because "American publishers had rejected my previous four titles as being 'too British.'" He did research (he later acknowledged, "from books, from the occasional Indian art-film featuring the city [Bombay], from scraps of friends' talk, from TV glimpses, and from the pages of the Sunday edition of the Times of India, which I had begun to take") and consulted with a friend that he described as "an Englishman just back from Bombay." He had intended the first book as a one-off, but The Perfect Murder "unexpectedly won the Golden Dagger award for 1964, and an Edgar Allan Poe award in America where, yes, it did get published." As Keating describes in the introduction to Inspector Ghote, His Life and Crimes: "...one morning, some time 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?" He accepted and landed in Bombay on 12 October 1974, spending three weeks there. Evelyn Hervey In the mid-1980s Keating published three novels with Weidenfeld under the pseudonym Evelyn Hervey. DCI Harriet Martens Harriet Martens is a detective chief inspector who earns the nickname "The Hard Detective" because of the tough image that she adopts to survive in the masculine world of UK policing. This toughness inspired her to start a "Stop the Rot" campaign that successfully reduced local crime but angered some violent criminals to the extent that they start murdering her officers. In the second book she falls in love with a fellow officer while investigating the murder of the UK's top tennis player. With her job under threat she fights to prove her worth in the third book. Other novels 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. The first of these was The Rich Detective (1993) in which Detective Inspector Bill Sylvester of South Mercia Police investigates an anonymous allegation that a local antiques dealer is murdering old ladies after persuading them to change their wills in his favour. In The Bad Detective (1996) Detective Sergeant Jack Stallworthy is a corrupt police officer who is