Rat Race by Dick Francis

Another flying story. This time we have Matt Shore, a commercial pilot whose career who has been in a downward spiral ever since he resigned from a command at BOAC at the request of his wife who objected to his frequent absences. Naturally, she left him anyway. So he has progressed in a negative direction to lesser carriers, to gun-running in Africa, to crop dusting, finally to working for a small air-taxi service largely engaged in carrying jockeys, trainers, and horse owners to the races. Bet you were wondering how Francis was going to make the racing connection this time.

Matt's depression isn't as severe as Gene Hawkins, who had taken to sleeping with a loaded pistol in case he decided to go ahead and kill himself in the night. Matt just hangs around a dilapidated trailer on the airfield and calculates how little money he has left after he pays the alimony every month and being thankful that he and his wife had never had children.

He is dragged back to life in spite of himself by some of the engaging people he encounters as he ferries them to and from racecourses all over Europe. One of them, of course, is a young girl, the sister of the most famous steeplechase jockey in the country. Matt is 34, Nancy is 19. Another young person who makes a difference to Matt is another Matthew, the ten year old nephew and heir of a peer. The nephew does his best to protect his uncle, who is a man of great wealth and sweetness of character - and very little intelligence or discernment - from those who would take advantage of him.

The criminal enterprise of the plot is truly perverse - and must, I think, take advantage of some of the areas of the British economy which are not tied up and gifted to the 1% in this country.

Enquiry by Dick Francis

It is hard to round up enough superlatives to adequately discuss Dick Francis. Reading them back to back this way, though, I am discovering some patterns that I had never been aware of before.

I think I did mention in one recent post, Francis's men are one depressed bunch of guys. Kelly Hughes is no exception. He is despised by his family, a bunch of working class Welshmen, for forgetting his place and becoming something besides a hired hand on a dirt farm. Not only that - he went to university - none other than the prestigious London School of Economics. Sort of the reverse of Henry Grey's situation (Flying Finish). Then to compound the disaster of his life, his wife and baby daughter were killed in a car crash. A lot of baggage.

Still when he and the trainer he rides for are set up and "warned off" racing by a kangaroo court, Kelly becomes angry rather than more depressed and with the daughter of the self-important trainer sets out to figure out what is really going on.

Another observation that has gradually grown on me is that with the sweet young things that step in to help these depressed men - young is the keyword. Gene Hawkins in Blood Sport is nearly forty - and ends up promising to wait for his boss's sixteen year old daughter to turn twenty-one. Kelly Hughes isn't quite that old and Roberta isn't quite that young, but she is young enough that, as a twelve year old, she had fallen for him when he went to work as a jockey for her father, so we are talking about seven or eight years age difference at least. I'm going to have to keep an eye on this one.

Sky Coyote by Kage Baker

It's an interesting basic premise: time travel (with some of the usual limitations) has been discovered and operatives are sent to rescue priceless and irreplaceable artifacts from the past - sort of like Connie Willis's To Say Nothing of the Dog. Eventually, these rescued artifacts come to include culture and tradition. The operatives themselves are cyborgs created from rescued ("recruited") children. The main character was the child of a French cave painter and should have been slaughtered with the rest of his family when some other tribal barbarians overran their home. These cyborgs are essentially immortal and proceed through the centuries toward the point in the future when the whole program began.

The main part of the story has to do with the "rescue" of an entire village of sixteenth century Northern California natives by persuading them to voluntarily decamp with the immortals and mortals of the future to one of their hidden sites - where apparently they become the servant class; after all, since they aren't made immortal, the servants eventually die and since the immortals don't want their servants distracted by a bunch of rug rats -- well, you get the picture. The vehicle of persuasion is our hero, transformed into their god, Sky Coyote, who talks and acts a lot like a second-rate stand-up comedian - bada boom.

I'm afraid the whole thing seemed somewhat diffuse and pointless to me. The "ancient cultures" are clear parodies of present day society, funny enough, but tiresome after a while. Nothing of significance is resolved. The characters and story lines are unsubtle and, having slapped the reader in the face with some snarky commentary on our society, they just sort of flounder away into nothing much. Many potentially interesting directions are sacrificed on the altar of a cheap laugh.

It kept me reading - it was entertaining - but I kept hoping that something would happen. There were hints at this, that, or the other - but all the firecrackers just fizzled out. I fear that the intent was some sort of subtle high-level critique of 21st century America, but it was certainly not subtle and not particularly insightful either. Sorry if it is intended to be the first of a series with good old facilitator Joseph moving from episode to episode exposing our own failings and fallacies, because, if so, he will be moving on without me.

