I suspected I wouldn’t be able to wait until all the Gold Dagger winners arrived such that I could read them in chronological order of publishing. At least I can say I know myself. Those first few books arrived, and I leapt in at once – already I have dispatched two off the list. And so, to the reviews!
By coincidence my first two choices won the award only a few years apart: Dick Francis’ Whip Hand of 1979, and Ruth Rendell’s Demon in My View of 1976. I realized this only after the fact, and these first two books have proven to me that two books in the same genre, published only a few years apart, and set in the same part of the world (London) can seem to be from different worlds. Already, reinforcement that “genre fiction” really is an umbrella term for a vast quantity of disparate stuff!
I read Dick Francis first, as I knew he was a favorite of my grandfather’s and this aroused my curiosity. It quickly became evident that Whip Hand is part of series about injured-jockey-turned-sleuth Sid Halley, but the pacing and emphatically “present” nature of the prose never made this first-time reader feel confused or as though I was missing backstory that might add additional depth or pleasure. Indeed, the pacing was spot on and made this book (256 pages) feel shorter than it was. What grabbed me first, however, was how the plot and characterization could have been set – and indeed, I thought was set – in the early part of the 20th century rather than (as seems to be the case) the present-day 1970s. I say this not because it felt stuffy or old-fashioned – far from it. To be sure, the world of horse racing creates a certain timelessness, and that world’s characters (Lords, Admirals, and Sirs abound) leant a certain air of the English aristocratic novel to the whole thing. Only when Sid called someone on his car phone for the first time did I realized jarringly that the novel wasn’t set in the 20s but – flipping to the front to find the year of publishing – the 1970s. This didn’t disappoint me but rather reinvigorated my interest. Francis’ ability to propel the reader’s interest along with Sid, whose point of view we never leave, eradicates almost entirely any need or desire to peer more deeply in the world around him. As Sid rolls through English horse country (and briefly to Paris) we get quick strokes of color – a step beyond impressionism, but only one step – that add just the amount of setting and background we need to watch the interplay of the characters. Sid himself is at core a familiar figure – the intelligent gentleman – but his disfigurement (he lost a hand in a steeplechase accident and wears a prosthesis) is something completely unique, in my experience. Reading Francis’ depiction of Sid’s musings on his electronic replacement and how he and those around him react to it have aged wonderfully, and beyond the technical limitations of the hand itself I never once winced at a depiction or assumption. To be sure, this novel does not pass the Bechdel test. The only women with lines are a bitter ex-wife in need of rescuing by Sid, a bitter wife (of another man) in need of rescuing, and the ex-wife’s flatmate, soon to be the romantic interest of the story (as soon as her skin was compared to an “English rose” it was clear the direction we were going). The dialogue itself is strong without in any way reaching towards an attempt at sounding utterly realistic – it reads like an excellent play rather than a series of recordings some horse-racing anthropologist. Nonetheless, the characterizations are enjoyable, if not overly deep, and the characters are easy to root for or against as they are slotted into their pre-determined places. The cheerful sidekick who knows judo is as reassuring as the oily bookmaker is to loath.
Another point in Francis’ favor is his plotting – rather than one thread to slowly follow, he throws quite a number at Sid (and the reader) quite quickly. Suspicious fellow I am, I suspected we would find some of these threads wound together towards the end and so they did, but watching them fall into place so neatly was satisfyingly enjoyable, without a whiff of deus ex machina or trickery. These multiple threads helped the pacing of the book wonderfully, creating a multi-dimensional tension/release dynamic that kept the book at a smooth canter throughout.
My only complaint with Francis is that the horses were ever-so-slightly underdone. The book opens with a short biography of Francis, who it turns out was (unsurprisingly) something of a horseman. The descriptions of the Jockey Club, the owners, trainers, jockeys, and all the assorted hangers-on, are deftly done and feel perfectly lively. The horses themselves are comparatively thinly sketched, bar a few times when Sid dryly weighs up animals in a way that feels either too expert or too detached to excite the horse-inexperienced reader. It could be that in the 70s the horse-racing world was still sufficiently present in the papers and on television that the average Francis reader would know more than the internet-enabled creature of the 21st century, but given the centrality of horses and their treatment to the plot, one might have expected a few more paragraphs to flesh things out. (The description of ballooning – I’ll say no more, as it’s a fun but important plot point – is wonderfully evocative, so I know Francis could have done more with the horses if he wanted to.)
A final note, the last scene of Whip Hand was curious. I’ll give no spoilers, but Francis has the piece’s ultimate villain display a distinctly un-villainish turn of real-world logic and weighing of scales. It almost feels like a sort of inverted, time-traveling comment on criminal justice reform, but from the criminal’s perspective in 1970s Britain. It’s all a set-up for the last line of the book, however, a benediction of Sid at the hands of his primary foil, but had me tilting my head. A strange note to end on but not an unpleasant one. All in all, I think my grandfather was on the something. Well done, Dick Francis, Whip Hand is a Gold Dagger winner to be sure, and not the last of your books that I shall read.
