The Perfect Murder

This I loved. It's comedy and social critic masquerading as a mystery novel. Written in the mid 60's, this is the first Inspector Ghote novel. Set in Bombay some 15 years after India became independent, we follow inspector Ghote, a young husband and father, trying to be a good policeman, a good inspector, following the rules, pursing justice and all that but coming up against the powers of tradition, religion, racism, money, corruption. He's like a Charlie Brown type of character that we kinda identify with and hang on to while the author paints us this portrait of a society quite different from ours but much like ours in its failing, it's human flaws. It's funny, it's satirical, it's critical and it has somewhat of a mystery "The show more Perfect Murder" which is the name of the victim : Mr. Perfect. I'll definitely go hunt the next book of this series. show less

A Peculiar Case
Review of the Penguin Classics Kindle eBook edition (2011) of the original Collins Crime Club hardcover (1964)

It was called the Perfect Murder right from the start. First the Bombay papers plastered it all the way across their pages. And then it was taken up by papers all over India.
The Perfect Murder: Police at House.
The Perfect Murder: New Police Moves.
The Perfect Murder: Police Baffled.
- opening sentences of "A Perfect Murder".

Somehow I missed reading HRF Keating's Inspector Ghote novels (1964-2009) when they were first released, but came across them only recently. This first book left a very odd impression and is surprising as a debut for a series that went on to 26 books. The lead Inspector Ghote is portrayed here show more as a rather naive detective who is belittled by his superiors in the Bombay (then the name of present day Mumbai) Police and its related government ministry and also henpecked at home by his shrewish wife. Together with his sidekick/Watson Axel Svensson (a Swedish criminologist sent to India to study international policing) they stumble towards an eventual solution.

The book feels like a bait and switch right off the bat as the so-called "Perfect Murder" is revealed to be a non-fatal assault on a Mr. Perfect, the secretary of a rich man named Mr. Arun Varde. The initial outrage announcing a "murder" from the household has been broadcast further by the scurrilous press and is the basis for a running joke throughout. The farce continues when Ghote and Svensson arrive to investigate and are met with denials and obstruction by everyone in the household, except for the secretary who is still unconscious and unable to be interviewed. It is all dragged out to book length with one fruitless interview after another with a diversion to another case involving the supposed theft of a single rupee note from the office of the Minister in charge of the Police.

See DVD cover at https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/9b/The_Perfect_Murder_%28film%29.jpg
The cover for the DVD release of the 1988 film adaptation of "A Perfect Murder". Actor Naseeruddin Shah as Inspector Ghote doesn't even get on the poster, which instead features Stellan Skarsgård (criminologist Axel Svensson) and Madhur Jaffrey (Mrs. Lai, renamed from the Mrs. Varde in the novel). Image sourced from Wikipedia.

Ghote and Svensson still solve both cases in the end and the reason for the obstruction becomes clear. It is an odd beginning to what apparently was a popular series. I think I will try at least one more to find out if the later books became more standard procedurals. Otherwise this would be cringe reading to have a protagonist who is belittled throughout his own books.

Trivia and Links
The Perfect Murder was adapted as the same-titled England/India film in 1988 directed by Zahar Hai, produced by Merchant Ivory Productions. I haven't watched the whole film, but from the opening scenes it seems to have been adapted as a comedy farce along the lines of the Inspector Clouseau films. You can watch the whole film on YouTube here.

There was a May 2020 announcement that the Inspector Ghote/HRF Keating novels were to be adapted for an Indian TV series. No TV series has yet appeared though. You can read the announcement in Variety here. show less

I had not read this series for a while so I started with the first. A Perfect Murder won some prizes but that was in a different era. I thought Inspector Ghote was too downtrodden, disrespected by the people he questions, by his superiors, by his nagging fishwife of a spouse and almost every one he came in contact with. This was tiring. He is an intelligent thoughtful man on the one hand, and extremely naive on the other since he considers having read one book on the investigation of crimes he knows what to do in all situations.This is like Precious of The Ladies Number One Detective Agency who also read one book which helped her become a sleuth.

As a child growing up in the eighties, it was considered somewhat infra dig to be caught watching Hindi movies. Sitting slack-jawed in front of the television as the Sunday evening movie came on was one thing; going to the theatre to watch a Bollywood blockbuster was another altogether, an act that could earn you the ire of those that decided what was cool and what was not (evidently, I was not part of this club: my index of cool fluctuated at their tender mercies.) Given this, suspicion naturally arose when my elders - and, some would argue, my betters - asked me to leave the cricket game, get washed and changed and packed into the car to watch a film with actors such as Naseerudin Shah and Dalip Tahil. This was not promising.

