Keating, H R F
Entry updated 18 December 2023. Tagged: Author.
(1926-2011) UK author, active from the late 1950s, almost all of his work being detective novels, notably those featuring Inspector Ghote of the Bombay CID, though he also wrote some ghost stories. Novels of sf interest include The Strong Man (1971), a Dystopian tale set on the Atlantic Island of Oceana south of Ireland; its name echoes George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Oceana's tyrannical dictator Mylchraine, despite his manipulation of his subjects' addiction to witchcraft, finds himself threatened and eventually overthrown by the eponymous protagonist, who in turn is disappeared by the Revolutionary Council, members of which had sat out the war in Dublin. In A Long Walk to Wimbledon (1978), a man treks laboriously across a Near Future London to visit his estranged wife after a Disaster has devastated the capital. She dies before he can reach her. [JC]
Henry Reymond Fitzwalter Keating
born St Leonards-on-Sea, East Sussex: 31 October 1926
died London: 27 March 2011
works (highly selected)
- The Strong Man (London: Heinemann, 1971) [hb/uncredited]
- A Long Walk to Wimbledon (London: Macmillan, 1978) [hb/Paul Wright]
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