And then we have Ruth Rendell’s A Demon In My View, a beast of a different kind. I chose it from the pile by a quick scan of the summary on the back, which seemed to be a villains’ perspective of an obsession with a woman he wanted to kill. It seemed like a gorier, darker turn from Dick Francis and I decided to give it a go as a sort of palliative from the smart, resourceful, gentleman detective thing. It was certainly different, but I was quite wrong in my assumptions! Demon is told from two points of view, that of a middle-aged and younger man, both named Johnson, who live in the same small building. I give very little away by stating that the middle-aged man, Arthur, is the killer whose perspective is summarized on the back of the book, but he isn’t some grizzled, mysterious figure. We are given a deep look at his habits and thoughts as he tries his best not to commit murder, specifically by sneaking into the building’s cellar every few nights to strangle a mannequin he has hidden down there. The other Johnson, a new resident, inadvertently starts a chain of events that disrupt Arthur’s decades-old routine and sends everything out of equilibrium.
This is a psychological book to be sure, although it is I think a stretch to call it a thriller. I waited for some spectacular crime to occur, for the police to arrive and a Detective-type character’s point of view at the beginning of each chapter, but about 6 or 7 chapters in I realized it was never going to happen. We alternate perspectives between the two Johnson’s, and the comparative view between them is deftly sketched as they interpret and misinterpret the actions of one another and their housemates. Arthur is almost a caricature with his suit, washing-up, views on propriety, and formal language. The periodic sketches of his background divert us enough into his mindset and how he became a killer that he becomes just a touch deeper than that, and a real tension develops as we watch his routines unwind to reveal what lives underneath. There is murder but almost no gore or violence in the book, perhaps appropriate given the antiseptic lifestyle Arthur leads. Shades of Anthony Perkin’s character in Psycho, perhaps, had he lived with his Aunt in a depressed part of London. While Demons lacks the depth to make the character a true stand-out, the perceived threats posed to and by Arthur make this more of a page-turner than I expected. Rendell throws in an epistolary relationship between the younger Johnson and a married woman he is trying to convince to leave her husband, which adds a needed degree of humanity to the novel, and also serves as a useful (if transparent) plot device – will they, won’t they, how will they once Arthur gets involved?
Rendell also writes with some success on race and class. She has a few good lines from a West Indian (her term) character about how the younger, white Johnson makes unfair assumptions about him because he’s black. Johnson immediately and shamefully admits this is so, and the book moves on. A young Taiwanese woman in the building has some lines that have not aged well (mostly involving grammar and the substitution of ‘L’ for ‘R’) but she is decidedly not a stereotype and serves as a perfectly mediocre secondary character that another writer could have made homogeneously white for ease. Arthur himself is shown to hold racist views in a off-handed sort of way (the moral scales have already fallen against him for his past crimes, so racism hardly shocks our perception of him) and Rendell manages to create a vivid, if small, world in her fictional corner of London. Multi-racial, underserved by public amenities, amidst construction projects that are pulling it from the past to a rather gray present, there is sometimes a flash of menace but more frequently the grayscale picture of mundanity and numbness.
As the plot slowly progresses, the question of course becomes can Arthur control his homicidal urges, and if not, will any of the building’s inhabitants be able to figure it out? The first question is answered fairly quickly, while the weight of the second is held in abeyance for a surprising amount of time, leaving the middle section of novel feeling rather light. Without the tension of an investigation, of someone looking for him, watching Arthur do his laundry and remember his childhood begins to feel a bit tedious. The affair between young Johnson and his potential love interest creates enough momentum to get us to the last downhill section of the novel, with lots of psychological meandering in the meantime, but it doesn’t feel particularly satisfying. As the book careens towards its final scenes, we see our characters in full relief, but they never quite escape the gray tones of the world around them – I was almost rooting for both Johnsons at different points in the novel, but I never quite did. Perhaps that was the point, but it left my thirst for mystery unslaked. The final scene makes you nod in poetic agreement, of course it had to end this way, but despite the neatness of the ending the whole thing ends up feeling a bit too antispetic to make a deep impact, rather like Arthur himself. Ruth Rendell juggled two points of view wonderfully, her characterizations were solid (though in my opinion she did less than Francis while spending much more space on it), her plot intriguingly different, but I am hard pressed to say I would recommend this to anyone who didn’t explicitly ask me for something “different”. The good news is that Rendell has another book on the list (1986’s Live Flesh) so I will get another bite at the apple to see if a different flavor of psychological mystery might go down better.
Two good, but very different, books to start with, and here are the rankings, which I will update with each additional review.
Current ranking:
- Dick Francis – Whip Hand
- Ruth Rendell – A Demon in My View
smq.world 