Where the Francis novel felt somehow contemporary to its time, this is a study in deliberate archaism. The setting is 1930s British India. The plot is a golden-era affair: one murder, a limited list of suspects, a brainy detective, and a litany of clues and red herrings. The prose style is often the sort of lulling repetitiveness that I vaguely think is meant to recall Kipling (vaguely, because I’ve not read much Kipling, at least not recently).

So there’s three archaisms. Why someone would want to write such a novel, I don’t quite know. Affectionate pastiche? Nostalgia? Boredom? Whatever the reasons, we can question the effects.

British India. Hmmmm. Bad enough. The court of a Maharaja, a vastly wealthy hereditary ruler of his own little kingdom, tolerated by the British so long as he remains fairly docile. Hmmmm. Worse. It does allow one to write about lavish banquets and sporting massacres of birds, but it does also seem to force one to write about hundreds of servants with protruding ribs and such, and if one doesn’t show much sympathy for them, one’s reader might start to wonder how harmless the nostalgia is.

Golden-era plotting. Well, not much to complain about here, I suppose, though we probably didn’t need quite so many references to Christie to get the point. Perhaps, actually, the point is a little more subtle, since the references are principally to The Seven Dials Mystery, which is generally held to be a disappointing Christie novel precisely because it departs from the template. No departures here. The suspect list is circumscribed, each is given a motive, each is seen to act somewhat suspiciously, and eventually the detective works it out. I wasn’t enthralled, but it was done well enough.

That prose style. Huh. It’s clearly very deliberate, since it’s so different to that of the other Keating book I’ve read in this series (that one was plagued by the ghost of Wodehouse). It does evoke a certain air and era. But it’s also rather tiresome, I find. Perhaps I was just in a bad mood.

I noted in that last Keating review that he was a well-loved figure in British crime writing, and I don’t want to be mean, so I will just say that this passed a plane journey but is probably past its time.