Dick Francis: Rat Race

It comes as something of a relief to have read a Dick Francis novel which I can't immediately recommend as a flawless small masterpiece.

Rat Race is very good indeed. As with Smokescreen he refreshes the horse racing mileiu by making his hero peripheral to it — in this case he is the pilot of a small plane that carries trainers, owners and jockeys to the race tracks. And the flying world is beautifully evoked.

But Rat Race comes with a couple of semi-fatal flaws. 

Both of these flaws relate to a character called Chanter (great name). Chanter is a hippie art teacher who is in the book as a spoiler for Nancy, who is the object of Chanter's affections as well as the hero's. 

Now, Chanter is an interesting and  amusing character. 

He wears utterly outlandish costumes (one described as a "dark green chenille table cloth" with a hole in it for his head), which stretch the bounds of crediblity. 

But, despite that, he's surprisingly three dimensional. A big boost to this feeling of reality is the fact that Nancy doesn't entire abjure his attentions and even, on some level, fancies him a little. Plus the fact that Chanter "really can draw".

No, the problem with Chanter is the way he talks.  

I first noticed this issue in Smoke Screen with a young American character. Now, normally Dick Francis's dialogue is spot on. 

Besides being vivid, amusing and informative it is also authentic. Hs horse-racing people, film makers and (in this novel) aviation folk all speak in an utterly convincing way.

I assume this is because Francis had a chance to observe such people, and listen to them, at close quarters. Not so with Americans and hippies, sadly.

The American in Smokescreen kept saying things like "sure" and "" in exactly the way that real Americans don't. (The way to nail American dialogue is to have them say things like "gotten" where an Enlgishman would say "got". The great Nigel Kneale knew this.)

And here Chanter says things like "You're a drag, man. I mean, cubic". Now, it's not impossible that such things were uttered at times by real live hippies. But they much more often came out of the mouths of dreadful cardboard stereotypes. 

Strictly from Cliché City, man. Or should I say Trope Town?

Anyhow, this is the only Achilles heel I've detected so far in the writing of Dick Francis, who remains a genius and my hero. 

There is one more problem with Rat Race, though.

This also relates to Chanter. What happens is that our hero and the alluring Nancy are getting closer and closer to, ahem, consumating their relationship... when this is suddenly kibboshed by the sort of arbitrary and far fetched misunderstanding which is a staple of bad romantic fiction. 

So she runs off (we think) with Chanter for a while, before everything is sorted out and normal service is resumed.
  
I would by no means advise you to steer clear of Rat Race just because of these minor imperfections. 

The book also features the most sustained and nail-biting setpiece of suspense writing I've encountered in the novels of Dick Francis (and possibly anywhere). I'll only tell you that it involves an airplane.

There are also the breathtaking sudden moments of unexpected violence. Francis really is a master of the form. And here he breaks new ground with his beautifully realised evocation of pilots and flying.

Despite the Chanter factor, I found Rat Race so gripping that I almost missed my station while reading it on the train.

(Yet again we have the admirable Jan-Willem Hubbers to thank for the stylish cover that begins this blog, with the photo by Colin Thomas. the Dick Francis Library cover is from Waterstones. The dynamic image photo image of the jockeys racing is from Fantastic Fiction. The green bomb cover is from Biblio Dot Com. The very nice first edition cover is again from Ash Rare Books. The painted cover is by Greg Montgomery and is from the artist's own website.) 

Philip MacDonald: More Colonel Gethryn

Anthony Ruthven Gethryn (the middle name is pronounced 'riven') was the detective protagonist created by the gifted British novelist and screenwriter Philip MacDonald. MacDonald is now largely, and undeservedly, forgotten.

And the Gethryn novels, possibly with the exception of his earliest outing, The Rasp (1924), are still worth reading.

The Choice is the fifth novel in the series and was published in 1931. Interestingly, it begins as a classic 'locked room' type murder mystery, but then soon modulates into a chase thriller before returning to the locked room mystery at its conclusion. 

MacDonald was an intelligent and imaginative writer and the way he blends and bends genre conventions is altogether admirable.

The Choice (aka The Polferry Mystery and The Polferry Riddle) also foreshadows the final, and perhaps finest, Gethryn adventure The List of Adrian Messenger in the way it presents a race to stop a killer completing a sequence of assasinations, and to work out the reason for his murderous spree.

