Farewell, Inspector Ghote
Breaking and Entering

H.R.F. Keating writes:

The great sprawling city of Bombay, Inspector Ghote's stamping, ground since his first appearance, in The Perfect Murder in 1964, is now the city of Mumbai and a very different place, in a very different India, from what it was when, without ever having set foot in India, I began to write the book that eventually gained a much-prized Gold Dagger. So it has been gradually borne in on me that Ghote's days might at last be over.

He didn't seem to be, modest chap that he is, a candidate for a plunge over the Reichenbach Falls, or a tumble from the top of the Gateway of India. Nor even could he be seen as having reached retirement, with the Commissioner of Police placing a garland on shoulders still bony with anxiety after some 36 years case-solving. Why? Well, officers of the Indian Police Service quit at age 55, and Ghote could hardly have reached the rank of inspector when only nineteen

However, with Ghote deprived of a Holmes-like quasi-death, or Morse-like definite one, I am presented with the tiny possibility that after the final performance there could one day be a positively last appearance. And then even a positively, positively We'll see. Certainly, I've found it hard to part with my old friend, not to say alter ego.
It was not, in fact, until I was some way into Breaking and Entering, when it came to me that the story needed the presence of Axel Svensson, the Swedish police official who dogged, Ghote's steps in his first case, that I released a rounding-off farewell was actually taking place that I saw that this twenty-second Ghote book (if you count a short-story collection and The Murder of the Maharajah, in which Ghote was a last-line twinkle in his father's eye) was to be the last.

Axel sahib, much older now, and perhaps more of a figure of fun, helped this final story past a few critical moments, as well as serving to remind the reader - Watson to a more self-doubting, Holmes - of that first success. I like to think his presence will give some reminiscent pleasure to all those readers who have over the years written to ask when 'the next Ghote' will be coming. But, if there never is another one, I have by no mean s let my trusty word-processor slip from my nerveless hand. India has passed away: England awaits.