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Another trip, another Dick Francis novel! This time

ep_birdsall and I were in the Poconos with my parents and I read Longshot, the other book that was hand-selected for me in Maine.

The plot of this one is very funny to me because it truly is Dick Francis taking the framework of a governess gothic and then just substituting one of his trademark stoic hypercompetent manly heroes in for the governess. The protagonist of this one is writer John Kendall, who has decided to quit his job writing survival guides for an adventure tourism company and attempt to make it as a Novelist, but his advance is running out and he has nothing to live on so he takes a job as live-in biographer for an eccentric millionaire racehorse trainer single dad for the promise of room and board and a small advance.

Soon John finds himself not only working on the biography, but doing the cooking and grocery shopping (the eccentric millionaire racehorse trainer single dad and his plucky teenaged son live entirely on freezer pizza), taking the plucky teenaged son on survival outings in the woods while teaching him valuable life lessons, bonding with the eccentric millionaire's racehorses, becoming a trusted confidante to everyone in the vicinity, and in general filling a hole in the household's heart that they never knew that they had until he showed up.

Unfortunately (as is also so often the case for a Gothic governess) someone has just turned up a dead body on the premises, and it seems like one of the lovable family members and assorted racetrack personnel that John has just spent half the book bonding with is probably the killer!

The survivalist Gothic governess plot is genuinely really charming -- there's no actual on-page romance (and shape of the plot aside the relationship with the eccentric millionaire racehorse trainer single dad is not particularly slashy either, certainly not as compared with some other Francises I've read) but Kendall's friendship with the teenage kid is very cute without being cutesy, and the thread in which everyone in the house gets obsessed with Kendall's Wilderness Survival Tips and then the things they learn thread their way through the plot is extremely fun to read.

That said, I do also want to fight this book to a certain degree, in large part because it's gotten in the middle of a discussion I'm always having with Dorothy Sayers. The thing about Dorothy Sayers is that, as she writes a detective, she is constantly queueing up this argument with herself about whether thing that a detective does -- attempt to get justice for a dead person, and, in doing so, destroy the lives of one or more still-living persons -- is in fact morally justifiable. Francis, in this book, is also sort of facing up to this argument and comes down, interestingly enough for a novel in which there is a murder and the murder is eventually solved, on the opposite side: Kendall decides that he will not reveal the murderer (who has just tried to kill Kendall and, when that failed, killed himself instead to avoid the consequences); that truth for the sake of truth and justice and closure for the dead is not worth the cost in suffering to the living who would be hurt by the revelation.

Which is a fair and interesting conclusion to make, except that the book weights the scales because we never see anybody who is grieving the dead girl! We're told she has concerned parents, but they're never onscreen; nobody we do see onscreen remembers her fondly; both she and the other dead girl in this book (there's no mystery about who killed her but there's also a to-me-appalling lack of consequences for it) are somewhat misogynistic portrayals of sexually aggressive teenagers with bad judgment. The book is sorry for its dead girls but it doesn't really care about them. Nobody cares about them, they're not people the way that the people our protagonist has gotten to care about who loved this murderer are people, so of course he comes down on their side. So I have the obvious problem with the mild misogyny, but I also have a problem with the fact that Francis takes a swing at this argument that I am already primed to think about from talking quite a lot about Sayers recently and does not do it fairly. His stakes are stacked.

Unrelatedly, I do find it really interesting that both this book and the last Francis I read featured villainous artisans whose brilliant talent in their chosen field does not justify their bad moral decisions.

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I've been rereading a lot of Francis recently (though not this one, which clearly I ought to) and I've been really struck by the amount of emotional connection, friendship circles, people caring about each other, that runs through them that I didn't really remember.

Interestingly, the ones I read include a couple where the hero looks at it, goes "The legal system will not provide justice here." and deals with in a way that is emotionally satisfying, legally unjustifiable, and often pretty ruthless (though generally not fatal.)

Yeah! I'm trying to think if any of the ones I've read yet have featured the legal system or the police in a major/helpful role, and drawing a blank -- this one actually has the most sympathetic police officer yet, in that he befriends our hero and is presented as intelligent and interested in the outcome, and the protagonist very consciously chooses to draw ranks with His People rather than The Law, which I would find unquestionably sympathetic if His People were not a wealthy racehorsing family who have already very explicitly and openly wiggled out of major consequences for one murder --

are somewhat misogynistic portrayals of sexually aggressive teenagers with bad judgment.

That sounds like Josephine Tey just jagged through the novel. Since I continue not to care about spoilers, is that how the calculus is intended to be palatable to the reader, or is the death of the murderer part of it, or what?

