Sunday, February 28, 2010

Dick Francis, 1920-2010

Dick Francis, one of my favorite authors, died on February 14 at the age of 89. He had been ailing for some time.  He wrote his first mystery, Dead Cert, in 1962; in the nearly 50 intervening years, he wrote more than 40 books. The Washington Post reported that his books sold more than 60 million copies.

I first discovered Dick Francis when I began reading a copy of Banker left unguarded at a family gathering by Louis Massery, my late brother-in-law. I liked it so much that I began working through Francis' previous books, and then reading each new book he wrote. I loved how, despite being murder mysteries, the books had a gentleness to them. His male characters were strong, but not aggressive; cautious, but brave; and sweetly persistent in getting the girl. 

As most all of his fans know, he started out as a jockey, becoming so successful that in 1953 he was chosen to ride the Queen Mother's horses in British races. Riding Devon Loch in the 1956 Grand National, the 35-year-old Francis was 50 yards from winning when the horse inexplicably went down. Some theorize that the horse was startled by the roar of the crowd; others thought he tried to jump a "phantom fence." Whatever the cause of the collapse, Francis' disappointment and injuries from previous falls made him hang up his racing career for good. He wrote an autobiography, and then began writing racing-related mysteries. 

Several years ago, I interviewed Mr. Francis when he came here to Washington, DC, for a book tour. I met him in his suite at a ritzy downtown hotel. He was older than he looked on book jackets and disarmingly sweet--not at all what I had expected of a wildly successful murder mystery writer. He told me that he had never been educated, having dropped out of school to be a jockey. He said that he would write his books in a very rough fashion, and then his wife, Mary, who had a university degree, would fix them up.

In an obit appearing in the Daily Mail's online edition, Graham Lord, Francis' biographer, said that it was actually Mary, and not Dick Francis, who wrote the books. According to Lord:

Mary was a crucial part of the thriller-writing 'team'. Although partly paralysed by polio and suffering chronic asthma and bronchitis, she researched all the books - in the process becoming a computer expert, photographer, accountant, painter and wine buff, even qualifying as a pilot for the book Flying Finish.
Indeed, as his biographer, I am convinced that Francis (who was poorly educated and not at all literary) did not write the books himself. I am sure that they were written by his clever, literate, university-educated wife but published under his name because as a famous jockey he would sell more copies.
In 1980, Mary told me: 'Yes, Dick would like me to have all the credit for them, but believe me, it's much better for everyone, including the readers, to think that he writes them because they're taut, masculine books that might otherwise lose their credibility.'
When I revealed the truth in my double biography of the Francises in 1999, the Mail on Sunday reported that Mary was 'evasive when asked bluntly whether she is the true author.
She said equivocally, "It is not exactly true to say that I write Dick's books ... I could get him to write you a letter and you would see he can write". The amount of sharing we do is, to my mind, sort of private. We would really like people not to press us too hard on this".' The truth is that Dick Francis hated writing and took little pleasure in the success of the books. His first love was horses and he once said: 'My life ended when I stopped racing.'

Several years ago, Dick Francis and Mary moved to the Cayman Islands.  Mary died in 2000, and for several years, Dick did not write any more books.  Recently, he began writing with his son, Felix. Their third collaboration, Even Money, came out in 2009. It centered on betting on horse racing, but also included a long-lost father, a wife with mental illness, and various other plots and subplots. The overly-busy story had a Dick Francis-like feel, but without Mary's influence, it just wasn't the same. 

Friday, February 12, 2010

The First Rule, by Robert Crais (Putnam; $26.95)

I blow hot and cold on Robert Crais. He can always be counted on for a solid detective story, and when I'm looking for a solid detective yarn, I know I can count on his LA-based Elvis Cole series to deliver. But he's no John Sandford or Michael Connelly. I don't yearn for his books, the way I do theirs.

