Henry Reymond Fitzwalter Keating (31 October 1926 – 27 March 2011) was an English crime fiction writer most notable for his series of novels featuring Inspector Ghote of the Bombay CID.
With his fifth novel, Death of a Fat God (1963), he moved to Collins Crime Club, with whom he stayed for the next twenty years.
[4] In the introduction to Inspector Ghote, His Life and Crimes, Keating stated that he was contemplating setting his next detective novel in India because "American publishers had rejected my previous four titles as being 'too British.'"
As Keating describes in the introduction to Inspector Ghote, His Life and Crimes: "...one morning, sometime 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?"
In 1978 Keating published A Long Walk to Wimbledon, a science-fiction novel about a man trekking across a ruined London to save his estranged wife.
In the 1990s Keating wrote several novels about UK police detectives whose human weaknesses adversely affect their work.
In The Bad Detective (1996) Detective Sergeant Jack Stallworthy is a corrupt police officer who is planning his retirement to Devon when a businessman offers him ownership of a hotel on a tropical island in return for stealing an incriminating file from the Fraud Investigations Office at police headquarters.