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Friday, September 27, 2002 |
Dick Francis mysteries found to be ineluctably masculine
While looking for something else, I came across Graham Lord's 1999 biography Dick Francis: A Racing Life.Dick Francis is on the short list of the best writers I know: his books read effortlessly, while making you think about things you've never thought about and care about things you've never cared about before. Virtually all of them revolve, to a greater or lesser extent, around the world of horse racing (which I've never been interested in), and he makes horse racing just as interesting as piloting a plane, or photography, or computers, or the wine trade, or whatever other mini-world his story features.
His success as a writer (his books made him a multi-millionaire) is all the more amazing when you find out that he dropped out of school at 15, was a jockey who rose to the top of the English racing world until injuries forced him to retire when he was 36, and only then started writing a weekly column on horse-racing. Certainly, his background as a jockey lends credibility to his stoic, two-fisted heroes: when the hero breaks a bone, we are likely to know that Dick himself had broken bones from racing accidents every year of his career, which probably explain why the hero tends to use painkillers and wear bandages for the rest of the book, unlike most mystery heroes.
Graham Lord asserts that the "Dick Francis" mysteries are in fact the joint product of Dick and his wife Mary, and that Mary insisted from the first on keeping her name off the mysteries. Back in the early 1960s, Mary felt that the books would sell better if they were seen as written solely by Dick (a well known sports hero), and would not sell if they were thought to have a "woman's touch" about them. No science fiction fan who remembers "Andre" (Alice Mary) Norton, or "James Tiptree, Jr." (Alice B. Sheldon), will have trouble understanding her reasoning. Mary Francis did in fact go on to publish, under her own name, a guide to flying small aircraft. She learned to pilot small planes while researching one of the early mysteries, and eventually ended up owning and running an air taxi company with three planes, which is perhaps carrying research further than most people would.
The mystery writer H. R. F. Keating confirms the main points of his thesis in a review of Lord's book, noting that Mary Francis herself told him that the books were co-written, and a quick web search turns up other people who knew them both and will testify to the fact that Mary had a large hand in every book.
About the "ineluctably masculine" title of this piece: the author and editor Robert Silverberg wrote an introduction to the early James Tiptree collection "Warm Worlds and Otherwise", in which he scoffed at rumors that Tiptree was a woman, and noted that he found that "there is to me something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree's writing." Two years later, it came out that James Tiptree, Jr. was the pseudonym of Alice B. Sheldon. In the same way, the Dick Francis stories are "ineluctably masculine", full of stoic and honorable men who solve problems themselves, don't look to the police for help, suffer injustice silently rather than be seen as a complainer, and above all suffer large amounts of physical stress and pain as they endure their way through to the end of the story.
So much for gender theory.
