Banker by Dick Francis

To paraphrase the crime writer, critic and broadcaster Jessica Mann in her introduction to Margery Allingham’s 1985 J.M. Dent edition of Traitor’s Purse: “Those defensive of their preferred reading matter often say that crime fiction will give historians more evidence of how early twentieth-century people lived than any survey or social history. Where better to learn….of the cigar-cutter, the monogrammed handkerchief or the fragment of tweed.…in a murder victim’s clutch?”

Fast-forward some sixty or seventy years, and the same sentiments could be applied to Dick Francis’ Banker, now twenty-five years old. The gentlemanly world of the investment banker was still six years away from being shattered by the Big Bang of the computerized London Stock Exchange, Thatcher and Reagan’s Decade of Greed had barely started, Gordon Gecko was but a gleam in Oliver Stone’s scriptwriter’s eye, the internet unheard of, and mobile phones concrete-slab-sized curiosities rather than today’s social must-haves.

It is this sense of an ever-widening chasm over even recent history that it is only one of the things that makes Banker so fascinating.

In terms of plot, it’s a medium well-done Francis. Merchant banker is asked to underwrite several hundredweight of horse-flesh. After the obligatory Francis lecture about How Banking Works (it’s fascinating to see Francis delve into his narrator’s profession, even as it dates the novel) Tim Ekaterin – as Francis’ heroes do – falls in love with horse-racing, just as Francis must have once done, perhaps fifty or more years before even Banker was written; it is worth considering that Francis would have been over sixty even at that time.

Equally inevitably, the narrator slowly begins to realize that dark deeds are being done, and stumbles into a denouement. That he is painfully slow to realize that devilry is afoot, and the villain and even motive are fairly obvious, is almost irrelevant. The whodunit aspect is the least interesting part of Banker.

It could be argued that Banker in some ways represents Francis first attempt to move away from formula, and toward a narrative arc as awkward and graceless as any literary novel representing ‘real’ life.

The novel is episodic, written in three blocks, each representing a calendar year. The blocks then split down into four or five chapters, each signifying a month within that year. This structure is one of the reasons that Banker is such a slow-burning novel.

The second is that narrator Tim Ekaterin has for Francis, an unconventional love life; hopelessly in love – although the depth of that love is not at first made completely clear – with a woman married to a friend whom he refuses to betray, he meets another woman, her sister, with whom he seems to be developing a quasi-romantic relationship. Just as there are hints that the affair may deepen, he meets a young girl who develops an obvious crush on him.

For most of the novel, the whodunit is as much romantic as criminal; when one potentially romantic avenue is brutally closed off, Banker veers back onto a more predictable, if less morally ambiguous course.

Francis ends the novel in such a way that at first it is slightly disappointing. On further thought, it opens yet another interpretation of narrator Tim Ekaterin; that in his own slightly awkward, old-fashioned way, Francis has created a Camelot for the 1980s, whereby Lancelot (Ekaterin)’s chivalrous behaviour toward his liege and lady receives the reward that eluded earlier versions of the Arthurian myth.

Historical distance, unusual narrative arc, refusal to conform to expectations -- Banker does not work on all levels, but it is this very willingness to experiment that makes it such an interesting read, and well worth re-evaluating.

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