I think it's primarily the death of the murderer -- the protagonist does not make a decision on-page about what he's going to do wrt his revelation until after we've learned about the killer's self-inflicted 'accident' -- so there can be no further death at his hands, combined with the social stigma the reveal would inflict on the killer's wife and child. Which I get! I'd just feel better about that calculus if, for example, we'd ever seen the grieving parents of the murder victim on the page or gotten any sense that they factored into the equation.

I'd just feel better about that calculus if, for example, we'd ever seen the grieving parents of the murder victim on the page or gotten any sense that they factored into the equation.

Understood.

This book sounds like one of the rare cases where Francis just blew it. I am all for complicated sympathies, but I am sort of out of tolerance for disposable girls.

[edit] I remembered that since leaving this comment, I re-read Margery Allingham's Coroner's Pidgin (U.S. Pearls Before Swine, 1945), which does not involve exactly the same question of the cost to the living, but it is the one where Campion finds himself investigating a death in connection with someone who is not a close friend of his, but a friend of long standing nonetheless—enough to keep referring to him absently by first name in formal situations—who is aristocratic and war-heroic and well-liked while the murder victim was lower-class, possibly blackmailing, definitely embarrassing, and not much mourned by anyone except her husband. Their entire social circle wants Campion to make the problem go away, Campion himself is just trying to get home and see his wife for the first time in three years, it would be overwhelmingly easier not to get involved, certainly not to confront the increasing possibility that someone he's known since they played cricket against one another at school is capable of murder and worse; there wouldn't be a novel if he didn't, of course, but the novel at least thinks about it. It thinks about the husband's grief and it thinks about Campion's own reluctance and his awareness that he's going to smash up a lot more than a family's illusions if he's right and perhaps even if he's wrong. Plotwise, I think it blinks slightly at the last minute, but not emotionally. So the Francis shows up badly against that, too.

Edited 2021-08-01 20:07 (UTC)

I am all for complicated sympathies, but I am sort of out of tolerance for disposable girls.

Exactly my feeling, yes.

Are there Gothic murder mysteries that care about "young girls"--let's say under age 25? I haven't read a ton, granted--certainly fewer than you! and this question is for anyone who may have thoughts--but there's casualty of plot, casualty of rake/etc., and narrative focalizer to reassure reader; I'm having trouble thinking of any where dead girls are/were humans. Like, this may be one of the very few subgenres where middle-aged women actually outrank young women for narrative care...?

I think you're right that middle-aged women outrank in golden-age detective novels, but I'd actually argue that twentieth-century Gothics (as distinct to murder mysteries) tend to have a lot of focus on teen-girls-as-people -- in large part because the protagonist is often a teenage or twentysomething girl, and if there's also a dead teenage or twentysomething girl involved, there's an element of identification/doubling with the present (for ex. Michaels' Ammie Come Home, in which a contemporary teen is haunted by the ghost of a dead one; Marilyn Ross' extremely bad The Locked Corridor, in which the heroine is attempting to solve her identical twin sister's murder; and, of course, Stewart's The Ivy Tree, in which doubling doubling spoilers.)

I think I've had the bad luck to meet mostly here-only-as-excuse-for-vulnerable-focalizer young women, then. It is good to know that the prevailing treatment in some books allows them to be people!

The "Gothic governess plot but with hypercompetent survivalist writer as the protagonist" does sound super interesting, and I'd totally read a series of books that are just Gothic governess plots but with protagonists from wildly different genres.

a fair and interesting conclusion to make, except that the book weights the scales because we never see anybody who is grieving the dead girl! We're told she has concerned parents, but they're never onscreen; nobody we do see onscreen remembers her fondly...they're not people the way that the people our protagonist has gotten to care about who loved this murderer are people, so of course he comes down on their side That is stacking the deck. This kind of reminds me of the second Hilary Tamar book, where the murder victim is also a young, unexceptional woman who's pretty much only tolerated by everyone, and no one is grieving that heavily over her death, but Julia still pushes for an investigation into her death at a time when everyone thought it was suicide/an accident. And by the end it's clear she was a pretty unpleasant person, but still distinctly a person.

SAME! tbh! (I also still very much want someone to take the Gothic governess plot and rewrite it for the start-up age. A recruiter called you and got you a job working for a suspicious new company ... but is there a dead stakeholder in the attic?!?)

Yeah, you can't say that Hilary Tamar ever forgets to draw her victims thoroughly in their character and in their context -- the books are very funny, but it's always people in there.

A recruiter called you and got you a job working for a suspicious new company ... but is there a dead stakeholder in the attic?!?

