H. R. F. KEATING Murder of a Maharajah

H. R. F. KEATING – The Murder of the Maharajah. Doubleday, hardcover, 1980. Pinnacle, paperback, 1983. First published in the UK: Collins Crime Club, hardcover, 1980.

   If there were an award designed to be given every year to some new mystery in the memory of the late Agatha Christie — there isn’t, and why not? — this is the book that would make Keating this year’s hands-down winner. Not only does it owe a great deal to Mrs. Christie in time, the year 1930, and in exotic locale, India, when that land was still a formidable bulwark of the British Empire, but in atmosphere, characters (some of whom are actually seen reading a Christie novel) and leisurely pace as well.

   The maharajah, never one to be crossed, is also inordinately fond of April Fool’s jokes, but one — a limousine’s plugged exhaust pipe — quickly comes home to roost (backfires?) when a plugged shotgun barrel is discovered to be the immediate cause of His Highness’s demise.

H. R. F. KEATING Murder of a Maharajah

   There are only a limited number of suspects, which should sound familiar, but even so D. S. P. Howard’s investigation into the case makes little initial headway, not even with the most highly enthusiastic help of the palace’s schoolmaster. Not until, that is, in grandly extravagant and artificial fashion — and comes the reminder that very seldom are mysteries written like this any more in today’s penny-pinching economies — an enormous royal banquet is recreated in the smallest detail, staged solely to help a murderer reveal himself.

   Lots of red herrings, you can bet on that, a thwarted romance or two, and a clue I’m willing to wager a bevy of Imperial sandgrouse that you’ll never spot, no matter how earnestly and devoutly you try. And for those who have followed Keating’s long career in writing detective mysteries up to now, there is a last line that is utterly untoppable.

Rating: A minus.

— Reprinted from The MYSTERY FANcier,
       Vol. 4, No. 4, July-August 1980 (slightly revised). This review also appeared earlier in the Hartford Courant.