BOOK REVIEW: ‘Dick Francis’s Damage’

OPINION:

DICK FRANCIS’S DAMAGE
By Felix Francis
Putnam, $26.95, 400 pages

This book explodes in its opening chapter with a gruesome murder at a race track, concludes with an express train demolishing a victim at 100 miles an hour and vibrates on intervening pages with the thunder of horses’ hooves.

Felix Francis’ latest mystery does the family tradition proud — he is the son of the late Dick Francis who held sway for many years over horse racing literature — and his plot moves at a formidable pace. What is most impressive is how well he knows his subject. You can learn a lot about horses, their riders, their owners and the awful things that can be done to make them illegally run faster from Jeff Hinkley, an undercover investigator for the British Horseracing Authority. He not only is an authority on what should not be going on at the track, but has a photographic memory to fill in any missing personal details about the animals or their owners.

He also is in league with a quietly colorful character called Crispin Larsin, an intelligence analyst, a breed akin to a CHIS (covert human intelligence source). Larsin is a man who may have been a member of MI5 or MI6 but nobody knows for sure, and he isn’t telling. He won’t even disclose whether he is married or where he lives. But he addresses most people as “dear boy” and is a delightful version of the sophisticated spy. There are few things he can’t do and almost nothing he won’t do, and he and Hinkley make an admirable and formidable team.

Hinkley needs all the help he can get because he is awash in problems. Because he witnessed a bookmaker having his throat cut at a race track, he is being accused of a connection to the killing by the murderer who is already in jail. Hinkley’s beloved sister Faye is being treated for cancer, and her unprepossessing barrister husband wants his brother-in-law’s help with a troubled son. He is in trouble that could end his career as well as possibly put him in jail. What the son is mostly worried about is that his father will discover he is a homosexual.

But Hinkley is chiefly preoccupied with a major threat to the sport of horse racing, which comes from the anonymous menace of a man who wants several million dollars in exchange for preserving the integrity of the business. He has already shown he means business by drugging dozens of horses and causing a spectacular track blaze that causes death and injury to many victims. Hinkley’s efforts to identify the man who will stop at nothing to get at least some if not all of the money he seeks, become perilous when he is injured in a car accident clearly meant to kill him. He limps on, still leaning for help on the imperturbable Crispin Larsin, and there are readers who will not readily forgive Mr. Francis for his allowing the intelligence agent to come to a sticky end.

Especially since the actual unveiling of the villain is something of an anticlimax because there are so few clues to his identity that readers probably have already chosen a more likely killer. However, this is mere carping at a book that is a vivid and fascinating read. It makes a visit to the track much more evocative when you can conjure up what is going on behind the scenes and especially in the enormous care taken by owners to preserve the running stability of their precious animals, not to mention the health of the jockeys on their backs.

There is a grimly amusing episode when a race has to be called off because the jockeys are all sick to their stomachs because a poisoned ginger cake has been introduced into their menu, and even men who diet off every additional pound succumb to the bite-sized pieces of homemade cake.

Hinkley even has a romantic life and is considering marriage to Lydia, his longtime lover who is interested in his work but resents that he can’t tell her much about it. He is not nearly as good at keeping secrets as the legendary Crispin.

• Muriel Dobbin is a former White House and national political reporter for McClatchy newspapers and the Baltimore Sun.