His latest focuses not on Cole, but on his sidekick, Joe Pike. The story is good, but Pike himself is a caricature.  Pike learns from some cops that an old friend, fellow mercenary Frank Meyer, has been killed in a home invasion, along with his wife, young boys, and the nanny.  The cops think Frank must have been involved in something nefarious, because the crime fit the pattern of six previous home invasion/murders where the victim was also a criminal. But Frank lived a clean life, or so Pike thinks.  He sets out to learn why Frank was targeted and to wreak vengeance on those who killed his guy.

Pike has always been the strong, silent type, which is okay for a sidekick, but doesn't work so well for a main character. It's hard to care about a character who refuses to speak. This is a guy who has been on "missions as long as a week, and never uttered a word." A good guy to have watching your back, but not very compelling as a main character. He does warm up a bit when he meets a pit bull and a baby, but these flashes of humanity are too rare to compensate for the over-the-top taciturnity. (If that's not a word, it should be.)


Thursday, February 4, 2010

Recent comments

Two comments from mystery lover DB:

1.  Alan Furst has a new title coming out in June, titled Spies of the Balkans. He is always worth a read. Great atmosphere. DB

2.  Has anyone heard anything about Robert Harris' new title Conspirata? I have enjoyed his earlier works. DB

Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Twisted Tree, by Kent Meyers (Houghton Mifflin;$24)

I have to admit, the cover of this book initially kept me from reading it. The photo of a horse, taken at sunset or sunrise, seemed more like something trying to appeal to the tweens who watch Saddle Club on Discovery Kids than to grownups looking for a good read.  And it wasn't just the cover art that was off-putting: the jacket describes the plot as revolving around the kidnapping and murder of a young woman suffering from anorexia. Like many people, I generally hate books in which children or teens are the victims.  So it's a wonder that I read the book at all.

But I'm so very glad that I did. Twisted Tree is one of the best books I've read in a long while.  I'm hard pressed to choose what aspect of the book I liked the most: the structure, the setting, the language, or the characters.  The weakest part, actually, is the murder plot.  It ended up being almost unnecessary, and the book would have been stronger had Meyers found some other way to unify the vignettes that comprise the book.

So here's the set-up.  Hayley Jo Zimmerman is slowly starving herself, with the encouragement of the people she's met on a "pro-Ana" website. (These are sites on which, unbelievably, anorexics support each other in their quest to continue to lose weight.) Hayley Jo doesn't know that the virtual friend with whom she's become closest (and shared a fatal amount of identifying information) is actually a fat creep who has been murdering other anorexics in the northern plains. By the end of the first chapter, Hayley Jo is basically out of the book.

Each subsequent chapter focuses on someone else living in the area around Twisted Tree, South Dakota. Although each person has had some tangential contact with Hayley Jo in her short lifetime, she is certainly not central to the action. There's the story of Angela Morrison, a young bride (later, the mother of Hayley Jo's best friend) who slowly goes crazy living on a rattlesnake-infested ranch with her husband Brock. Or Sophie Lawrence, who looks to all of Twisted Tree like a saint for tending to her disabled stepfather, while actually tormenting him in private to make up for how he abused her when she was a girl. And one of my favorites: crazy Shane Valen, whose great-grandfather settled the land, and who--well, I'm not going to give his story away.  ("The thing about weird sonsabitches is they stick to their weird," the sheriff muses about Shane. "You can trust them. Normal people keep their weird hid, so if it ever gets out you have no idea where it'll go.")

The aspect of the book that I found the most amazing, however, is how each detail, no matter how small, ends up being significant in some way.  A marble, two dusty golf bags, some old names carved in a school desk--they appear, and reappear, in a way that speaks to Kent Meyers' precision and--for lack of a better word--control over his writing. I cannot even contemplate the effort it must take to keep track of so many of what might just seem like throw-away details. It reminded me of the movie Crash, one of my favorites, where all the stories end up with overlapping details that you don't even pick up on until you see the movie for a second time. In a similar fashion, my second reading of Twisted Tree unearthed details that I missed the first time because I hadn't realized their significance.

If I were Kent Meyers, I would demand that my publisher change the cover art, rewrite the flyleaf, and pay for a huge book tour in which the book gets as much publicity as is possible. This book simply blew me away.