I mean, this just clicked for me that at least two of the original canon of Sherlock Holmes stories are Gothics seen from the outside, a device which is sufficiently not overplayed as to be something people should do more often (I am thinking of "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches" and "The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist," regularly cited in Tumblr discussions about Holmes caring about people, damn it).

Edited (details, details) 2021-08-01 19:28 (UTC)

I also still very much want someone to take the Gothic governess plot and rewrite it for the start-up age. A recruiter called you and got you a job working for a suspicious new company ... but is there a dead stakeholder in the attic?!?)
Omg I want this so much! A fresh college grad accepts a job from a company she's never heard of, but they pay really well for what the role is and offer free food and board at the company HQ and apparently the owner is a reallyyy rich and reclusive person. Then it turns out "company HQ" is an isolated giant mansion in the middle of nowhere ("exclusive and venerable" was the recruiter's description), her new teammates are all kinda shifty, and there are weird noises in the night that they say are just the night owl programmers ("it's nothing, you know how odd coders can be!")

I also still very much want someone to take the Gothic governess plot and rewrite it for the start-up age. A recruiter called you and got you a job working for a suspicious new company ... but is there a dead stakeholder in the attic?!?

Hmm, maybe Ex Machina is kind of a Gothic from this perspective! (Movie with a tech bro villain making female robots which I've only seen once but think is very underestimated, much as the tech bro hero is like... I mean I see structurally why you're the protagonist but I care about you by far the least.) There's a kind of wife in the attic figure who escapes and wrecks everything, and there's definitely stuff with doubling, and also race stuff you could probably do a Wide Sargasso Sea on!

I do love the survivalist gothic bits of this, especially the cooking and teenager bonding.

I think that Come to Grief, one of my favourite Dick Francis books, grapples with the problem inherent to private detection more successfully (from a literary and ethically point of view; there are significant character consequences) - the fourth paragraph states that the problem with being a private investigator is that occasionally you end up “smash[ing] peaceful lives” but it’s also the third in one of Francis’ only two series and I wouldn’t start there.

Sayers’ debates are also operating against a background of having the death penalty, which I think for her really highlighted the stakes. I really like Unnatural Death not just for Miss Climpson but for that bit where Peter points out exactly what his investigation has cost everyone.

The teenager bonding is so good! I loved the parts of the book where we were just hanging out with John and the kid and the kid's friend (Coconut?) watching them More Or Less Succeed in Kid-Oriented Survival Training Tasks the most.

Unnatural Death has a lot of 1930s problems to a modern eye but it is genuinely one of my favorites -- it really does grapple with some of the tensions in the best (by which I mean uneasiest) fashion, whereas when it comes up later, in the Peter/Harriet ones, the argument always shifts to 'well is it fair for HARRIET to be upset about it' which is in fact a different argument.

That said, I do also want to fight this book to a certain degree, in large part because it's gotten in the middle of a discussion I'm always having with Dorothy Sayers. The thing about Dorothy Sayers is that, as she writes a detective, she is constantly queueing up this argument with herself about whether thing that a detective does -- attempt to get justice for a dead person, and, in doing so, destroy the lives of one or more still-living persons -- is in fact morally justifiable. Francis, in this book, is also sort of facing up to this argument and comes down, interestingly enough for a novel in which there is a murder and the murder is eventually solved, on the opposite side: Kendall decides that he will not reveal the murderer (who has just tried to kill Kendall and, when that failed, killed himself instead to avoid the consequences); that truth for the sake of truth and justice and closure for the dead is not worth the cost in suffering to the living who would be hurt by the revelation.

Which is a fair and interesting conclusion to make, except that the book weights the scales because we never see anybody who is grieving the dead girl! We're told she has concerned parents, but they're never onscreen; nobody we do see onscreen remembers her fondly; both she and the other dead girl in this book (there's no mystery about who killed her but there's also a to-me-appalling lack of consequences for it) are somewhat misogynistic portrayals of sexually aggressive teenagers with bad judgment. The book is sorry for its dead girls but it doesn't really care about them. Nobody cares about them, they're not people the way that the people our protagonist has gotten to care about who loved this murderer are people, so of course he comes down on their side. So I have the obvious problem with the mild misogyny, but I also have a problem with the fact that Francis takes a swing at this argument that I am already primed to think about from talking quite a lot about Sayers recently and does not do it fairly. His stakes are stacked.

Wait, so, it doesn't actually matter how many people a murderer kills? Because the victims will still always be dead and dead people don't count, but the murderer is alive and so that is more important? Vital status is the most important factor?

It has been a while since I read Sayers and only read some of them. my main memory is the time that Lord Peter let someone in his social circle commit suicide to avoid scandal.

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