”I awoke with foreboding. My hand closed in a reflex on the Luger under the pillow. I listened, acutely attentive. No sound. No quick surreptitious sl”I awoke with foreboding. My hand closed in a reflex on the Luger under the pillow. I listened, acutely attentive. No sound. No quick surreptitious slither, no rub of cloth on cloth, no half-controlled pulse-driven breath. No enemy hovering. Slowly, relaxing, I turned half over and squinted at the room. A quiet, empty, ugly room. One third of what for want of a less cozy word I called home.”
Gene Hawkins is on a forced vacation from a British agency that remains unnamed, but could quite possibly be some entity of MI6. He would rather stay busy because mental repose leads to thoughts of melancholy. His life is empty outside of his service to his country. The love of his life, Caroline, is married to another man, and whatever hope he once had of having a life with her sailed away when her husband refused to divorce her. This is the 1960s, and getting a divorce is not as easy as the perfunctory wham, bam, see you in the funny papers style of today.
While attempting to relax on a boat, an attempt is made on the life of one of his shipmates, which leads, after he fishes the chap out of the water, to a job offer to find some stolen thoroughbred horses. I knew that Dick Francis would be working horses into the plot. What intrigues me is his decision to have his protagonist, a man with little knowledge of horses, be on the outside of the business, unlike most of his other books where the protagonist is someone working in the horse business.
To find these horses, he has to go to America. That’s okay. He globe-trots for his day job, so moving about in America on his moonlighting gig will be easy peasy. He decides to be German because his German accent is better than his American one. Three expensive horses, past their racing days and now being used as studs for future generations of hopefully fast horses, have been stolen over a series of years, but it is baffling as to why. Their value is in their papers, so someone can’t sell their sperm without rolling out their ancestral tree. If they can’t show their prestigious background, they are, for all intents and purposes, nearly worthless. Gene will have to unravel the reasons for the theft if he has any chance of finding out who took them. He has to be careful because, if he tips his hand before he can secure the creatures, it will only stand to reason that the thieves will have the horses killed.
Gene has a bigger problem named Lynnie Teller, daughter of the man he fished out of the water in England. While trying to get a line on his investigation, he is spending time with her and her mother. Both are attractive, and both are interested in finding out more, a lot more, about Gene Hawkins. Lynnie reminds him of Caroline because she matches up well with Gene on a mental level, and she is pretty and trim, a delight for any man’s eye. ”But if I’d learned anything in thirty-eight years it is who not to go to bed with.” Maybe so, but loneliness weighs on Hawkins like a five hundred pound gorilla, and the girl makes him feel good about himself. ”Too young in experience, understanding, and wickedness.” Aye, but that also lends charm to her beauty. Despite the pitfalls, he can’t help flirting with her.
”She laughed gently, stretching like a cat. ‘Isn’t this heat just gorgeous?’
‘Mm.’
‘What are all those scars on you?’
‘Lions and tigers and appendicitis.’
She snorted.”
It’s hard to decide who is more dangerous, the thieves or the pretty and smart seventeen year old temptation.
The plot has a few tricky parts that don’t quite work, but in the later part of the book, the well crafted action scenes make the reader forget about the snags in the beginning of the book. There are inexplicable sections of minutiae that are kind of dull at times, but the basis of the plot proves to be fascinating, especially for those of us who have dealt with blood lines in animals before.
I sort of fell into owning this book. I was actually looking for a copy of Whip Hand, which is the second book in the Sid Halley series. I stumbled upon first American edition copies of Odds Against and Blood Sport, sold by the same dealer at unbelievably good prices. They have the lovely Frederick E. Banbery covers, and this is one of the few times where I prefer American dust jackets to the British designed ones. Blood Sport is sun faded on the spine, but otherwise is a very good copy. The Odds Against is really lovely, near fine, and just like that, I’m no longer just a reader of Francis’s books but a collector of his early titles. Fortunately, it is a gentle madness.