My show more protestations were met with a response intended to comfort: it was not a Hindi movie after all, but an English one - a Merchant Ivory production. My heart sank deeper into my North Star sneakers - not another soppy-serious-arty-sharty movie, please! I would never be able to show my face in public again! Somehow, this didn’t seem too much of a problem to anyone else.

Once the film started, though, my heart recovered quite rapidly, and I was all in all in quite good humour - the film turned out to be wonderful: here was Naseerudin Shah, and who knew he was as good an actor in an English film as he was in Hindi movies? Here was Dalip Tahil, and who knew he could speak English so fluently? Here was Amjad Khan, another revelation! In a time when most English movies lived short, June-bug lives in theatres, and any VHS you rented would have a fifty per cent chance of being totally scratched and unwatchable, it was a matter of pride to watch Indian actors speaking so well in English - look, we could stand with the best!

The Perfect Murder was a childhood memory for the longest time: a fond remembrance only, because getting hold of a copy of the film is near impossible (if you find one, please, do tell, handsome stranger!) Who knew there was a book behind the movie? Nay, not a book - a series, featuring the inimitable Inspector Ghote of the Bombay C.I.D.! This revelation was a result of the obituaries - and the habitual commercialisation of the recently deceased artiste that followed the death of H.R.F. Keating on March 27 of this year. As I would find out only then, Mr. Keating wrote a series of books featuring Inspector Ghote, all of which, in the words of Alexander McCall Smith, are “beautiful little classics”. A prompt trip to the bookshop, a beautifully designed book cover, and a few wonderful hours followed, spent in the company of Inspector Ghote, Alex Svensson, the U.N.E.S.C.O. Expert deputed to shadow Inspector Ghote as he went about his investigative work, and a delightful cast of characters featuring Lala Varde, D.S.P. Samant, and half of 1960s Bombay!

Inspector Ghote may not occupy the same echelons of achievement that other fictional private eyes do - he is not, for example a Poirot or Holmes, not even a noir, falcon-chasing, smart-talking wise guy; Ghote is your archetypical everyman, trying to make the best he can of his life, his work, and the advice rendered in Gross’ Criminal Investigation (adapted from the German by John Adam, sometime Crown Prosecutor, Madras, and by J. Collyer Adam, sometime Public Prosecutor, Madras). Where other detectives point a needle of suspicion, the often hapless Inspector Ghote makes do with a porcupine of suspicions - every one is a suspect, and, adamantly, none of the suspects refuse to be eliminated. Elementary it may have been for others, but for Ghote, it is all hard work, sincerity, and dedication, and often a times, frustration at running up against an impassive wall of ‘influence’ with his superiors that each suspect seems to have.

The fates do not change for Inspector Ghote, and the times are caught beautifully by Keating, who clearly had a penchant for encapsulating large swathes of story in short, surreal passages:

“Mr. Perfect lying on the tattered charpoy breathing so dangerously gently: Lala Arun Varde calling for whisky and arousing only the distant clamour of the locked-out servants: the thin line of the wound on the back of Mr. Perfect’s skull: the succession of steel-grilled windows looking out on to the streets round the house: Lala Varde hinting at his power and influence in distinguished quarters: and again and again and again, Mr. Perfect’s long, still, emaciated body hovering on the boundaries of death.”

The role fit Naseerudin Shah perfectly in the film; had the film stuck closer to the book, the suit would have seemed of a finer cut. Not remembering all that much about the movie, though, and not having been able to lay my hands upon it this time around, such a comparison may be unfair. What matters is that the book is good in and of itself - a little gem of storytelling that captures what it must have been like to be a working everyman, anyman in 1960s Bombay, hoping against hope:

“Inspector Ghote did not telephone next morning to find out whether during the night there had been any change in Mr. Perfect’s state. Instead he got to the Varde house early, and before doing anything else made his way up to the little room where the old Parsi lay. Try as he might he could not rid himself of the obsessive notion that his personal success and Mr. Perfect’s state were bound up with one another. It was not as if he had not told himself a hundred times that such an idea was unworthy of his whole outlook. Yet it was there. Always at the back of his mind like a smooth, dense, black stone embedded at the very bottom of a deep pool. Immovable, adamantine, primeval.”

