar: the first 30 pages include "a tennis court/ where Jack's in play"; a sahib who says, "I never shirk/ when duty calls"; and the entire situation and argument of George Orwell's famed essay "Shooting an Elephant." Then the mystery plot begins, and Keating displays his real gifts. An English woman of loose morals is dead: the sahibs assume a "native" did it, but the only clue casts blame on an Englishman... named Jack. Can our hero clear his name by finding the genuine culprit? The answers involve a secretly gay English planter; the evasive, hedonistic "Plum Duff," proud of his Angl0-Indian background; and "Little Brown Gramophone," an Indian lad who can remember, and imitate, every sound he has ever heard. Keating takes his poetic methods from Vikram Seth's novel-in-verse, The Golden Gate: like Seth, Keating uses the 14-line stanza of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, which can produce a padded, or corny, English ("there he'll have a major part./ You'll find him at the story's heart"). But if he's no Byron, Keating does manage to make his strings of stanzas fit his story; after a few dozen tetrameter couplets, readers will find the verse transparent, even entertaining. (Dec.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

H. R. F. Keating was the reviewer for "The London Times" for fifteen years and served as chairman of the Crime Writers' Association and the Society of Authors. He has been the longest-serving president of the Detection Club, next only to Agatha Christie. He twice won the CWA Gold Dagger, and in 1996 he was awarded the CWA Cartier Diamond Dagger. In 2005, he was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Malice Domestic conference. He lives in London with his wife, the actress Sheila Mitchell, who regularly reads his titles as audiobooks.