”I wrote out a bill for $120. He studied it, looked at me, studied it again. Then he unzipped his bag and put wads of notes on my table, fifties, twen”I wrote out a bill for $120. He studied it, looked at me, studied it again. Then he unzipped his bag and put wads of notes on my table, fifties, twenties, perhaps five or six thousand dollars, more, in used notes.
Temptation had run its scarlet fingernails down my scrotum. What did it matter? A success fee, that’s all it was. Merchant bankers took success fees. But I wasn’t a merchant banker. People like that grabbed what they could within the law. In my insignificant way, I represented the law. I was a sworn officer of the court. I was a thread in an ancient fabric that made social existence possible.
I was the law.
Sufficiently psyched up by these thoughts, I leaned across the tailor’s table, plucked two soiled fifties and a twenty, pushed the rest back his way.
‘Lester,’ I said, ‘not all lawyers are the same.’”
I wanted to begin this review with this quote especially for those readers who haven’t met Jack Irish yet. This is the third of four novels that Peter Temple wrote with Irish as the protagonist. There are two seasons of the TV show, and, hopefully, there will be a third of Guy Pierce starring as Jack Irish. There are three standalone movies based on the books also starring Guy Pierce as well. Needless to say, as I read this book, Guy Pierce supplied the face of Jack Irish for me. The quote above really encapsulates who Jack is. The painful honesty, the sense of duty he feels, and the need to believe that any money he makes he earns. He feels vulnerable, as if one more mistake will be his last, but he can’t help keep putting himself out there, trying to be someone standing between those in need and those who take.
He was a high flying lawyer with nothing in front of him but blue skies and a fast escalator to the peaks of his profession, then tragedy struck. His wife was killed by one of his clients, and suddenly, the world did not make sense anymore. He was one of the chosen; there shouldn’t be a fall from grace. After he climbed out of the bottle, he apprenticed to a carpenter, and now he splits his time between “sawin’ and ‘lawin’”.
Jack Irish lives in Melbourne. ”Weather’s okay. I like it, very noir.” The book before this, Black Tide, there was so much of Melbourne in it that I finally pulled up a map of Melbourne so I could follow along with Jack as he moved about the city. I’m reasonably familiar with the streets and alleys of the city without ever having visited. Whenever a writer gets details like this correct it lends an extra layer of authenticity to the plot.
Jack has some horse businessmen friends, AKA gamblers, by the name of Harry Strang and Cameron Delray. They don’t break the rules, but they do bend them a bit. The novel begins with them at the racetrack watching a disaster strike. The only thing that could go wrong to completely bugger them happens. For Jack, it is a chance to achieve some financial stability. To make things even worse, one of their gambling associates is robbed and unnecessarily beaten, brutally.
Mercury, the bloated god of commerce, must be too jaded and knackered to do more than chuckle at the feeble attempts of Jack Irish to put his life back together. Aphrodite has also made him a favorite plaything. His girlfriend leaves him for someone else, and with his mind still whirling, an ex-girlfriend, Linda, blows back into town and wants to shag. She routinely drops into his life like a hurricane and just as quickly blows out with the next tropical storm.
His head isn’t really in the right place to look for a missing person. ”Oh, Lord, why hast thou anointed me the fixer of all things? And why hast thou ordained this in a cold season in which too many things need fixing?” It soon becomes apparent that the person he is looking for may not be the person he thinks he is looking for. He discovers that powerful people are very interested in his investigation. They have secrets, and as Jack gets closer to the truth, people start dying. It doesn’t take a slide rule or a TI-89 calculator to figure out that Jack is the next logical victim. His only safety is finding out the truth before he becomes a missing person. And there isn’t another Jack Irish to come looking for him.
Irish is the fictional protagonist that I’ve met recently who resonates with me the most. For him, living a respectful life is so much more important than acquiring piles and piles of money. He wants to do the right thing by others, despite the ease with which he could take advantage because he is smarter and more skilled. He uses his brains and tenacity to fight against the powerful people in mega-corporations, the equally powerful people who misuse positions of government authority, or on the other end of the spectrum, the local thugs using violence to inspire terror. “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing”― Edmund Burke. Jack Irish, as flawed as he is, is one of those special people who will step forward out of a crowd and say, enough is enough. He is the type of loyal friend that most of us wish we knew.