It also prefigures a couple of the murder methods in that later novel — the small boat drowning and the spooked horse. For a little while I even thought that the motivation behind the killing of the victims on the list would be the same in both books.

But MacDonald is much too good a writer to duplicate himself like that and, thankfully, The Choice eventually explores very different territory to The List of Adrian Messenger.

One thing about the Gethryn novels; even though he is a sleuthing genius, the police are never treated like dolts. There is an attitude of mutual respect — and affection — between Gethryn and the Scotland Yard officers.  This was even true of the first novel The Rasp. 

(I was perhaps a little hard on The Rasp in my earlier post. It did feature some excellent, vivid characterisation. Like the effeminate, corrupt private detective Mr Pebble, who only features on about one page but makes an indelible impression.)

And on a police procedure note, I was intrigued to see that even in 1931 the police issued the familiar caution: "Anything you tell us..." "I know, I know, may be taken down and used as evidence against me." 

Elsewhere in the novel, MacDonald is up to his old trick of rendering the dialogue of the lower orders phonetically, for the amusement of the reader. However, to his credit, he actually does a reversal of this procedure here when a taxi driver is asked to describe his fare. He says the man was a 'toff' and goes on to mimic the toff's voice as it commanded him: "Drave me lake L to Jook Squaw". Translation: "Drive me like hell to Duke Square."

MacDonald actually has quite a good ear for this idiomatic stuff, and now I've read an example of him using it to mock the upper class as well as the working class, it sits a lot more comfortably with me. 

And there's some fine little touches of descriptive prose: a floorboard is torn up "with a little crashing scream."

Incidentally the Mayflower Dell copy which I read, featuring the yellow lamp, is very misleading showing as it does the bloodstained cut throat razor. The whole point of the story is that the razor is mysteriously missing. But this isn't just artistic licence, it's fundamentally inaccurate in other ways. I won't say any more, except to add that the Black Dagger Crime edition, with its red cover, is much more on-target.

I'm keen to read some more Anthony Gethryn adventures. And if you're wondering what the image of the automobile is about, it's a French Voisin of the same vintage as the one Gethryn drives. (Also a favourite motor of the architect Le Corbusier.)

(Image credits. The generic but striking green, white and black Crime Club cover is from Fantastic Fiction. The beautiful hardcover dustwrappers, both UK and USA, are from the wonderful Facsimile Dust Jackets. The Vintage paperback with its jigsaw design (I'm beginning to realise this was a very stylish series) is from eBay. The red razor blade cover — much more relevant than some others — is from The Bunburyist, a blog which features a perceptive post about this novel by Elizabeth Foxwell. The Mayflower Dell yellow lamp cover is again from eBay and is exactly the copy I bought and read. The radiator of the Voisin is from Beloblog, where I learned about the Le Corbusier connection.)

Dick Francis: Smokescreen

I'd like to thank Mark, a reader of this blog, for recommending that Smokescreen should be my next Dick Francis novel.

I read it and it's dynamite. I am more and more impressed with Francis. His stuff is so good — thank god there's so much of it to read. 

There is an interesting development and expansion in these novels. Although they all  feature the world of horse racing, Francis varies this formula by not necessarily making his protagonist part of that world.

So we have Edward Lincoln, nicknamed Link, hero of Smokescreen. He is, of all things, a movie star.

Now, this is a potentially disastrous choice of milieu and character, but the formidable Dick Francis pulls it off. He writes as knowledgeably about film making as he does about horses and jockeys.

Indeed, professional filmmakers admire the authenticity of his writing on the subject.

Another possible disaster area is the unusual location of the story. South Africa. 

I assumed Smokescreen would just be a breezy thriller set in an 'exotic' location and that the political and racial nightmare of the country would be ignored. But, again, our author is far too clever for that. He cannily addresses the whole issue by letting one of his South African characters launch into an obtuse defence of her country — thereby subtly offering a critique of it.

But to hell with politics, this is a thriller and an outstanding one. The nerve wracking sequences of violence and suspense come out of nowhere and nail the reader utterly. I couldn't stop devouring the book. It was kind of an agonising pleasure.

The characters are also beautifully depicted, and given considerable depth and authenticity. 

