Jack, the Lady Killer - Softcover

Keating, H R F

3.62

8 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1890208248 ISBN 13: 9781890208240

Publisher: Poisoned Pen Press, 2000

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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.
H. R. F. Keating is best known for his long series of Inspector Ghote mysteries set in India, but Jack, the Lady Killer is something completely different as well as completely unexpected. It is one of the rarest forms known to literature, a detective novel in verse. Inspired by Vikram Seth's brilliantly successful revival of the verse novel in The Golden Gate, Keating develops his rhyme-crime in nearly 300 fourteen-line stanzas. During a writing career spanning forty years, Keating has won many honours, most notably the award of the CWA Cartier Diamond Dagger in 1996 for a lifetime's achievement. Since 1985 he has been President of the Detection Club in succession to some of the greats of British crime fiction, G. K. Chesterton, Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie and Julian Symons.

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Review:

""The great drawback of crime fiction of all types is its tendency to reduce itself to formulas. This applies whether it's Noir or Mayhem Parva, a private eye novel or a psychological thriller. So it's all the more exciting when a genuinely original crime novel appears. H.R.F.Keating has been doubly clever, because the originality of this novel is in form rather than content; and only as the story progresses does the reader realise that the former is subtly influencing the latter. Like Pushkin, Vikram Seth and indeed Byron, he has chosen to write a novel in verse. (His only fore-runner in the genre is Dorothy Porter, whose The Monkey's Mask is a sort of crime novel in vers libre.)
Jack the Lady Killer is set in India but not the India of Inspector Ghote. It's the Punjab in 1935. Most of the action takes place in a small British community. A lascivious widow is murdered. The District Superintendent of Police, the very pattern of an imperialist hero, is in hospital with sunstroke. The task of investigating the murder falls on young Jack Steele, fresh from his English public school and on the threshold of a career with the Imperial Police Service.
How convenient it would be if the murder could be pinned on one of the natives. Unfortunately, however, the murderer must be One of Us one of the handful of suspects who were within the precincts of the club at the time of the murder, and each of whom have secrets to hide. Even the godlike figure of the District Commissioner is not above suspicion. To make matters worse for Jack (if this is possible), an MP is about to visit the Station, bringing with him his niece, a stunningly attractive girl with a habit of asking stunningly awkwardquestions. Only Bulaki Ram, Jack's sergeant, seems able to make the occasional useful suggestion by accident, no doubt, because he's only a native.
In terms of plot, Jack the Lady Killer is a perfect whodunit in the classic mould. (If handled in prose, it could have been a long short story or, with the addition of a few subplots, a full-length novel.) On another level, it is also a coming-of-age novel: one by one, Jack's illusions crumble, not least the illusion about the insignificance of Bulaki Ram. As Jack picks his way through the murky thickets of motivation and pretence, he finds his way painfully towards maturity. On another level still, the book is a perceptive and even-handed critique of British imperialism in India.
What effect does the form have on the content? Keating uses a 14-line stanza and a tight metrical pattern. Oddly enough, the constriction of the form allows a liberation of the content. Verse encourages concision, the telling phrase or syntactical inversion that would be out of place in a prose narrative. It also permits an author to avoid some of the conventional limitations of fictional ""realism."" Moreover, the rhythm carries you forward in tandem with the narrative tension. Just another stanza, you think, and an hour later you discover you have finished the book.
It's difficult to think of another crime novelist who could have written this fascinating and unusual book. As a bonus, it has been beautifully produced by Flambard with some excellent illustrations and a sensible glossary. Highly recommended and the ideal Christmas present for those who like intelligent crime fiction.
--Andrew Taylor, author of the highly acclaimed Roth & Lydmouth Series

From 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.)
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