One other short story then followed, written originally with an airline while-away in mind, though it eventually appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine: ‘The Hooked Fisherman’, as Fred Dannay (who never could resist altering a title) called it in place of my ‘The Not So Fly Fisherman’. I had hoped that with its gentle knocking of the bucket-shops which got round the law – as it then stood – about cheap seats, BOAC would lap it up. But airlines stick together and my ingenious use of the cover of the Bombay telephone directory, a volume I had discovered in my local library, never entertained any in-flight passengers.
One more book carried Ghote onwards before I too, became a passenger to Bombay. This was Bats Fly Up for Inspector Ghote, a consideration of suspicion, suspiciousness and its consequences – good and bad – occasioned by dinner-party talk with a senior Pakistani Customs official in London. It begins with a wild inaccuracy. As I had already hinted at in ‘The Miracle Baby’, I put poor Ghote on anti-pickpocketing duty. But this, I was soon to discover, was as unlikely as detaching a Scotland Yard Murder Squad man to move on the traffic.
Then one morning, some time in 1974, I got a letter from Air India saying they had heard of this author writing about Bombay without ever having seen the sub-continent, so would I like a flight there in exchange for whatever publicity there was to be made? Immediate reaction: marvellous, now at last I can overcome the financial difficulties of staying in India for adecent period. Subsequent reaction: Oh God, but what if those real smells, those real crippled beggars, those real lepers so appal me that I can no longer write about their city? A justifiable fear. Holding imaginary worlds in your head is achancy business at best.
But I thought eventually that it would be chicken indeed to turn down such an offer. So on 12 October 1974, with eight novels, three radio plays and four short stories about Inspector Ghote behind me, I set foot for the first time on Indian soil. On landing, I had intended to say, if possible not aloud, ‘One small step for Harry Keating, a giant stride for Inspector Ghote.’ But instead, struck as if by an immense hot, damp wash-cloth by Bombay’s post-monsoon humidity, all that emerged was amuttered ‘Cripes.’
However, I spent three splendid weeks thereafter learning alot, mopping up atmosphere, filling notebook after notebook and finding there was not so much to correct in my notion of the city – only, rather, things to enhance what I had managed to put into my subconscious and thence onto the pages. Everything was more than I had believed. The colours were brighter. The clamour was louder. The rich were richer. The poor were, yes, poorer and occasionally more outwardly wretched than I had been able to conceive of. Yet I was able to accept that. My fears had proved grou dless. I credit the power of the imagination. I had seen in my mind’s eye the worst, if not quite the whole, already. I suffered no crippling culture shock.
In fact, I followed up that first visit with another soon afterwards. I had had the temerity to put to BBC Television the idea of making adocumentary about this writer who had, for so long, chronicled the life of a Bombay detective without ever having seen his stamping ground, and who now at last was doing so. The BBC had taken up the idea, but tactfully left me to make my first visit unencumbered. Now, seven months later, we pretended to maks that visit again. In between and during filming, I filled yet more notebooks. And I had abonus. As a strand in the documentary, we filmed the work of the Bombay police as it really was. So I got to see, amid much else, the office, the ‘cabin’ of the head of Crime Branch CID, Ghote’s boss. I got to interview him, too, and Deputy Commissioner Kulkarni said, on air, ‘I would like to have Ghote on my team. He has the essential quality of being able to put himself into the mind of the criminal he is seeking.’ Delicious praise.
But some of Ghote’s everyday circumstances did have to change as a result of what I saw. His boss’s rank shot up from Deputy Superintendent to Deputy Commissioner. His desk had mysteriously become glass-topped, losing the whorled, scratched and ink-stained top it had had as at the opening of the story ‘The Not So Fly Fisherman’, relic of school desks where I had sat learning amongst other more forgettable things the elements of English composition.
Ghote’s home, too, had to undergo a sea-change. In my earliest days with him I had read of houses in Police Quarters somewhere. But what I had failed to realise was that in incredibly crowded, sea-surrounded Bombay, where property values now compare with Manhattan, police officers, however high their rank, live in flats. So the house Ghote once occupied became for a while simply a ‘home’ and eventually took on bit by bit the characteristics of a flat, such as the ones in which flattered – and flattering – Crime Branch inspectors had entertained me.
So, how would all I had learnt affect what I was to write about Ghote after India? I worried. So I decided to try my unprentice hand on a short story. ‘Inspector Ghote and the Noted British Author’ has in it a version of a case Crime Branch was handling at the time of my visit, with the addition of a visiting author (one of the Bombay papers had described me with the delightful expression of the title) who makes more of a nuisance of himself than I hoped I had done, and is rather fatter than I hope I was.
When I had written some dozen pages of the story and Ghote was still in that cabin I now knew so well, receiving orders, I began to realise that visiting the scene of the crime has its pitfalls as well as its perks. I had put into those pages every detail of that big room, the positioning of the chairs in front of the desk (significantly different in Indian offices, but …), the map on the wall and what it showed, even the names of the police dogs on the duties-board. And it was then that I understood that absence from the scene can be a help to the writer; automatically cutting down the dross that obscures the picture. I had to go back and be pretty severe with the blue pencil. But in the story I was now able to show a side to Ghote, until then not in evidence, that he shares with real-life Indian police officers, the ability to obtain answers at the end of a fist. Or of an open slapping hand. It is something he and I do not have in common.
I gave the first post-India novel a background I had scented long before but had hung back from using till I had had a chance to see the real thing – Bombay’s film world, the filmi duniya as, picking up a few words of Bombay Hindi (a fearful bastard language), I had learnt to say.
Luckily, I had had an introduction to a film distributor who in turn introduced me to one of the superstars of the Bombay studios. Thus when Inspector Ghote became infected with an echo version of the dizzying ambition that is apt to afflict quite ordinary men and women who get caught up in the swirling spiral of stardom, I had in Filmi, Filmi, Inspector Ghote plenty of circumstances to place him in. He goes, for instance, to a star’s party – ‘Come. Come, Mr Keating,’ my star had said to me. ‘A small party, sixty-eighty people’ – and that affair is truthful to reality in every particular. On the other hand, when the star in the book is late for the auspicious ceremony that starts a film, the mahurrat, which must be held to the minute, it was my idea to have the clock stopped in the studio. And afterwards I think – I think – I heard this was done in reality.
Bit by bit, then, Ghote was learning about himself and about life. Or I was learning about Ghote. Sometimes a lot, sometimes just an extra detail, such as the chewy paans that can (filled with aphrodisiac and thus called ‘bed-smashers’) cost as much as a hundred rupees. They are to be found in the story I wrote for broadcasting in 1976, ‘The Wicked Lady’. Originally this was to be a pilot for a series where the authors would interrupt just before the dénouement and invite listeners to guess who done it. Shamelessly, I had pinched a plot from Agatha Christie and Indianised it. The series was abandoned, so I turned the tale into a straight story. It proved to be the last about Ghote for some years, while instead I contributed tales about a charlady sleuth, Mrs Craggs, to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.
Back in his novel life, in Inspector Ghote Draws A Line, the poor fellow – in the unlikely disguise of Dr Ghote, research scholar – is sent to the home of an ancient and cantankerous judge deep in the Indian countryside when the aged relic is threatened with assassination. There my alter ego came to ponder (with