Dick Francis Critical Essay | Critical Review by Norma J. Shattuck

SOURCE: A review of Come to Grief, in The Armchair Detective, Vol. 29, No. 1, Winter, 1996, pp. 102-3.

In the following review, Shattuck asserts that Francis does not fully explore the emotions and motivations of the villain in his Come to Grief.

To say that jockey-turned-sleuth Sid Halley solves puzzlers involving horses and horse racing is to repeat what Dick Francis readers know already. To say that he solves them single-handedly is to perpetrate the obvious pun.

Actually, Halley's state-of-prostheses-art left hand comes close to being a co-character in Francis's Halley novels. At some point Sid's amputee status (the hand was lost in a disastrous racing spill) can be expected to become the focus of some character's malicious intent toward Halley-in-whole. A sub-theme of such encounters is people's not uncommon fascination with such physical infirmities. In Sid's dangerous business, morbid interest of this sort can segue to sadism.

Here,...
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