Showing results by narrator "Sam Dastor" in All Categories

This was no ordinary murder, for the victim was Frank Masters, millionaire and philanthropist. The case was bound to attract much public attention. But Inspector Ghote finds that his demands for evidence are met with nothing but lies and evasions.

The Railway Detective faces his most dangerous adversary yet. It is 1852, and Inspector Robert Colbeck and his assistant Sergeant Victor Leeming are faced with their most complex and difficult case to date. As a train speeds over the Sankey Viaduct, a man is hurled from a carriage and plummets into the canal below. It later transpires that he has been stabbed to death. With no papers by which to identify the man, the detectives' investigation is hampered from the start. Suspecting that the victim may have come from continental Europe, Colbeck and Leeming take the case to France where a new railway is being built by a British contractor.

Derby Day at Epsom Downs and a multitude of people crowd to watch the races: dukes and dustmen, bishops and beggars, privileged ladies and prostitutes. The gamut of Victorian society, though, is also a hotbed for crime and crooks of all kinds. With the country a-flutter in the run-up to this national occasion, events reach fever pitch when a disembodied head is discovered on a passenger train at Crewe; the first in a murky course of events that takes in murder, fraud and race-fixing.

When the engines finally met, there was a deafening clash and the Brighton Express twisted and buckled, tipping its carriages on to the other line. It was a scene of utter devastation. October 1854. As crowds of passengers rush to make the departure of the London to Brighton Express, a man watches from the shadows nearby, grimly satisfied as the train pulls out of the station. Chaos, fatalities and unbelievable destruction are the scene soon after when the train derails on the last leg of its journey.

Yorkshire 1855. When Colonel Aubrey Tarleton walks into the path of a speeding train, he is crushed to death on the track. The famous Railway Detective, Inspector Robert Colbeck, is immediately put on the case to determine why such a well-respected man would have resorted to suicide. Tarleton's wife had recently gone missing, but was the colonel responsible for her disappearance? It's up to Colbeck and his trusty sergeant Victor Leeming to uncover the truth.

London, 1841. Mr Jeremiah Blake and Captain William Avery, recently returned from India, are invited by Viscount Allington to examine the particulars of a grisly pair of murders. Two printers from the seditious gutter presses have been brutally dispatched in distinct but similar circumstances. Fearing the deaths will stoke the fires of Chartism sweeping the capital, Allington hopes Blake and Avery's determination to uncover the truth will solve these crimes and help restore civic order.

No great composer’s story is more predominantly happy than Haydn’s, though even his has its share of clouds. A classic rags-to-riches tale, it sees him move from humble beginnings through decades as a liveried servant to his emergence as the most popular and successful composer of his time. One of the healthiest and least neurotic artists in musical history, he did more than any other single figure to pioneer the symphony, the piano sonata and the string quartet - and he was the first truly great practitioner of each.

On the far eastern borders of the Soviet Union, in the sunset of Stalin's reign, soldiers are training for a war that could end all wars, for in the atomic age man has sown the seeds of his own destruction. Among them is Pavel Gartsev, a reservist. Orphaned, scarred by the last great war and...

In Delhi a small baby lies alone and abandoned. The product of IVF and surrogacy, she had been so coveted - until she was born with a fatal illness. Thousands of miles away in London, Kate and Ben are desperate for a baby. As Kate suffers another miscarriage, she knows something has to change...

In a small, provincial town in the heart of India, a politician’s wife has done her husband’s career a great service, by dying under suspicious circumstances. That the corpse and the trail have been cold for fifteen years hasn’t saved Inspector Ghote of the Bombay CID from being sent to investigate. But what chance does he have when his chief suspect is so powerful, when the whole district is against him, and when a holy man is fasting to the death to protest his prying?

The First Inspector Ghote Mystery. It is just Inspector Ghote’s bad luck to be landed with solving a seemingly perfect murder at the very start of his career with the Bombay police. For in this baffling crime there is no corpse…. But he also has the cunning tycoon Lala Varde to contend with and the mysterious theft of one rupee from the desk of the Minister of Police Affairs and the Arts.

When Robert Pomeroy, a young undergraduate at Corpus Christi College, finds a letter slipped under his door in the early hours of a rainy day, he flies into a panic. He hurries to the railway station. But he doesn’t reach his destination alive. Inspector Colbeck and Sergeant Leeming are called upon to investigate this tragedy on the railway. It soon becomes apparent that Cambridge’s hopes of success in the forthcoming boat race rested on Pomeroy’s shoulders.

The assignment was routine - to bring a notorious confidence trickster, arrested in Calcutta, back to Bombay for trial. But Inspector Ghote devised a plan to make it almost a holiday - but Ghote's fellow passengers soon prove anything but restful.

In his proud new position in the prestigious Bombay Police Crime Branch, Inspector Ganesh Ghote sees his career finally take off with the prospect of only the most high-profile murders to investigate. Unfortunately, the Assistant Commissioner of Police has other ideas and chooses to keep Ghote busy with interminable paperwork. Waiting to be given his first case, Ghote doesn’t expect to find it planted in his waste bin....

British detective writer H. R. F. Keating was best known as the creator of Inspector Ghote of the Mumbai CID. He won two Crime Writers’ Association Gold Daggers, and in 1996 was awarded the Diamond Dagger for lifetime achievement. Included here are dramatisations of two of his most popular murder mysteries, set in 1930s India and Victorian London, plus a short clip from Radio 4’s Bookshelf featuring the award-winning author.