I was reading the first Jack Irish novel when I started watching the TV series. The series is not based on the novels, though they stay true to the concepts and ideas that Temple based his books on. The movies are based on the books, so you might want to read the books before venturing into the movies. I feel like watching the series and reading the book at the same time created some good synergy for me and increased my enjoyment of both.
”Charlie once said, elevation of chin, narrowing of eyes revealing that he was about to deliver a message, ‘Jack, make something, you look at it, you’”Charlie once said, elevation of chin, narrowing of eyes revealing that he was about to deliver a message, ‘Jack, make something, you look at it, you’re happy. The work it took, that’s not work.’”
When Jack Irish was drowning himself in whiskey, self pity, and a healthy dose of soul crushing depression, he wandered into Charlie Taub’s workshop and asked for an apprenticeship. Charlie threw him a plank to keep him from drowning, and now, whenever life gets too real, which is a frequent occurrence for Jack, he can always escape to the mingled scents of wood chips and well oiled precision equipment to add some buoyancy to his mental ship.
Jack has enough problems of his own to deal with, but he can’t help getting involved in the plights of others. He used to be a decent lawyer, and he acquires the type of acquaintances who have need of his services. They don’t always pay well, but then money tends to take a back seat to Jack’s natural tenaciousness in finding the truth. Give him a Gordian Knot and he won’t cut it with his sword (Alexander the Great was very impatient), but will unravel the twisty knots until he finds the beginning and the end.
In this case, an old friend of his father shows up and asks him for help in finding his son and the money he loaned him. Jack’s father was a legendary footie player, and there is simply no possible way for Jack to ever live up to his father’s legacy. His father may have given The Fitzroy faithful a lot of pleasure on the field, but Jack gives people hope who have no other avenue to find help. So you might not be surprised to discover that Jack has father issues, unresolvable because his father is dead and nearly sainted by his fans.
What is supposed to be a missing person’s enquiry soon turns into a grand conspiracy that involves one of the richest men in Australia (seriously no one gets this rich without bending, breaking, and obliterating rules) and a series of subsidiary companies that lead Jack on a merry chase to not only find Gary but also find out why Gary is hiding or even if Gary is still alive. It soon becomes apparent that one unarmed lawyer is hardly the proper investigator for what becomes a battle between contending forces that involve bullets instead of legal paperwork.
On top of all this, his love life is a shambles. His girlfriend runs off to Sydney to take a new job and finds a new lover as well. Things are not going well with his friend and frequent employer Harry Strang at the horse racing track. Cam, the enforcer and legman for Harry, proves invaluable as always in showing up just when Jack needs him most. His talents are immeasurable. And all of this is taking too much time because he still has those tables he needs to finish for Charlie.
Whew!
This is a complicated book, but less so if you read the first book Bad Debts and, in my case, have watched most of the Tv series. What I appreciate about this book is that Peter Temple expects his readers to not only pay attention but also to be smart enough to be able to handle juggling several plot elements at once. If you do become momentarily confused, grab a sizzling shrimp off the barbie and pop the top of a Victoria Bitter. Read on; it will all become clear.
The cast of characters are fantastic. Jack is a fully formed character whom I feel I know as well as people I’ve known for twenty years. The Australian colloquialisms come fast and furious, and by the end of the book, you might even risk having acquired the downunder accent. After two Jack Irish books, I feel like I can find my way around Melbourne like a native. Temple takes us down to street level, into the pubs, restaurants, and more than a few dank alleys.
Jack Irish, without a doubt, has been my favorite find of the year.
”I caught her scent as I took the coat and jacket. It was, in a word, throaty.
‘This is nice,’ she said, looking around.
We stood awkwardly for a moment”I caught her scent as I took the coat and jacket. It was, in a word, throaty.
‘This is nice,’ she said, looking around.
