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Smokescreen by Dick Francis
Somehow Smokescreen had never gotten on my radar at all, even though I've read quite a bit of Dick Francis and had others recommended to me. In this case it came up on my Kindle screen as a recommendation, and I ended up absolutely loving it. In fact, this is probably one of my favorite Francis books ever. I finished it and immediately went back to reread it from the beginning.
This is especially impressive because this book begins with a narrative trope I absolutely hate, a bait-and-switch opening. And this one annoyed me in particular because I had bought the book on the basis of it - in the opening pages, the hero is handcuffed to the steering wheel of a car in the desert, struggling to free himself. I was intrigued. I bought the book. Two paragraphs later, the director yells "Cut!" So it started off with one strike against it. Having read the whole book, however, I'm really impressed at how thoroughly the seemingly bait-and-switch opening ends up being tied to the rest of the book - thematically, plotwise, and in terms of character relationships.
Like all(?) of Dick Francis's books, horse racing is involved, but the book takes the protagonist out of Francis's usual English setting into South Africa. The protagonist - Edward Lincoln, Link to his friends - is an actor whose honorary aunt/godmother has asked him to look into the unusually bad performance of her South African racehorse stable. He travels to investigate under the cover of a press tour, and soon begins to experience mysterious accidents that may or may not be attempts on his life. But with the entire stable acting suspicious, as well as being embroiled in the snakes' nest of the press tour (which includes a sleazy promotor, a director who hates him, and a variety of other suspects) there's no shortage of not just suspects but motives as well. Are the murder attempts trying to stop the stable investigation, a series of publicity stunts gone wrong, someone trying to settle a personal grudge, or something else entirely?
This is actually one of the more genuinely mysterious Francis whodunnits that I've read. I spent most of the book with absolutely no idea who among the relatively large cast were trustworthy - and in fact a lot of them aren't, but in very different ways, which makes the entire thing very tense. And yet there's a lot of genuine camaraderie, often with unexpected people, and an absolutely spectacular hurt/comfort-heavy climax that I thoroughly loved. Francis's books tend to go heavy on the "h" rather than the "c" - his characters go through hell, but don't often have a lot of aftermath for it other than just ending up in the hospital. But this one has a lot more than usual, necessarily due to the timing/location/nature of what happened to the protagonist, and it is entertainingly awkward and clumsy while also very sweet. This book is the very definition of the Hurt/Comfort Exchange tag "Awkward attempts at comforting are actually very comforting."
Good use is also made of the setting, with vivid descriptions of, among other places, a gold mine and a game preserve. The political aspects are there in the background; the book definitely isn't about that, probably for the best as it's written by a middle-aged white British guy, but the way it was touched on felt natural to me. (This was written in the early 1970s, so some of the descriptions are a bit dated, but not - imho, for whatever it's worth - too badly.)
I would totally nominate this book for Yuletide if I hadn't missed the deadline, WOE. Maybe next year! Anyway, I loved it, and there's a lot I want to talk about that I can't talk about without spoiling the entire plot, so I'll do another post for that a bit later. Or maybe in the comments.
EDIT: There are now considerably more detailed spoilers in comments!
This is especially impressive because this book begins with a narrative trope I absolutely hate, a bait-and-switch opening. And this one annoyed me in particular because I had bought the book on the basis of it - in the opening pages, the hero is handcuffed to the steering wheel of a car in the desert, struggling to free himself. I was intrigued. I bought the book. Two paragraphs later, the director yells "Cut!" So it started off with one strike against it. Having read the whole book, however, I'm really impressed at how thoroughly the seemingly bait-and-switch opening ends up being tied to the rest of the book - thematically, plotwise, and in terms of character relationships.
Like all(?) of Dick Francis's books, horse racing is involved, but the book takes the protagonist out of Francis's usual English setting into South Africa. The protagonist - Edward Lincoln, Link to his friends - is an actor whose honorary aunt/godmother has asked him to look into the unusually bad performance of her South African racehorse stable. He travels to investigate under the cover of a press tour, and soon begins to experience mysterious accidents that may or may not be attempts on his life. But with the entire stable acting suspicious, as well as being embroiled in the snakes' nest of the press tour (which includes a sleazy promotor, a director who hates him, and a variety of other suspects) there's no shortage of not just suspects but motives as well. Are the murder attempts trying to stop the stable investigation, a series of publicity stunts gone wrong, someone trying to settle a personal grudge, or something else entirely?
