On the surface, Valentine's Day may appear to be all about love and relationships, chocolate and flowers, but I suspect there are equal amounts of angst, heartbreak and even violence underneath the crepe paper hearts and pink-ribboned candy boxes. Likewise, there's a lot of faux comaraderie and back-stabbing involved with another type of manufactured social event that's really all about shallow displays and profit-motives—namely, beauty pageants. Put the two together and you have Is Skin Deep, Is Fatal, by H.R.F. Keating.
In Keating's standalone police procedural from 1965, night club queen Fay Curtis seemingly commits suicide shortly after passing along a note to beauty pageant impresario Teddy Pariss, who's in the middle of rehearsing the Miss Valentine contest at the Star Bowl ballroom. When Pariss also winds up dead, with a golden-handled paper knife in the shape of a naked female sticking in his back, it's clear his death was anything but suicide.
Soho Police Constable Peter Lassington and CID Detective-Constable Jack Spratt are in on both cases from the outset. But when Scotland Yard Superintendent Ironside's right-hand man is knocked out of commission, Ironside corrals Lassington and Spratt into assisting his own investigation. The Miss Valentine contest provides a gaggle of beauty contestants and various other associates of the murdered Pariss as suspects, and also affords Keating literary bon mots like the following:
The overwhelming impression at the door was of a mass of bits of the feminine, at their most blatant. Mouths, lipstick-shaped in screaming red, unlikely pink, heavy magenta, darted here, there and everywhere, pouting, smiling, sulking. Legs in shimmering nylon and tight-stretched ski pants waved and flaunted. Blouses and hugging jerseys, A cup, B cup, C cup, advanced and flirted. Fingernails in every shade and circumstance of red flickered, pointed, lured and beckoned. Guaranteed personal freshness from spray, bottle and tube clashed and mingled all around. From the chaos, Ironside brought order like a sedulous botanist in a wild garden.
Lassington may be the POV character, but Superintendent Ironside is the star of the show, stage-managing the suspects, clues and histrionics with his unflappable, disarming presence. He would have been an interesting choice for his own series, a la Keating's other popular protagonist, Inspector Ghote of the Bombay CID, except for the fact this is Ironside's last case before retiring to the countryside to tend his domestic rabbits, far from the seamy Soho nightlife.
It's rather easy to guess the culprit due to a giant in-your-face clue toward the start of the book, but perhaps that was Keating's way of preventing the reader from feeling cheated or sucker-punched by the ultimate resolution. It might not be one of Keating's best, but contains his characteristic humor and, as he once said, the manner in which he tries "to convey character through dialogue and forward the story through descriptions of place and situation, but it can only be a snapshot of the particular moment I have reached in the story."
By the way, if you're a fan of Inspector Ghote, on April 7, 2011, according to the author's web site, Penguin Classics will be reprinting four Inspector Ghote titles (with a new introduction by Alexander McCall Smith):
The Perfect Murder
Inspector Ghote Breaks an Egg
Inspector Ghote Trusts the Heart
Under a Monsoon Cloud
and Audiogo, formerly BBCAudio, is preparing new recordings of all four books.
This week's Friday's Forgotten Books feature is being hosted by George Kelley while Patti Abbott is taking a breather, although she'll be back corralling books next week.
I've read several of Keating's books and enjoyed them all. He also published CRIME & MYSTERY: THE 100 BEST BOOKS. It's a little dated (1987) but still interesting.
Posted by: George Kelley | February 11, 2011 at 09:05 AM
Yes, Keating has contributed not only crime fiction stories and novels but much, much more in the way of nonfiction books, reviews and general support of the genre. I contemplated including a lot of that biographical information, but it would fill up a book all its own! For those folks who want more info, be sure and click on the author's web site link above.
Posted by: BV Lawson | February 11, 2011 at 09:22 AM
I had mostly read Ghote stories and the 100 and a few other of his nonfiction works over the years, and I've definitely meant to dig in farther...
Posted by: Todd Mason | February 11, 2011 at 09:25 AM
I'm not sure he's still writing new materials (he's 84, I believe), but there is certainly already a wealth of other fiction and non-fiction to choose from! I'm looking forward to reading more of Keating's work, myself.
Posted by: BV Lawson | February 11, 2011 at 10:02 AM
Another writer I've missed out on.
Posted by: patti Abbott | February 11, 2011 at 11:37 AM
It's OK, Patti -- I look at my towering TBR pile, many of which are books by authors new to me, and then I browse through the library looking for Forgotten Books each week, and realize that if I lived to be 150 and read a book every day, there'd still be untold numbers of authors and books I could never get to. A depressing thought, I suppose. But what a problem to have -- too many books!
Posted by: BV Lawson | February 11, 2011 at 12:34 PM