We stood awkwardly for a moment, something trembling in the air between us. I looked around at the books in piles on every surface, the CDs and tapes everywhere, the unhung pictures, seeing the place for the first time in years.
‘It’s sort of gentlemen’s club mates with undergraduate student digs,’ she said.”
Jack Irish was once a high rising, reasonably successful lawyer when tragedy strikes. What this woman caller sees in Jack’s flat are the results of a quick spiral downward. Although I must say the description sort of sounds like a mini-paradise to me. I’ve had apartments that resembled that ensemble.
Jack is still a lawyer, but barely. He helps a man named Harry Strang with some shady horse dealings. He helps with loan shark collections. He helps people find people, but he is not a private investigator, though as the story goes, you’ll be wondering why he doesn’t just apply for his licensing and make it official.
As part of his self-therapy, once he pulled his head out of the bottle, he starts hanging out at the local woodworking shop. Charlie isn’t too keen on acquiring an apprentice, but Irish keeps coming around, and before too long, Charlie can’t help himself from showing Irish how things are done. I’ve done some woodworking in my past. I’ve built cedar chests, cabinets, bookshelves, and desks. Doing something with your hands is unbelievably cathartic. I put words on pages every day, and even though that is satisfying, sometimes I just need to go outside to muck in the garden or pull some old boards from the rafters and see if I can conceive of something to make with them. Seeing something tangible, built with your own hands, is so satisfying. The woodworking nuances threaded into the plot add some depth to the character of Irish that make my developing relationship with him that much stronger.
Irish has finally made it to a level of competence that Charlie is trusting him with a special order, though Jack is finding it difficult to make something this beautiful that won’t be revered in someone’s home.
”I studied the rough walnut boards with reverence. This was one of the classic furniture timbers. Very few makers ever had the chance to work with wood of this quality and size.
Did an emerging mining company deserve a table made from unobtainable timber air-dried for at least fifty years?
I loved Charlie’s response: ”’This arschloch I’m not making it for,’ he said. ‘He’s just the first owner. I’m making it for all the owners.’”
The trouble begins with a message left by an ex-client Danny McKillop. The name doesn’t ring any bells for Jack. He attempts to get in touch, but they keep missing one another. When McKillop ends up dead, Jack’s curiosity is aroused. As he starts to resurrect McKillop’s recent and more distant past, some of Jack’s memories regarding Danny’s case starts to resurface. It wasn’t the best time in Jack’s life to have him as your attorney. He was self-abusing himself at an alarming rate over the death of his wife. When you read the book and find out exactly how she died, you’ll have even more understanding of his state of mind. ”I wasn’t walking around drunk, crying in pubs, getting into fights with strangers because I was blaming myself. I was in a state of incoherent rage. I had lost someone who had cast a glow into every corner of my life. I was entitled to my feelings. Loss. Hate. Hopelessness. Worthlessness.” The more Irish peers into the past the more he starts to realize that things were missed in the McKillop case. There were greater forces at work than he or even Danny were aware.
As Jack pokes and prods about, he soon discovers that the strings connecting to the case lead all the way to Parliament. Even if he wants to back off, he is already in too deep.
The series is set in Melbourne, Australia. I was reading about Jack going here and there, and so finally, I pulled up a map of Melbourne. I spent a bit of time familiarizing myself with the layout of the streets. By the end of the book, I wasn’t having to look at the map anymore but could visualize where Jack was in the city. There is some Australian slang scattered throughout the book. Some are familiar to me, and some are self-evident, but there are a few I had to google to be sure they are what I think they are. I know things like this annoy some readers, but for me, all it does is add authenticity to my reading experience.
There is a Jack Irish series available, starring Guy Pearce, which has two seasons. In addition, there are three movies that precede the series, also starring Guy Pearce, that are based on the novels. There are only four Jack Irish novels, which is too few for sure, but unfortunately, Peter Temple passed away in 2018. I have not seen the movies yet because I decided to read the books first. I am watching the first season of the series, and it is terrific so far. Guy Pearce has always been one of my favorite actors, and the role fits him like a glove. So you have many choices about how you want to get to know Jack Irish, but whichever way you choose, I highly recommend making his acquaintance.
