The Body in the Billiard Room (Crime, Penguin) [Mass Market Paperback]

H. R. F. Keating (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This brief, entertaining novel, the 17th featuring Bombay's Inspector Ghote, finds the dauntless detective summoned to the hill station of Ootacamund ("Ooty") in South India, where he must locate a "diabolically ingenious murderer." A former ambassador, Surinder Mehta, calls upon Ghote to probe the death of Pichu, billiards marker at the genteel Ooty Club, gathering place for well-to-do Indians and English. Pichu had been found sprawled in the middle of the billiard table, stabbed in the heart; the murder weapon is missing, as are many of the club's silver trophies. Aspiring "Great Detective" Ghote puzzles over this troublesome case with Mehta, an aging crime novel buff who doggedly defends his theory that Pichu's slaying occurred because he was blackmailing some frequenter of the club. As Ghote stalks a motley group of suspects, he despairs of solving the homicide until the culprit's identity comes to him in a most unlikely fashion. Admirers of Keating's light, diverting mysteries will not be disappointed.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics); First Printing edition (June 1, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0140101713
• ISBN-13: 978-0140101713
• Product Dimensions: 7 x 4.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,666,521 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3.0 out of 5 stars Goodbye to all that, June 14, 2002

By 

frumiousb "frumiousb" (Amsterdam, the Netherlands) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Body in the Billiard Room (Crime, Penguin) (Mass Market Paperback)

For the first half of this book I was irritated as heck-- it seemed as though Keating were doing a memory lane romp through all the Agatha Christie-land, with Inspector Ghote being forced to labor under every hackneyed assumption about detection to ever come out of the genre. Towards the end, however, it became a very sad book-- more about the death of empire and the passing of an age than anything else. There was something so majestic in the final moments that I was willing to forgive its other sins and excesses, grievous though they were.

Ghote is summoned from Bombay to solve a murder at the Ooty Club-- the last bastion of colonial India. He needs to determine who left a servant dead in the middle of the billiard table and what all the motives are in the little enclave out of time.

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars In British footsteps, May 28, 2006

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Roger Brunyate "reader/writer/musician" (Baltimore, MD) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Body in the Billiard Room (Crime, Penguin) (Mass Market Paperback)

To call this a meta-mystery would be too pretentious for such a light-hearted book, but that's in effect what it is. The detective, Ghote, an overworked and very insecure Bombay policeman, has been invited to a former exclusive Birtish colony in South India by a man who is steeped in classic British mysteries. Having read about Ghote's prowess (presumably in other books by Keating!), he assumes him to be the rightful heir to Holmes and Poirot, and presents him with what appears to him to be a classic locked-door mystery: a body on a billiard table. His first briefing contains a sentence to the effect "Of course we assume that the fact that the billiard-room window was smashed and the club's silver trophies stolen is merely a trick to throw us off the scent." And so it goes. Ghote goes through the book haunted by this flattery as a great detective of fiction, and does to a certain extent follow the pattern, but in the end comes up with a solution that nonetheless fits the more prosaic norms of routine policework!

As a matter of personal disclosure, I should confess that I did not read this book in the original, but rather in Spanish translation while working in Central America. My own cultural and language shift may have heightened my appreciation of the similar shifts in the book, as Ghote is sent from his familar Bombay not only to a virtually foreign part of his country, but also to a living relic of a different era, and a vanished colonial culture. Since my own father was born in India, the son of one such government official who must have frequented clubs like the one in the book, and since I too have become an expatriate of a different sort, I found the picure that Keating paints of post-colonial India to be rather touching.