Inspector Ghote’s magic does not lie in a heroism that is strange or foreign - it does not lie in any quality unknown in everyday life - he is a middle-class man who just happens to be a detective, and, as it turns out, is pretty good at his job. And all this - this accurate sketching of characters - of people, Bombay, and the times of India then, by a man who hadn’t even visited the country when he wrote this, the first of the Inspector Ghote stories. Sometimes, it turns out, the fates do conspire.

This review first appeared on www.myLaw.net on Thursday, May 12, 2011. show less

HRF Keating was a grand old figure in British crime writing of the later 20th century, in large part due to the success of the series inaugurated by this book. The setting is Mumbai; the protagonist is Inspector Ghote, who will go on to feature in 25 books or so, along with the odd film (notable that this is the first in this CWA series to feature a serial detective, though there's more to come).

Now, look, Keating is held in great affection by many, and no doubt Ghote is too, so perhaps the kindest thing to say is just that this book now feels very dated, without pursuing post-colonial critique too fiercely. I mean, and I wasn't in Mumbai in the 1960s, and for all I know it could be that every cliché of urban India was in fact true of show more the time and the place. And for all I know every Indian did speak some more or less schooled variant of the mannered English on the lips of all the characters.

I say "on the lips". We also get a fair amount of this stuff when the free indirect authorial voice comes close to the Inspector's thoughts. When the voice is distant, it often adopts a sort of light-comic Wodehouse tone that seems to have been almost a default mode for crime writing around this time. I suppose a lot of people like it, but it sets my teeth on edge, and I'm glad we now have a sub-category for the kind of stuff likely to be written in this style ("cosy crime") so that I can safely ignore it.

Behind the Indian hokum and the bantering nonsense about traffic, there's a fairly decent formal structure to this story. A pretty classic locked-house deal: small circle of suspects, all with prima facie motive for the central crime (assault that might become murder). It ticks along OK without really getting going; I realised three quarters of the way through that, although I had been told that the suspects all had motives, I couldn't really grasp what they actually were. The twist at the end is predicated on your having paid a bit more attention than I did.

Overall: OK, but I'm not going to rush to read the other 24. show less

One liner - overrated clumsy work full of stereotypes.

Perfect Murder is the sixth or seventh Ghote book that I have read and easily the worst. If I had read this book first, I would not have probably attempted to read any other.

The title refers to the attempted murder of a Parsi named Mr Perfect. He is seriously injured at the beginning of the novel but doesn't die. The residents of the house where the incident happens are thoroughly uncooperative. It is only very occasionally that Ghote gets his questions answered. Finally towards the end, he makes a major leap of intuition and solves the case. There is a parallel track of a minor mystery which doesn't amount to much.

The later Ghote books are more polished and realistic. Even when the show more plot was weak, the writing was enjoyable. Perfect Murder is a rambling work with characters who are caricatures. The plot is not particularly interesting and it moves in fits and starts. Even though this is the first book in the Ghote series, a reader should probably start with one of the later works. show less

I'd heard about the Inspector Ghote books for years but had never read one. I thought a book set in 1960s Bombay would be fun and evoke memories for me. Granted, Keating had never been to India when he wrote this, and in fact he wrote half a dozen more books before setting foot in the country. But it won a Gold Dagger award, so it must be good, right?

Well. It is OK as a mystery. But the casual racism and stereotyping were tough to take. I know it's a product of its time, but Paul Scott managed to write general fiction set in the waning years of colonial India without turning every Indian into a caricature. Inspector Ghote is a man of integrity, which sets him apart from everyone around him. He has a wife who is perpetually angry show more because he's never home and a boss who worries mostly about the effects of investigating (or not investigating) elite and powerful people. The "Perfect Murder" is actually an attack on a Mr. Perfect (we're never allowed to forget he's Parsi), who works for a powerful and hugely fat Bombay tycoon (we're never allowed to forget he's fat). Think Raymond Chandler meets Inspector Clouseau.

I don't think any of the Indians were described as physically normal, except maybe for a teenage boy and two women. Everyone else is either fat or emaciated. The mysteries (there are actually two) are interesting but the path to solving them is convoluted and then comes to an abrupt end. About 150 pages in I began to enjoy the crime aspects, but that wasn't enough.

I guess we're supposed to read this for the atmosphere; several readers commented on how well Keating describes the onset of monsoon. Except that he makes it sound as if the pre-monsoon heat shows up a couple of days before monsoon. Nope. I could go on, but you get the idea.

Read it as an artifact of an era, but please don't think that it is an authentic or accurate, let alone sympathetic, depiction of 1960s India. show less