I've been a voracious reader of Dick Francis's thrillers -- all of which take place with a background of horse racing -- since I discovered them in the 1980s. After Francis's wife (his unacknowledged co-writer) died, his son Felix left his job teaching physics at a British prep school and started writing with his dad. Now that Francis senior has died, Felix has continued the franchise his parents started with Dick Francis's Bloodline,
and continues it badly. Like Silks, the novel which they wrote jointly,
this ends with the hero killing the antagonist. It also proceeds through the
gratuitous murder of an attractive woman who appeared for six chapters only to
be knocked off, the annoying "I recognized the murderer, but won't tell
you who it is right now" ploy, and two instances of "how could they
have been so stupid" for the sole purpose of advancing a stalled plot.
That's it. I'm done. Francis pere put together good thrillers, which
violated rules of plotting to good purpose. I don't know how good a physics
teacher Francis fils was, but as a writer, he seems to be re-inventing
particle physics --- he's just smashing things together to see what flies out.
1 comment:
I read over a dozen Dick Francis books, but got tired of the formula I saw. The ingith into the world of horse racing was the draw. I read a lot of books about horses when I was a boy, like the Walter Farley books.
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