For example, Link has a brain damaged young daughter. In any other genre novel she would be allotted a huge chunk of the plot, and probably receive a miracle cure at the end. But here she is just briefly mentioned, to give a bittersweet three-dimensional quality to our hero's life. To make us care about him.

These sort of details lend the book an indelible vividness and a sense of reality.

Best of all, Smokescreen features a blithe psychopath (to use Charles Willeford's phrase) of the kind who used to feature so memorably in the novels of John D. MacDonald. 

A really chilling bad guy, to set against the likable and sympathetic hero.

And, as I've come to expect from Francis, there's notable moments of wit, perceptive writing, sharp observation and excellent dialogue.

Here we have the cinematographer admiring an attractive young woman: "Conrad took in her colour temperature with an appreciative eye."

Elsewhere a poised, snobbish woman learns that her friend is terminally ill: "her grief showing through the social gloss like a thistle among orchids."

Or: "A couple of vultures... perched on a nearby tree like brooding anarchists awaiting the revolution."

More Dick Francis, please.

Incidentally, the cover photo looks like some kind of stirrup...

It's a handcuff. 

(Note to blog reader Dawn Over London: I hope you enjoyed Nerve by Dick Francis. Smokescreen is well worth a look, too, as you will have gathered.)

(Image credits: As is traditional, I used one of the boldly graphic Colin Thomas covers as the main image, and it's borrowed from Jan-Willem Hubbers' fine website. The stylish and apt  "blue moon" cover is from eBay. The somewhat dull first-edition clapper board cover is from Ash Rare Books.The excellent photo of Dick Francis with a horse is from his Wikipedia entry. The yellow Pan cover is from Biblio.Com's Dick Francis page. The nice (though somewhat misleading — this book isn't much about horses, or about shooting at targets at all — did anyone even read it?)  'Dick Francis Library' cover is from Waterstones.)

Philip MacDonald: The First and Last of Colonel Gethryn

Colonel Gethryn is Anthony Gethryn -- he hates to be referred to by his military rank. An intelligence officer in both World Wars, he consults with the police on an informal basis.

He is Philip MacDonald's detective hero and featured in a sequence of some twelve novels which began with The Rasp in 1924 and ended with The List of Adrian Messenger in 1959.

I started with the last book, and then proceeded to the first. It was an unconventional procedure, but an enlightening one.

By the time he wrote The List of Adrian Messenger (great title, by the way), Philip MacDonald was a writer fully in command of his craft with almost half a century of experience, and it shows. This is a taut, expertly plotted thriller with evocative locations, memorable characters and a compelling villain.

The bad guy here is reminiscent of the monstrous antagonists in Thomas Harris or John D. MacDonald. 

Indeed, the scheming ruthless psychopath killing for gain could come straight out of the pages of one of John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee novels.

The List of Adrian Messenger is a race-against-time thriller where Gethryn has to work out who the victims are, and why, and identify the killer and stop him. It's beautifully done and well worth a read. It has hardly dated.

The same can't be said of The Rasp, which as I said was published in 1924 and was for decades regarded as a masterpiece and a classic of crime fiction in the great tradition.

The Rasp appears to be MacDonald's first solo effort. His earlier works were two novels under the pseudonym Oliver Fleming, written in collaboration with his father Ronald MacDonald -- a name which, to the modern reader, seems hilarious.

Given that The Rasp is effectively his first novel, and that Philip MacDonald was still three years away from his masterpiece Patrol, I guess one should cut him some slack.

However, I found The Rasp a major disappointment. It is a whodunnit and features a 'locked-room' style puzzle murder. Unfortunately, the solution to the puzzle wasn't sufficiently original, convincing or ingenious to impress yours truly.

This is in complete contrast to MacDonald's Rynox, written in 1930, which was also a locked room puzzle, and is a work of sheer genius which had me chuckling with awestruck delight.

Much worse than the weakness of the central conceit in The Rasp is the gooey romance which encumbers the book (in fact, three gooey romances). This gives rise to some of MacDonald's most unfortunate prose. I was particularly amused by the line "a dark proud face whose beauty was enhanced by its pallor."

But, as I said, within three years MacDonald would be writing the brilliant hard-boiled prose of Patrol. And even here in The Rasp there's much excellent writing, as when he describes the "low angry mutter of thunder."

