  |
|
|
|
After Banker, Francis returned to the jockey as hero, introducing readers to finance through gold price fluctuations, creating in Malcolm Pembroke a memorable character
Malcolm Pembroke has five wives -- all of them exes -- nine children including an amateur jockey, a seemingly limitless talent for making money from the movement of gold on the financial markets, and a suspicious police force on his tail convinced that he held his soon to be fifth ex-wife’s face down in a bag of potting compost until she stopped breathing. They don’t believe that someone knocked him unconscious with an unexpected blow to the back of the head, then stuffed him into his car, fed a length of pipe into the window, and turned on the engine; they’ve dismissed it as remorse for his wife’s murder, or a clumsy attempt to divert suspicion from him. So quietly fearful of a second attempt, he asks Ian, his son by his third marriage to stay close to him, even though they hadn’t spoken for three years before that. It’s only Ian’s sharp reflexes from his time in the saddle that save their lives from a second attempt. When they talk it through, and it becomes clear that one of Malcolm’s extended family is the killer, Malcolm suddenly realizes the risk that he’s taken. ‘People can pay assassins…You could have decided not to go through with it tonight…at the last moment… …. ‘It wasn’t like that,’ I protested. Saving him had been utterly instinctive. ‘I didn’t have Moira killed,’ I said. ‘If you believe it of me, you could believe it of yourself.’ From that gradual rapprochement begins a desperate attempt keep Malcolm alive against an ever-more frantic killer, anxious to stop Malcolm “frittering” his family’s inheritance away. For Malcolm has a plan – if he spends the money, on high living, on buying bloodstock, on last minute-trips to Australia, there will be no reason to kill him. But Malcolm, while he is an unparalleled judge of the hot money whizzing around the financial institutions, is no judge of the human heart, and his plan backfires. Badly. In Malcolm Pembroke, Francis created one of his most memorable characters, who in some ways overshadows even narrator Ian. After books like Banker, where the hero tended to be an outsider, Hot Money’s hero, Ian, is a reversion to his earlier jockey protagonists, but Francis returns to on of his favourite themes, that of falling in love with the world of racing by making Malcolm his Innocent Abroad. In having Ian educate Malcolm, Francis instructs his readers without seeming to do so. Hot Money is one of Dick Francis’ very best novels, and bears repeated reading.
The copyright of the article Hot Money in Modern American Fiction is owned by Colin Harvey. Permission to republish Hot Money in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
|
|
|
|
