Whip Hand was the book I read for the Wednesday Whodunit Mystery Book Discussion group assigned to read in September and discuss on October 5, 2011. Just like the book we read the previous month, Odds Against (see earlier review), Whip Hand was written by Dick Francis and has as the first person protagonist, Sid Halley the former accomplished jockey turned detective. Dick Francis wrote many books publishing about one per year between 1965 and 2010 when he passed away. However, unlike many mystery authors, Francis’ books usually had different detective/protagonists. Only three of the books feature Sid Halley: Odds Against published in 1965, Whip Hand published in 1979 and a third one published in 1995. Unlike the first Halley book, Whip Hand was not only nominated for the Edgar Award, it actually won it. And I thought it was a much better book than Odds Against. It still had the charming English words but also has better pacing and more humor. Another difference with reading Whip Hand was that it was the “normal vision” edition of 248 pages rather than the large print or “blind” edition that I read for Odds Against.
Odds Against was more of an introduction to Sid Halley allowing Whip Hand to not be cluttered with introductions and backgrounds and get right into the action. Despite this, I don’t think it is necessary to read Odds Against in order to enjoy Whip Hand. Something that kind of bugged me about Odds Against was that Halley seemed too perfect. Other than a useless and disfigured hand he seemed to be the successful jockey living off his carefully saved earnings on his way to becoming the successful detective. Well, Whip Hand unveils some of his imperfections and this makes it a better book. His flaws make him seem more real, relatable and less idealized.
The mystery actually turns out to be multiple mysteries, some related and others not. Despite this complication I was able to follow them all fairly easily. One of them turns out to be very complex but still comprehensible and I found it to be quite interesting. Whip Hand is more gripping than Odds Against and at parts, funnier. The action kicks in sooner and lets up at the right places. The pace never gets too frantic. My favorite part was when Halley is at a crowded May Day celebration trying to elude a couple of hired thugs. There’s the suspense of whether or not he has lost them. The setting reminded me a bit of the L.A. County Fair. “Among the tents, the vans: ice cream vans, riding associations’ trailers, a display of crafts, a fortuneteller, a charity jumble stall, a mobile cinema showing films of sheepdogs…” (p. 123). Later he refers to the thugs and their boss as “Peter Rammileese and his merry men” (p. 147). The name of Halley’s car, a Scimitar, was new to me. It could have been one of those small and ugly European cars.
Just like Odds Against, Whip Hand takes place in London and the English countryside at various racecourses and towns where trainers and other related people lived or worked. The place names all sounded English such as Kempton, Newmarket, and Tunbridge Wells. The book also contains many English words that differ from the American words. I knew most of them such as in the sentence “The nurses are stuffing (the boy, Mark) with jam butties.” I know that butties are small sandwiches. I also knew that the knackers or knackermen took away the dead horses to the knackers yard where they cut them up for dog food. Later in the book, Halley describes how “Running on wood shavings felt like running through treacle” (p. 211). My wife actually had some treacle the month before I read the book. We found it at Fresh & Easy. Not long after that we found a can of Spotted Dick at Ralphs that looked very similar.
There were only a couple of English words that I did not know. Halley’s unofficial coworker, Chico, uses one when he says, “Well, look, I’ve done the recce, and we can get in all right, but you’ll have to be through the main doors before four o’clock” (p. 161). From the context, “recce” seems like another word for “recon” since Chico had checked out a place where they planned to break in. Another unknown term is a type of clothing. Before going riding for a trainer friend, he goes down to the yard in “jodhpurs and a pull-on jersey shirt” (p. 166). In addition to the jodhpurs there’s the jersey shirt that I couldn’t figure out while reading Odds Against.
We discussed the book on October 5. Three or four people from the previous month’s discussion did not show up. Perhaps this was because they didn’t like Odds Against and didn’t want to keep reading Dick Francis. Those that did come seemed to like Whip Hand better as I did. One club member gave it a B+. Another thought the escape through the May Day festival to the balloon race wasn’t believable. That was my favorite sequence of the book. There was talk of Halley’s fears and imperfections. Others felt the book was dated in that there seemed to be a common decency between people, even between crooks that doesn’t exist now. They also referred to the class society in England. But overall I thought it was a good English horse racing mystery.
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