And the other early Gethryn novels are by no means to be ignored. I'm currently reading the fifth one, from 1931, and it's turning out rather well.

I'll report about it soon. 

(Note: I wish I could have included a link to the great Thomas Harris/Hannibal Lecter website Hannotations. But it has vanished and the real estate is now occupied by some jerks who want to offer links to "Lebanese Girls" and "Funny Funny Pictures". Like I'm going to click on those. Hannotations was a magnificent resource and if I'd known it was going to disappear I would have printed out every page. On the other hand, John D. MacDonald is very well served online, and Steve Scott's The Trap of Solid Gold, referenced above, is informative, detailed and a labour of love. Also, there were too many good Travis McGee websites for me to link to them all above. Check out this one by S. Rufener and also the handiwork of the admirable Book Slut.)

(Image credits: The striking black and white Bantam paperback of The List of Adrian Messenger (by Sanford Kossin, I think) is from Good Reads. The groovy German The List of Adrian Messenger is from Prisma 631 on Flickr. The Vintage jigsaw cover of Adrian Messenger is from Amazon. The Vintage jigsaw cover of The Rasp is from Paperback Swap. The wonderful early dustjackets of The Rasp, one British and two American, are from the magnificent Facsimile Dust Jackets site. I urge you to shop there.)

Zen and the Art of Murder

Dashiell Hammett once wrote an essay about the most common — and annoying — mistakes in crime fiction.

Number one on the list was for the writer to confuse an automatic pistol with a revolver. Hammett said: "A pistol, to be a revolver, must have something on it that revolves."

He wrote those words in 1930, but it's a lesson that still needs to be learned. Perhaps it seems like a nit-picking detail, but if the author gets something like this wrong  it spoils the whole illusion of reality which is essential to the artifice of fiction: disbelief ceases to be suspended.

Which is why I was so disappointed when Michael Dibdin's marvellous Italian detective Aurelio Zen digs out a pistol obtained by his father when Zen was a little boy. It's a Beretta 9mm revolver.

Beretta are famous for their automatic pistols. They did, eventually, manufacture a couple of revolvers for the American market in the 1980s, but there was never a 9mm model and the period piece described by Dibdin simply doesn't exist.

And that's a real pity, because in other respects Cabal, the novel in question, is a wonderfully diverting piece of crime fiction and Aurelio Zen is a great creation.

Moving through the corrupt world of Italian policing and politics, Zen is himself an amiably semi-corrupt individual. When he is summoned by the Vatican authorities to assist them in covering up a murder, his response is pretty much an enthusiastic 'sure thing'.

This is such a refreshing change from the unbending square jawed crusaders who dominate the literature.

And Dibdin writes very amusingly: "The stairwell was dark, and the timer controlling the lights had been adjusted for the agility of a buck chamois in rut rather than a middle-aged policeman going about his dubious business."

In this case, his dubious business is framing a suspect. But it turns out someone has arrived before him and (very ingeniously) murdered the man...

I also loved Zen's girlfriend Tania, who works in police administration, but in fact spends her days using the office's resources to run her thriving food wholesale business, selling local delicacies from her home town.
 
What's more, the way Dibdin handles his shadowy, sinister conspiratorial Vatican sect in this novel should be adapted as a model for other writers — notably Dan Brown.

It would make for a lot more fun.

There are eleven Aurelio Zen books. 

The BBC did some adaptations for television, based on the first three: Ratking, Vendetta and Cabal. I missed these and the series was cancelled after one season.

I now regret both these facts.

(Note: the Dashiell Hammett essay I quoted was published in the Saturday Review of Literature on 7 June  and 3 July 1930. Astonishingly, it isn't available on the internet, though there's some excerpts here. Until some kind soul types it out and posts it, you'll have to find it in a physical book, like Richard Layman's excellent Hammett biography Shadow Man, on pages 122-125. It's well worth a read. And the rare hybrid automatic-revolver Hammett mentions is described here.)

(Image credits: the book covers for Cabal, Ratking and Vendetta are all from the Faber website. Nice designs, folks. The DVD cover is from Silverdisc.com. The stylish Shadow Man cover is from Amazon. Buy a copy. They're going cheap.) 

Dick Francis: Nerve

Another cracking thriller by Dick Francis.

