I enjoyed this very much indeed, though it’s hard to say whether the book really merits that much enjoyment. The thing is, I read a fair few Francis novels in my early teens, so reading them again is an experience infused with nostalgia (this will probably be thematic throughout the 1980s and 90s).
Like most Francis novels, this is set in the world of horse racing. Francis was himself a jockey before turning to fiction, and knows the horsey stuff intimately. The protagonist is Sid Halley, an ex-jockey with an artificial hand who now works as a sort of specialised private eye for equine matters. The plot involves a trio of investigations: dodgy ownership syndicates, possible nobbling of runners, and a conman who’s swindled Sid’s ex-wife (he’s still best buddies with his father-in-law).
A fair amount of this is objectively silly (not least the artificial hand), and there are some ridiculous episodes in the book—an extended escape scene involving a hot-air balloon, for example. Also, that trio of investigations, plus all the stuff about Sid’s own feelings concerning his change of career and a bit of love life stuff, ought to amount to more plot plates than anyone can reasonably keep spinning. And yet Francis manages it. Setting aside the nostalgia and all, I think this is genuinely superbly done. There’s nothing flashy about the writing, nothing profound about the novel’s themes, and this is all to the good—it’s just a masterful, fun, pacey thriller, if you don’t think about it too hard and enjoy being taken for a ride.
As I said, I think I enjoyed the ride all the more for the fact that I used to read these things a lot (I’m genuinely unsure if I read this one all those years ago). One thing that struck me on re-reading is that young teen me had confused two alien worlds. As in many Francis novels, the milieu is upper-middle to genuine upper class. The father-in-law is a retired admiral, who Sid meets for regular drinks in a London club. There are various characters with titles, money is made in offhand ways that require wealth to start with, and everyone drinks champagne all the time and eats food with French names. There’s also a lot of casual bed-hopping. This was all completely foreign to young me, but I think I mistook its unfamiliarity for the unfamiliarity of adulthood. I somehow implicitly thought that all of this was what grown-ups do, not what poshos do. It’s weird to sort of reconstruct the contents and origins of a muddled way of thinking which was never properly conscious, and yet in retrospect was clearly present.
Now, you’re probably not going to get the same second-rate Proustian rush from this novel, but there is a sense of nostalgia or perhaps archaism available to all here. It has two sources. First, the novel somehow stinks of 1980s England. I can’t quite put my finger on why, but it’s just the atmosphere, the environment, the faint sense that all of these people would have voted Thatcher (and yet aren’t eminently dislikeable). Second, the horse stuff. Racing’s popularity has dwindled markedly since 1979, and it’s hard to imagine that a series of novels set in stables and racecourses, heavily featuring the arcana of training and betting and all, would ever get off the ground today. I suspect that this is going to mean that Francis disappears into relative unread obscurity, despite having been an absolute book-selling machine at his height. And that’s a shame, because nostalgia aside, I think at his best (as here) he really is a first-rate writer of a fun thriller. Well worth picking up cheap second-hand and gobbling down over a long train journey or a day in a deckchair.