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Ron Miller's DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 10, No. 14 |
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Father & Son Francis team
turns out a big winner
of TheColumnists.com
When aging Dick Francis teamed up with his son, Felix, to write his "comeback" novel "Dead Heat" not long ago, many casual fans of the long-reigning king of "equine" mysteries may have assumed the son had taken hold of the legacy and was just going to exploit the old boy's famous name while Francis was still able to sit upright and take regular breaths.
But "Dead Heat" turned out to be a pretty good mystery novel with so many of the usual Dick Francis markers that most fans were pretty sure the master had quite a lot to do with the book after all.
Then their second collaborative mystery novel--"Silks" (Putnam, $25.98)--turned up late last year and pretty much settled the issue. I've just finished reading it and I can say without hesitation that this is Dick Francis at his very best, regardless of how much his son may have joined in the task of writing it.
First, let's establish one well-known fact: Dick Francis always had a collaborator on his novels, so this is nothing new to his canon. His late wife helped him with research and served as his editor, polishing his drafts with her considerable skills. His grief upon her death was one reason he stopped writing for a time, but another reason probably was the fact that he needed someone to do what she had always done for him in the writing of his best-selling mysteries. The bright and capable Felix Francis obviously has stepped forward to replace his mother and everything finally has jelled.
"Silks" is a superb mystery novel by any standard. Though Dick Francis is now 88 and may not be able to rustle up all the skills he once had, it seems obvious to me that his son knows his dad's work so well that he can work so closely with his dad that they function almost as one creative mind.
The hero of "Silks" is Geoffrey Mason, a criminal defense lawyer whose great passion in life is his second career as an amateur steeplechase jockey. Dick Francis, of course, was one of England's greatest steeplechase jockeys, so he's on familiar territory when Mason is called upon to defend Steve Mitchell, an unpleasant young steeplechase jockey who's accused of killing Scot Barlow, a rival jockey whose sister committed suicide after a sordid love affair with Mitchell.
Mason, whose friends have teasingly nicknamed him "Perry," doesn't want to take the Mitchell case because he knows the man personally and doesn't especially like him. He also knows how much Mitchell and Barlow hated each other and even once witnessed a physical altercation between the two men--something Mason feels might make him a potential witness in the case, but not a member of the legal team.
Francis, pere and fils, keep the story moving between race track and courtroom, obviously enjoying the double meaning of the book's title. "Silks" are what the jockeys wear in races, but "Silks" also are what the top-rated barristers or "QC's" wear in the very formal English courtrooms. Mason is eager to win his "silks" in a courtroom, but feels the odds are so heavy against his client winning acquittal that Mason isn't likely to be rewarded with his "silks" anytime soon.
The real bete noir of the novel is a thug named Julian Trent who vowed to get revenge on Mason for not winning him an acquittal in his own criminal case. Trent's specialty is beating people to death with a baseball bat, so Mason has real cause for alarm when he starts getting phone calls ordering him to lose the Mitchell case--or else!--and then realizes Trent obviously has been hired by someone to intimidate Mason enough to bring about Mitchell's conviction for murder.
"Silks" moves like a runaway train and has an especially exciting finish after Mason finally decides Mitchell must be innocent and the only way to prove it is for him to find out who the real murderer of Scot Barlow was. There's also a pretty interesting romance as a subplot, involving widower Mason with a beautiful young veterinarian he meets quite by chance.
Dick Francis practically created--and certainly dominated--the sub-genre of mysteries set against a horse-racing background ever since his first novel, "Dead Cert," in the 1960s. If the help of son Felix can keep him active enough to turn out more mysteries of this quality, I'd say the mystery world owes Felix a great debt of gratitude.
©2009 by Ron Miller. The book cover reproduction is curtesy of Putnam. This column first posted March 16, 2009.
Ron
Miller is a former nationally syndicated television columnist
and the author of "Mystery! A Celebration," the official
companion book to PBS' "Mystery!" series. He currently
writes about television mysteries for MYSTERY SCENE magazine.
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