I'm currently writing a series of novels about a record collector turned detective. Someone asked me how many stories there can be concerning mystery, murder and mayhem revolving (ahem) around records?

My reply was, Dick Francis managed about three dozen concerning the world of jockeys and horse racing.

But I didn't realise how damned good they were.

Nerve concerns a jockey, Rob Finn who is just starting to build a reputation when that reputation is cruelly and deliberately sabotaged.

It is a riveting story of his attempts to salvage his career -- and gain retribution against his tormentor (Finn describes his plan of revenge to his cousin: "I told her. It took some time. She shivered. 'He didn't know what he was up against when he picked on you'.")

And Francis can really write. His characters and background detail are beautiful. 

Finn is the only non-musical member of a family of professional musicians. This is from a description of their sitting room: "A cello and a music stand rested side by side like lovers along the length of the sofa."

Elsewhere he describes a man struggling to lead a powerful, impatient horse "hanging on to his leading rein like a small child on a large kite."

There are many other lovely concise bits of scene setting. He talks about "the freezing dawn" and "a damp raw January afternoon". And immediately the reader is there.

Nerve was written in 1964 and there is an interesting air of Cold War terror shimmering subtly in the background.

Amazingly, it was only his second novel.

Many thanks to my blog reader Frank Fair for pointing out that Stanley Kubrick was also a Dick Francis fan (pity he never adapted one of the novels) while another one was script writing guru Syd Fields, who praised Francis' depiction of film making.

Another reader Mark recommends Smokescreen so I'm delighted to say I've now obtained a copy of that, and I'm reading it next. Many thanks.

(Also, I'm hypnotised by this review of 1965's Odds Against, from The Sun: "a spot of kinkiness in the delectable shape of a sado-masochistic femme fatale.")

I love Francis' terse evocative titles, by the way.

(Image credits: Once again the striking Colin Thomas photo cover is from Jan-Willem Hubbers excellent and useful website, a terrific Dick Francis resource. The great first edition cover is from Wikipedia.
The Penguin edition with the stylish graphic design by Cato is from The Woman in the Wood's photostream on Flicker. The grey painted cover is by Greg Montgomery and the artist's website is here. The yellow Pan cover is from LeLivre.com via Antiqbook. This is the copy I read and I don't recommend it because the cover painting gives too much of the plot away, particularly the back cover. Do they think people read books without turning them over?)

Jack the Giant Writers

The best written movie I've seen since Side Effects is, somewhat to my surprise, Jack the Giant Slayer. 

Interestingly, one of the writers on Jack is Christopher McQuarrie, who wrote (and directed) Jack Reacher which featured in this blog a few weeks back.

The other writers credited are Darren Lemke who worked on Shrek Forever After, Dan Studney and David Dobkin.

It's a splendid movie visually, with some great design reminiscent of Terry Gilliam.

The script is clever, witty, neatly structured and features some excellent characterisation. 

Nice dialogue, too. 

At one point during the terrifying climb up the beanstalk Jack (played by Nicholas Hoult) suffers a fall which knocks him out. 

He groggily returns to consciousness, staring up at Ewan McGregor and Eddie Marsan.

"Am I dead?" says Jack.

"Not just yet," says Ewan dryly.

The action sequences are particularly well planned. Someone actually sat down and thought, "If I was a giant, how would I attack a (human sized) castle?"

Some strong performances, too, from a really high calibre cast... though I thought a couple of the accents were a bit silly.

I was startled to read a rather bitchy article about this picture saying that it's a box office 'flop'. Hard to credit, for such an excellent film.

The same article goes on to compare it to 'notorious cinematic bombs' Battleship and John Carter. (In fact, both these movies did well internationally, though they weren't successful in the USA.)

Well, I'd like to go on record as saying that, like Jack the Giant Slayer, these were both good films and notably well written, especially Battleship, which was a model of screenwriting -- and of making feeble subject matter work on the big screen.

Anyway, if Jack really is a 'flop' (it seems to be performing strongly as it enters its fourth week at my local cinema) I urge you to rush and see it on the big screen, while you can.

(Image credits: Ewan with his crossbow is from Fantasy Film Scoop. Nicholas Hoult climbing is from Never Ending Radical Dude. Eleanor Tomlinson looking fetching in her armour is from Imp Awards. And the stone faced drain is from The Coventry Telegraph. No, honestly.)