This is actually one of the more genuinely mysterious Francis whodunnits that I've read. I spent most of the book with absolutely no idea who among the relatively large cast were trustworthy - and in fact a lot of them aren't, but in very different ways, which makes the entire thing very tense. And yet there's a lot of genuine camaraderie, often with unexpected people, and an absolutely spectacular hurt/comfort-heavy climax that I thoroughly loved. Francis's books tend to go heavy on the "h" rather than the "c" - his characters go through hell, but don't often have a lot of aftermath for it other than just ending up in the hospital. But this one has a lot more than usual, necessarily due to the timing/location/nature of what happened to the protagonist, and it is entertainingly awkward and clumsy while also very sweet. This book is the very definition of the Hurt/Comfort Exchange tag "Awkward attempts at comforting are actually very comforting."
Good use is also made of the setting, with vivid descriptions of, among other places, a gold mine and a game preserve. The political aspects are there in the background; the book definitely isn't about that, probably for the best as it's written by a middle-aged white British guy, but the way it was touched on felt natural to me. (This was written in the early 1970s, so some of the descriptions are a bit dated, but not - imho, for whatever it's worth - too badly.)
I would totally nominate this book for Yuletide if I hadn't missed the deadline, WOE. Maybe next year! Anyway, I loved it, and there's a lot I want to talk about that I can't talk about without spoiling the entire plot, so I'll do another post for that a bit later. Or maybe in the comments.
EDIT: There are now considerably more detailed spoilers in comments!
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It's true! That entire sequence is emotional gold (and successfully endeared me to the relevant character whose introduction is deliberately not at all endearing).
I would totally have read the Yuletide fic for Smokescreen that someone wrote for you. I am also faintly puzzled that this one, for the more than usually obvious reasons, was never adapted for film.
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Yes, on all counts! Actually, since I'm not likely to write up a spoiler version of this anytime soon (if ever), I'll just get into that part in this comment: I absolutely loved how the book deals with Evan. Right up until Link is rescued, it was still genuinely plausible that Link might be wrong about who actually did it and that Evan might have staked him out in the desert to die as an egotist's revenge. It's not that likely, and Link doesn't think he's capable of it, but I wasn't sure! Tasty tasty uncertainty.
But Link is right after all, and more than that, Evan's obsessive assholery is actually useful for a change; he's not only the one who finds him, but the one that Link thinks will find him (and he's not wrong). I appreciated Conrad quite a lot as well (and am I wrong, or is Conrad implied to be gay? Or at least as much as can be done in a men's adventure book in 1972), but I also really loved that Evan goes from being the person who literally put Link in that situation in the first place - and he is genuinely an unbearable, egotistical dick in the opening scenes and many of the subsequent ones - to something of a touchstone while he's waiting for rescue; the "Evan, please find me" litany was really affecting, even though it's just that he literally has no other hope except to hope that Evan is just that obsessive!
It's not a redemption arc per se - Evan is probably still going to be just as much of a nightmare to work with for the hapless actors who are saddled with him as a director, and he clearly doesn't even understand the magnitude of what Link went through given his lack of empathy about getting back into the car. But I loved that he ends up being brought face to face with the actual reality of the nightmare he forced Link to enact at the start of the book, and he's genuinely appalled and sympathetic, and trying his best to be helpful. I also found him very endearing, far more so than I could have anticipated. It was all very nicely done and absolute bang-on exactly what I wanted on all levels.
I am also faintly puzzled that this one, for the more than usually obvious reasons, was never adapted for film.
Oooh, that's a very good point! I am also surprised now that I think about it, especially since I feel like the book's visuals would have been a generally good fit for cinema of the era it came out in; it feels very 1970s-era in visual style.
Oh, while I'm at it, one thing I forgot to mention in my write-up is that I really loved how funny this book often was. Francis isn't an author I associate with humor, in general, but this book really did a nice job of the inherent comedy aspects of a bunch of clueless movie-makers and actors running around in rural South Africa, including some very nice lines. (I don't have the book in front of me to quote exactly, but some of them made me laugh out loud, like the bit about the guidebook mentioning that you aren't supposed to stick your head out the window and yell "Zebra!" because most of the animals think that cars are inedible but they do tend to bite off anything that's sticking out.)
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"Dear boy" is a dropped hairpin since time immemorial.
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And yes, lots of very funny moments - the kid who doesn't turn the light off when doing the films with his eyes closed! everyone shoving their way onto the gold mine tour! also Link totally shutting down the attempted dinner-seduction-paparazzi thing, and the poor long-suffering Haagen the park ranger and the elephant :-).
