Hot Money - Dick Francis

I can’t remember the last time I read a who-dun-it. It probably must have been another of Dick Francis’s book, Longshot. And that, while it had a murder to be solved, and definitely had some parallels with Hot Money, did not have as much a detective-novel flavor as this book did.

Hot Money begins with a family tree; nothing as complicated as Bagginses or Took family tree from LOTR, but quite a long list for your usual family. At the head sits Malcolm Pembroke, the affable, lucky, brilliant and spectacularly rich gold-trading man, who has a strange disposition to get married all the time. He has five wives. Not simultaneously, but one-after-another, and each of them have kids and some of the kids have kids. The last two wives, Coochie, the best of the lot it seems, and Moira, the last one, are dead. And Moira has been murdered. And then, someone tries to kill Malcolm. Hot Money, especially in the volumes that Malcolm owns, is a much desirable target. And everyone in the family stood to gain from Moira’s and then, Malcolm’s death.

Malcolm approaches his estranged son, Ian, to be his bodyguard. And the relationship with Ian and Malcolm really lights up the book. The protagonists are the highlight of any Dick Francis book. And this one has two of them, and in a father-son pair, and their banter and arguments and just about any interchange, makes the book quite delightful.

Ian is an assistant horse trainer and an amateur jockey. And Malcolm seems to have discovered a passion for horses, and goes about spending millions of pounds on colts, much to the anguish of his family, most of them who badly need the cash. With such hostilities brewing for his father, Ian knows that the only way his father, and himself, can be truly safe is buy nabbing the killer.

The plot of the book is quite tight. And the chemistry between various characters extremely well written. Even though every individual family member doesn’t get too much page-time, so to speak, their characters are handled quite well, considering the number of characters and overall book-volume.

Hot Money was the second book of the omnibus containing Flying Finish. And Hot Money has as well and truly wrapped a conclusion as Flying Finish’s is incomplete. The mystery is solved eventually (obviously) and there are no over-dramatic twists, and it’s pleasing to read a very well balanced and a real detective story. Not that Agatha Christie style of detective fiction where every page and paragraph is about that body that was discovered is not fun. But in the real world, where solving murders is the responsibility of the police really, real people do not quit their jobs and stop racing horses trying to come up with schemes to arrest murderers. And the worldly treatment of a murder story makes the book a very interesting read.

Flying Finish - Dick Francis

Bored-with-life protagonists are nothing new in Dick Francis books. But there is a different element to them every time which does preserve the uniqueness of every character.

Henry Grey, a Lord who has no fascination about his own title, works in a bloodstock agency, pushing around papers. A loner, cleanliness zealot, an amateur jockey, and a bloody good pilot: Henry is bored with his job and takes up a position as labour in a transport agency, responsible for transporting horses from one country to another. His job requires docking horses in planes, taking care of them in the journey, unloading them at their destination, and clearing customs in the destination country; all of which, as it turns, out, is a very methodical procedure.

The story progresses as Henry takes a job transfer from his desk job to the more menial horse handler job, gives a cold shoulder to his families demands of marrying into a respectful family and settling down as a “Earl” ought to, deals with his father’s death, flies planes, does favours for friends, and eventually falls in love. Nothing major seems to be happening in the story for a very, very large portion of the book. The Sin City type monologue tone of the book keeps you hooked. And considering Dick Francis books are no voluminous epics or anything, reading them, when there does not seem to be much action, is not as painful as it is with a lot of other books. Yes, there are a couple of people who have disappeared in these trips on which horses are transported, but Dick Francis underplays it so much that even though you know the story is precisely about that, you don’t expect much from it. And you do begin to want something to happen to break the boring monotony of Henry’s life.

And the book plunges headlong into the climax, with very little warning. And all of a sudden it’s all happening. A reader feels as dazed as Henry Grey as he tries to battle it out with the bad guys. And there is a gripping bit of writing in the end as Henry Grey finds himself flying a plane without any communication gear, in the thick of the night, lost in the European skies. And Dick Francis does some fantastic piece of narration about Henry Grey flying an airplane, something that I might not have been interested considering the technicalities involved. But Dick Francis keeps it sufficiently simple for the non-pilot readers, as I expect most are, and gets the complexity of Henry Grey’s predicament through to the reader.

And then, the book ends. The climax draws to as sudden an end as it began. There are five lines which explain away everything and the book ends. It was bizarre. The characters were great. The story was quite good. But the build up to the climax and the smoothing to the conclusion was just not there. I just turned over the last page and there was nothing more. That’s that!

