skygiants | Entries tagged with dick francis

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 the rest of this discussion is spoilers )

Recently we had a friend visiting for a week, and then shortly afterwards went up to stay at a another friend's cottage in Maine for the long July 4th weekend. In addition to the novel phenomenon of spending concentrated time with beloved non-household humans I've also seen a great deal of the ocean, and lots of birds and seals and a baby whale, and generally had a truly wonderful time! but very little of it has been spent on the internet so my booklogging backlog does grow ever longer.

However, both

genarti and

jothra are firmly convinced that Vacation Is A Time To Read Dick Francis Novels. Therefore, upon arrival in Maine a serious consultation took place among the Dick Francis aficionados and I was subsequently handed two paperbacks and informed that these were the Dick Francis that had been hand-selected for me. I managed to finish one of them, Straight, (the other will have to wait for another future vacation later in the summer), which was indeed very enjoyable, in large part because it read delightfully like an escape room write large.

The plot of this one is that the jockey protagonist's kind but secretive elder brother has unexpectedly died in an accident and left his jewelry business to the jockey brother, mysteriously missing either 1.5 million dollars OR 100 diamonds. The secret of what happened with the diamonds is buried somewhere in the brother's house full of weird mystery keys and hollow books and locked cabinets, OR in the brother's mysteriously encoded computer files which may have passwords written down somewhere in the notebooks he left, OR in one of the brother's weird and extremely specific gadgets that do things like 'measure the specific width of a room' and 'beep exactly at 4:20 every afternoon for unspecified reasons that may tie into one of the other mysteries ...'

Admittedly there's probably a bit too much plot to really adapt this book into an escape room, but you could probably also make a very good puzzle-adventure computer game to much the saame effect. Anyway, Jo told me she picked this one because she also thought I would like the jewelry-store staffer who get to come into her own professionally (nonromantically) helping the jockey learn about gemstones, and I do like her quite a lot! But my actual favorite character is the jockey's temporary chauffeur -- the jockey needs a chauffeur because he broke his ankle badly on the racetrack immediately before the action began and spends the entire book on crutches and having to be really conscious of what he physically can and can't do so as not to make the injury worse, another factor I think is quite well done -- his antisocial neighbor who barely speaks and refuses to answer the carphone but nonetheless gets really smug every time he participates in solving the mystery and also saves the protagonist's life several times; IMO the main love interest of the book.

To the Hilt is one of

genarti's favorite Dick Francis novels, so I ended up checking it out earlier this year when I needed to test my e-reader's library book functionality and couldn't remember anything else on my list that was immediately available.

To The Hilt is about a man who just wants to paint the core of the human spirit as represented through golf and instead is forced by circumstances to solve an embezzlement case, temporarily stealing a racehorse along the way. To be honest I have already forgotten much of the details of the actual plot; the important elements that I do remember:

- protagonist Alexander Kinloch's intense and profound Golf Art

(I painted the passions of golf as much as its physical scenery, and I'd learned it was the raw emotion, the conflict within the self, that sold the pictures [...] It was golfers who bought my work, and they bought it for its core of struggle)

- Chris Young, Alexander's PI sidekick/bodyguard, a Master Of Disguise who spends most of his time onscreen posing as Alexander's glamorous secretary and/or girlfriend

(Emily eyed Chris with obvious speculation, not doubting his/her gender but wondering if the tall leggy dark-haired presence in black tights, short inappropriate skirt and baggy black sweater was a serious girlfriend, in view of the glue that kept him ever and only a short pace away from my side. Unsurprisingly, Alexander and Chris appear to be responsible for more than half the Dick Francis fanfics on the AO3)

- the vehement feud between Alexander's uncle, a Scottish laird who has hidden several priceless historical treasures in and around his home, and the elderly museum appraisers who are determined to capture them for cultural heritage institutions No Matter What It Takes; this is absolutely irrelevant to the plot but significant to the book because the elderly museum appraiser is also, delightfully, Alexander's Artistic Muse

- the amazingly over-the-top sequence at the end in which ( spoilers )

Of all the Dick Francises I've read so far, this is definitely the one that surprised me the most; I vaguely knew to expect and look forward to Chris Young, but had no way to prepare for the passions of golf.

Various persons of my acquaintance have been trying to convince me for some time to read Dick Francis, but ever since I had that dream about Dick Francis books I have deliberately abstained on the principle that it's clearly much funnier if I never read a Dick Francis book, ever.

