Wednesday, June 20, 2018

Review: Break In

Break In Break In by Dick Francis
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

My father loved Dick Francis, and I can still see him in a beach chair at Spring Valley Pool reading or rereading one while my brother and I played around him. A Francis novel combined two things Dad loved: well-written work and horse racing. I hadn’t read one in at least 20 years, but it was Father’s Day and this was in the pile, so I figured it would be a way to reminisce a little.

The start of this shows what Dad loved about these novels. We get a riveting description of our protagonist Kit Fielding as he serves as jockey during a nail-biter of a steeplechase run, and we get a deep background provided with clear efficiency. Francis gives us everything we need to know in just a handful of pages, and he does so without “info-dump,” without breaking the narrative he grabs us with at the start.

We get, as well, a great example of the “cozy,” the old-fashioned Agatha Christie style mystery where, beyond the crime in question, we’re led to see the fundamental decency of the world. That’s in contrast to the hardboiled or noir, mysteries that suggest the opposite: that the world is a dark place where decent people are at a perpetual disadvantage.

And Kit is decent. Francis more or less bullies us into liking him. He’s such a good guy that we have no choice. His brother-in-law comes from a rival racing family, the result of a marriage his sister undertook as a kind of real-life Juliet Capulet move. He still helps Bobby out when Bobby is suddenly the victim of a sudden series of tabloid attacks. He loans them money, puts on his amateur detective hat, and even forgives Bobby after a tantrum-style unprovoked attack on him.

Later, he forgives several others who wrong him. It’s a kind of turn-the-other-cheek response that ultimately wins in the novel but that, in this age of Trump, seems quaint and impossible.

And, just to show how very British this all is, he pursues an eligible young woman patiently and chastely, waiting to be certain that all concerned are interested and have no objections. We get an eventual “sex scene,” but it’s almost comically discrete.

While I am impressed with the opening here, I’m afraid my disappointment grows as it goes. Kit is able, far too often, to ask the right tangential character the right question to get the response he needs. He gradually learns the real reason behind the campaign against his brother-in-law [SPOILER: It’s to get at the brother-in-law’s father] and, he is able to put together a documentary detailing the old man’s financial crimes.

[CONTINUED SPOILER] The further we go, the more we’re asked to assume Kit can simply accomplish things others cannot. Why, for instance, is he able to ask three people for their experiences, stick a video camera in their faces, and get a report so damning that it undoes Allardeck’s chances at a knighthood? I mean, there are two major newspapers out to get Allardeck as well; not one of them has a reporter with the capacity to follow up on the very basic leads Kit pursues?

All of that goes along with the strangely nonviolent quality of the novel. Kit gets beat up once or twice – and he’s subjected to a stun gun at one point – but the only gun in the novel comes at the very end, and then no one fires it. There are large sums of money in play and ruthless men out to get it, but no one ever ventures to real hurt.

I’m glad I read this since it did make me feel as if I were in conversation with my father. Short of that, though – with a nod to the clear skill of its early narrative – I don’t feel called back to this. It’s no slight on Dad to acknowledge that the genre has grown since he read these. Francis has some better ones as I recall, but this shows he could also lose sight of wrapping up his own creations.


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