Blood Sport - Dick Francis

If you’ve got a Dick Francis two-story omnibus, then you might as well read both the stories at one go.
Blood Sport, as far as Dick Francis stories go, had quite a convoluted plot. And for the first time amongst the four books of his that I have read, I felt at a loss as the racing terminologies started raining. And that did have quite a ruining effect for me despite the story itself being quite fast paced.
The hero, Gene Hawkins, is a ‘civil servant’. The implications of the job title and what he really does for a living are never really clarified. That aspect of Gene hangs like a constant mystery throughout the book, which really adds a lot of appeal to the character. Is he an assassin? A spy? Espionage agent? Police? It’s anyone’s guess. His talents, though not up at par with, say, Jason Bourne, are still pretty damn good at uncovering truths. But his objective is not, as he says, to punish, but to prevent. I wish Gene wasn’t as suicidal however. But Dick Francis does a splendid job of imposing a suicidal trait on such a strong and determined character. And when you read the story you really do realize how the internal struggle of Gene impacts the direction of the path he takes, and the flow of the story. Dick Francis gets down to being poignant. Can’t say I expected it from a writer of horse racing thrillers. But he does a good job at it.
So Gene, given he is some sort of a spy or something, is asked by his employer, Mr. Keeble to look for Dave Teller’s missing horses. He lands in America, in a conquest to find Chrysallis after a murder attempt on Dave Teller, which probably prompted Gene to take the assignment up. Gene, with his half thoughts of killing himself, takes it up with a shrug as one more thing to keep him from killing himself, probably thinking that if he could live and save a life, it might just be worth it.
Chrysallis is the third world class stallions to be stolen in a fairly short space of time, the other two being Alyx and Showman. And Gene, as he retrieves Chrysallis, unearths a shocking and an elaborate fraud, which would shake up the world racing community and risks his as much as his friend’s lives. It’s good that he carries a lugger around in an under-arm holster. You never know when you’d need it. Especially in Gene’s line of work!

Forfeit - Dick Francis

Horse Racing, a brilliant protagonist, and firm, dark, writing which sounds exactly like the narration of Sin City or Max Payne in your head. That makes a very palatable package. And that’s the formula of Dick Francis. His writing is not complicated, but he creates an air of a sort of a calm thrill. If you know what I mean. You don’t exactly imagine a double-woofer, stereophonic death metal music when you read the climax of Dick Francis novel. Nor are deaths unnecessarily graphic. But the thrill is abundantly present.
Forfeit is about James Tyrone. He is a scandal stirring, scam busting reporter at a magazine called Blaze. But this time, the scam that he is trying to prevent threatens to get a bit too nasty for his taste, and a bit too personal as well.
The scam is brilliant in its simplicity. Get a horse piped as a favourite. Gather huge amounts as bets in his favour. And then prevent him from running the race and pocket all the bets since the race counts as a forfeit. As James Tyrone, or Ty, tries a hand at preventing it from happening one more time, he finds himself at the receiving end of physical harm, blackmail, and overconsumption of alcohol. And it’s up to him to get out of the situation he finds himself in. I say, that’s a complicated job to have!
Again, as in most Dick Francis books, the plot is nothing sensational. I mean, you’d think, it’s eventually going to be a plot about horse racing and how sensational it’s going to be? There are obviously not going to be any nuclear missiles that will be fired between nations. But Dick Francis keeps you interested throughout. And that’s where this book succeeds as well.

Risk - Dick Francis

This is the story of a righteous accountant, Roland Britten, who is also a jockey. And it is horse racing which is his first love. But being righteous, he has his share of enemies, the people whose scams he has caught as an accountant, and subsequently reported to the authorities.

It is one of them, apparently, who gets Roland kidnapped and confined in a small dark room. He escapes, and then again gets kidnapped and gets confined in another small dark room. Interim he tries to figure out who was out to get him, and his kidnappers, since they aren’t exactly professionals, do leave a trail which Roland manages to unravel. But that might just have been a very bad idea.

A large chunk of this story is about the confinement of Roland Britten. And while the narration isn’t as fear inducing as say Stephen King’s Misery or Gerald’s Game, it fits well into the genre that Dick Francis writes.

The story flows with an easy narration and witty dialogues and is entertaining. Something that you can read very quickly and feel satisfied about it. Though I must say that the accounting practices in England are very strange indeed. Or atleast they were pretty strange when the book was published. Roland Britten goes about matching a lot of numbers around and about which is not something that any accountant or an accounting firm would do. Well, whatever the case may be, it does make for an entertaining story and a very plausible premise on which the plot is built.

Longshot - Dick Francis

An omnibus of Dick Francis Novels at a book store made quite a deal. A 2-book omnibus at Rs.199. What a steal! Not that I would have bought any other author just because he was cheap. Dick Francis happened to be one of the favorite authors of my best friend, who himself is a book enthusiast like I never could be. Plus, horse racing is actually quite a fascinating topic and even a mediocre plot around that is interesting because of the so many new things you learn about a very glamorous sport. So I picked up Longshot, and got down to reading it.

The plot of Longshot… well, is a bit weak in the sense of your regular crime novel. It involves the death of a nobody, an investigation that would never have a global repercussion, and even the most radical conspiracy theorist would fail to link up the crime in the book to “higher powers”. But such is the story. Dick Francis himself takes a jab at this fact in the book, when his Police Detective sighs with resignation that the dead body they found turns out to be an ordinary stable girl.

Enough of the spoilers already!

The climax, while it is fitting to the story, is not quite that nail-biting a finish as you would’ve liked. And the end, though logical and humane, with no ridiculous dues-ex-machina coming into play (ok, maybe a slight one), does not give that satisfaction of triumph of good over evil.
But despite the novel being only a regular story, I enjoyed every bit of it because of the protagonist. He is a writer… Ok, I hear you say, one more author chooses to have a writer protagonist. Isn’t that the easiest, you ask. Well, perhaps. But the protagonist here is an adventurer, and has written a series of books on surviving in hostile environs. And a lot of tips that he shares through the book keep you hooked, while the story progresses around that. So maybe I would not rate the plot too highly, but when I combine that with the protagonist and his livelihood, Longshot gets a “Thumbs Up”. So if you are the kinds who want some wholesome reading and are not overly concerned about the adrenalin factor of a story as long as the book keeps you entertained, you will like Longshot. To end with a corny line… do give Longshot a shot, it might just hit the bull’s eye.