Or at least this was the case until a few months ago, when

genarti were in the car, and she started explaining to me the Dick Francis plot in which Our Hero has to do high-pressure detective work while undercover on a train where there's a bunch of horses AND a dangerous criminal AND ALSO a troupe of actors pretending to be ordinary horse-racing train passengers WHILE IN FACT conducting a week-long murder mystery dinner theater.

skygiants: I cannot believe the number of Dick Francis plots you've attempted to explain to me over the years without ever telling me about the WEEK-LONG MURDER MYSTERY DINNER THEATER!

genarti: I mean, yes, but it seemed like you didn't really want to read Dick Francis books and I didn't think it would be fair!

The point is: I have now broken my vow and read The Edge, the Dick Francis book set on a train featuring a week-long murder mystery dinner theater.

Our Hero is a nice young man who is secretly heir to a vast fortune, but prefers to spend his days undercover as a member of the SECRET RACECOURSE POLICE. Are the secret racecourse police a real thing? I don't know, but this was introduced on the first page and it was already everything that I had expected a Dick Francis novel to be.

Anyway, his latest job is to stop a Serious Racing Criminal from destroying the good times of everyone on the BIG CANADIAN RACING TRAIN, whence the horses and the murder mystery dinner theater. His bosses want him to go undercover as a Young Racing Millionaire. Instead, he decides to go undercover as a member of the murder mystery acting troupe who is, himself, undercover as a waiter -- i.e. all the other waiters think he's there as an undercover actor, and keep asking him when his big scene is coming up in between waiting tables. This is an amazing plot premise and Dick Francis should feel really good about it, especially when it involves our competent racing cop secret millionaire hero getting increasingly stressed out about a.) the impossibility of foiling or even guessing the villain's plans while b.) also making sure everyone has enough ice for their drinks, why is everyone always having FOUR COURSE meals, being a waiter is quite difficult it turns out??

Besides the actors, the horses, and the villain, other important players include:
- the hypercompetent project manager who serves as the love interest whenever either she or Our Hero have spare time, which is really not very often, she's kind of busy coordinating a major event?
- the Canadian cop who is Our Hero's contact on the ground, except he almost never actually contacts the Canadian cop, he keeps in touch with him by calling his elderly mother, who is having the BEST time being the secret contact in an Important Criminal Racing Case
- The Richest Millionaire In Canada and his Troubled Family, who are all on the train For The Good Of Canadian Racing
- tremendous amounts of lovingly described beautiful Canadian scenery

I enjoyed this book a lot, but perhaps the oddest thing about the reading experience was how much it made clear to me how my expectations have been trained on mysteries and Gothics. As a result, every time Dick Francis spent a fair amount of page space on a sympathetic or innocuous character, I'd start looking at them suspiciously: 'this horse-racing couple is Too Nice, they're CLEARLY not what they seem!' 'Our Hero has noticed the innocuous fake villain of the murder mystery dinner theater mingling inconspicuously with the passengers nearly ten times already, I bet he's wrapped up somehow in The Plot!'

But in fact all of my suspicions were completely unfounded; the villains are all very obviously villains from the moment they're introduced, and the suspense comes one hundred percent from the how and not at all from the who. I'm assuming this is where the actual genre line comes in dividing Novels Of Suspense from Novels Of Romantic Suspense from Mystery Novels; in mysteries, you're obviously expected to guess who the murderer is, while in Gothics/Romantic Suspense the most obviously villainous person invariably turns out to be the hero.

In a dream I had last night, I was trying to explain Dick Francis novels to someone.

Note: I have never read a Dick Francis novel.

"OK," I said, "look, it's not a series, the protagonists are all different -- they're all mystery novels about horses but the horses play a different role in each book, like, the horses are always plot-relevant but they're not the same ... horses ..."

"That doesn't make any sense," he said, "how can you write twenty different mystery novels that aren't a series and are all about horses?"

So I tried to pull up

rachelmanija's Dick Francis tag to demonstrate, but something was wrong with the internet and it kept redirecting us places I didn't want to go, and the end result was that he never did believe me about Dick Francis and it was deeply frustrating.

This is the only dream of mine I've remembered in months. Apparently my subconscious is very keen to explain that it doesn't believe Dick Francis novels exist.