”It came, the blinding flash in the eyes, as we soared into the air. White, dazzling, brain shattering light, splintering the day into a million fragm”It came, the blinding flash in the eyes, as we soared into the air. White, dazzling, brain shattering light, splintering the day into a million fragments and blotting out the world in a blaze as searing as the sun.
I felt Revelation falling beneath me and rolled instinctively, my eyes open and quite unable to see. There there was the rough crash on the turf and the return of vision from light to blackness and up through grey to normal light.”
Two years ago Sid Halley crashed during a horse race and horse shoes made razor thin by use sliced up his left arm like roast beef at the deli counter. The doctors wanted to take his arm, but he insisted that they sew it up and hope for the best.
The best turned out to be an arm so deformed that people can’t bear to look at it and can’t bear to look away. Sid learns to hide his hand in his pocket. His days as a championship steeplechase jockey are over. He has a friend give him a job in his detective agency out of pity or with the hopes to put him back on his feet? Sid isn’t sure, but he is itching to get back to feeling useful.
The novel begins with Sid recovering from a bullet wound to his stomach. His first stakeout did not go very well. His wife has left him, but his father-in-law the Admiral, who didn’t want him in the first place, is sticking with him. It seems like when things start going wrong for someone they keep going wrong. Sid barely has time to recover from one disaster before another is staring him in the face.
Sid finds himself saddled with a nonexistent personal life, but hopes that throwing himself into a case will at least keep him occupied. He starts investigating a series of mishaps at a local racetrack. This quickly escalates into a scam worth millions and when things are worth millions people who get in the way start to get hurt. Sid can’t clear all the jumps that have been put in front of him. Desperate to help, and motivated by the natural tenacity that made him such a great jockey lands him at the mercy of a trio of crooks who enjoy administering pain to cripples.
And when they are beautiful it somehow lends more pain to the process.
”Doria Kraye stood there, maliciously triumphant. She was dressed theatrically in white slender trousers and a shiny short white jacket. Her dark hair fell smoothly, her face was as flawlessly beautiful as ever: and she held rock steady in one elegant long-fingered hand the little .22 automatic I had last seen in a chocolate box at the bottom of her dressing-case.”
‘The end of the line, buddy boy,’ she said.”
Sid does meet a woman who doesn’t wish to be as beautiful as Doria Kraye, but she does wish that she could be normal, just plain would be fine. Fire has turned a portion of Zanna’s face into a dreadful mess. She can’t just hide her face in her pocket like Sid can his hand.
The interesting part that Dick Francis explores so deftly in this novel is the way people react to deformity. It brings out the absolute worst in some people by inspiring mystifying hatred or a smothering bout of pity or a chilling abhorrence when all anyone wants who has suffered some crippling accident is to be treated normal. Zanna moves her desk at work so the good side of her face is what people see. Even though she can’t see her face, she can see her face in the eyes of the people who notice the burns. The blanched expressions and the looks of horror never allow her to forget.
I used to believe that people who suffering these crippling injuries will eventually adjust and they do, but unfortunately the people that they see day in and day out do not ever allow them to just move on. They have to deal with the reactions to their injuries every day. Unless a person is strong willed their injury will end up defining them.
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Even when they have lost their jockey some of the horses want to finish the race.
It has been a long time since I’ve read Dick Francis, too long. I enjoy horse racing, although I mostly stick to The Triple Crown of racing and the big races leading up to those events. I did recently, almost by accident, watch a steeplechase race from England on television. It was fascinating. The jumps, the jockeys who get thrown, and the horses that continue to run the race without their jockeys. I had never seen anything like it before. I don’t know how they keep enough steeplechase jockeys ambulatory to keep having races. That bit of fortuitous channel flipping did plant the seed back in my mind to read the Sid Halley series by Francis. I’d never read them, but always heard they were excellent. Next in the series is Whip Hand which many fervent Francis fans consider to be his best book. I for one can’t wait!...more
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