Forfeit by Dick Francis

I was so accustomed to just adding another book to the list, that I forgot that I was caught up - and had promised myself that I was going to stay caught up. School is back in session, so the pace will inevitably slow down, but I did finish this a couple of days ago. At this point, although school is going none of the performance groups that I belong to are rehearsing yet, so I have a few more days.

This one I remember - even though I didn't recognize the title. The hero is a newspaperman who writes for a paper more interested in sensation than straight news. His wife is almost completely paralyzed from polio - remember, these were written in the sixties when, although polio was no longer an issue, the victims of polio were still around.

A bad has appeared from overseas with an almost perfect scheme for cheating the betting public. This is the second time that Francis has opened with a suicide. In Nerve, a jockey shoots himself in front of the crowd before a race. This time a sports columnist falls from a window convincingly enough for the coroner to believe it, but not enough for James Tyrone.

Ty takes some fairly heavy damage, but the crisis comes when the heavy threatens to turn off the breathing apparatus keeping his wife alive.

The title refers to the scheme, which has horses touted for big races to encourage betting before the actual race day - only to have the horses not show up to race.

"L" is for Lawless by Sue Grafton

I had definitely not read this one before, and I'm pretty sure I hadn't read the previous one either.

Grafton had to reach a bit for this title. Granted, we were dealing with a group of crooks and a bank robbery from a couple of generations past, the particulars clearly indicating that there was no honor among this bunch of thieves, a pretty lawless crowd, but to have it all come down to a family name - now that was pretty cheap.

Maybe I've been reading them too fast, but this one was just not particularly satisfying to me. Kinsey comes across as pretty ineffectual, manipulated by the bads at all turns. She does come up with the critical clue at the end, but simply gives it away.

In the other matter I'm tracking, she doesn't kill anyone - and never has any opportunity for dalliance. Speaking of which, Henry's brother, William, and Rosie actually get married.

Flash and Bones by Kathy Reichs

I just "flashed" on the forensic anthropology grad student and former stand partner of mine who put me on to Kathy Reichs many years ago. Thanks, Amanda, wherever you are.

NASCAR is the setting and a new man has entered the scene. Ryan hasn't totally disappeared - but his presence in this one was only a matter of emails and a couple of phone calls. Charlie Hunt is still in Charlotte, but was working a big case - and according to Katy, Tempe's daughter, has been seen escorting other women around town. I still have trouble accepting a character named "Cotton," though - just a little too southern. And there was all that weirdness about her almost ex-husband and his buxom young fiancee's wedding - it seemed to me far more implausible than the murders.

Reichs does always manage to come up with creative ways to get Tempe almost killed, I wonder if there is a little hostility going on there.

As for the title - not my favorite - the pun is just a little too strained. Good story, though.

Blood Sport by Dick Francis

Finished on 8/20. (Note: that date matches the posting date!)

And I am caught up - if I can get all this posted before some glitch comes down the line. Classes started today - so I almost achieved my goal of getting this caught up before school started. Now if I can just stay on top of it. I'm not taking classes - but I have signed on for three evenings a week of rehearsals - some people never learn.

This one is set largely in the United States and I remembered parts of it quite clearly. European super stallions are being sold to US breeders but are hijacked on the road before they arrive at the new owner's stables or disappear into the mountains along with all the other horses from a mysteriously broken corral. The other horses are recovered but not the expensive stallion.

The first mystery is why they are being stolen, since their value at stud is minimal without their names. Another is why was one of the members of the syndicate owning the most recent missing horse targeted for murder.

Through a friend, "civil servant" Gene Hawkins is asked to go to the States and see if he can find the horse.

He decodes the crimes and survives with rather less than the usual malicious physical abuse that Francis dishes out to his heroes, but he hardly needs it because he is sunk to the point of suicide in clinical depression. Hawkins is the most depressed in a series of depressed heroes. He sleeps with his gun under his pillow in case he decides to finish himself off in the middle of the night. Henry Grey in Flying Finish wasn't exactly depressed, he was simply so detached that it was hard to tell the difference. Sid Halley, of course, had the wreck of his hand and the end of his racing career to blame. Daniel Roke in For Kicks felt trapped by his life and responsibility to his younger siblings. All of them rediscover life in the course of their stories, except Hawkins. And I suppose that he does, too, in a way - it isn't really that his depression is lifted, he just decides that his life debt to someone else compells him to continue living. Depressing.