Thank you for the rec, it was absolutely 100% my kind of thing and reminds me that I ought to read more Dick Francis because I've only read a few of his so far.
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The absolutely epic whump at the end and then the amazingly awkward h/c with the mixture of realistic 'WTF do we do about this?' along with the odd little moments of earnest sincerity, like Evan's horrified reaction when Link begs them not to leave.
Yessss! I loved all of that - they're so very bad at it in a relatable way (actually I just realized, too, that the scene with Link doing CPR on the electrocuted reporter sets up Link as the only person in his entire social circle who has any first aid skills at all, which is now coming back to bite him) but they're also really worried and genuinely well-intentioned, including Evan being earnestly concerned about him and trying just as hard as Conrad to help!
That's also a really good point about Evan's basic flaws in other circumstances actually making him a very useful person in a crisis once he's pointed in the right direction. He is a very interesting and complicated character! After I had spent most of the book not being sure if he was the person trying to kill Link, once I went back and reread the rest of the book with the outcome in mind (jerk: yes; evil: no) I noticed how many little humanizing touches he actually gets throughout the book - getting flustered because he has no idea how to talk to Quentin's teenage daughter, his claustrophobia in the mine, generally being kind of adorably nerdy (if unbearable to everyone around him) with his fixation on his probably goddawful elephant movie.
It was such terrific fun. I wish I hadn't missed the Yuletide nomination cut-off, but there are always other exchanges.
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I also thought Francis did a pretty good job with the plot thread about Link's daughter with brain damage, that was pretty well handled.
It is a shame Yuletide nominations are over, because this would have been a great Yuletide fandom - there's some kind of law of Yuletide that says you discover an amazing Yuletide fandom a couple of days after nominations close.
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Him agreeing to get back in the car is possibly the single most astonishing act of badass stoicism in Francis' entire career of writing badass stoics.
It's too bad you didn't read this in time for the deadline! Next year, or some other exchange.
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Yes! I love how it not only does redeem the opening scene, but in a less glib way than it could have. In a different author's hands, Link having already been through the fake version of this could have given him the tools to survive, or some unique trick that he learned the first time would be available to pull out and use now.
But instead it's the opposite of that, with the reality of the situation hitting him brutally with how very different it is, how many things he failed to understand, and how even his suggestions about how to make it "more realistic" were wrong. It's incredibly well done, and that's even without the additional callbacks involving people around him, or other aspects of the scenario. I was just thinking about Link agreeing in the opening scenes that it makes a better movie if his character doesn't get rescued - a tragedy makes better drama - but then rescue is exactly what happens to him in the "real world" version of it.
Him agreeing to get back in the car is possibly the single most astonishing act of badass stoicism in Francis' entire career of writing badass stoics.
Yes, I loved that. I also didn't understand up until that point that not changing clothes (I was almost begging him in my head to take a bath, LOL) was actually part of his plan. Francis is good at stoic badasses, but that was absolutely next level.
Yuletide would have been perfect because it's one of the few character-based exchanges still out there, and I really just wanted to request Link and let it be writer's choice. But now that I know how much I like this book, I'm sure I'll reread it for some future Yuletide or find another exchange it works well for.
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I was saddened to check Francis's bibliography and realize that I've now read more of them than I haven't. I wanted an endless stash of unread gems!
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You should list the ones you haven't read yet some time so we can give you recs.
Dick Francis suggested reading list
The good new is that they're endlessly rereadable. For me, the mystery isn't the main pleasure - rather, it's the characters and their interactions.
Faves in no particular order:
Rat Race
To the Hilt
Flying Finish
Reflex
The Sid Halley series
The Kit Fielding couple (man, I wish there were lots more of these. I love the Princess!)
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Yes, I love it! The place they get to by the end of the book is really enjoyable - maybe nothing that might be called friendship exactly, but there's definitely a lot there, and there's a general sense of thawing even before Evan actually saves his life.
I was saddened to check Francis's bibliography and realize that I've now read more of them than I haven't. I wanted an endless stash of unread gems!
Oh nooooo! I'll be hitting that point eventually, probably. I've been coasting for a while on having read most of the ones I already read so long ago that I don't remember anything about them. (I read a bunch of them as a teenager, but my memories are so vague that I've only been getting occasional flashes of "yes, I think I read this one before" every now and then as I've been reading them in recent years.)
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