Established, well-loved authors get a little more latitude in their product than unknowns. Though I don’t mean to imply that I didn’t thoroughly enjoy Dick Francis’s Banker, I won’t pretend that it’s a taut, edge-of-your-seat thriller. It’s pretty languid, stretching the action over a period of three years. We don’t even know for sure any crime has been committed until about half-way through, and nobody gets killed till after that. The only suspense comes near the very end.
But the signature Dick Francis pleasures are all here in abundance—a stalwart, sympathetic hero, a love story that doesn’t try to hog the spotlight, and an interesting look into a world few of us know. That horse racing is involved goes without question, but the education here is in the world of merchant banking—how loans are made (or refused), what makes for success in a chancey field, how banker princes live.
Our hero is Tim Ekaterin, who at the beginning is an underling in an English bank that bears his family name (though that refers to a different branch of the family than his own). But when his immediate superior is taken ill he’s instructed to take over the man’s loan decisions. This opportunity moves him up a level in status, and he gets an invitation to attend the Derby at Ascot, where he and the rest of the party see a brilliant horse called Sandcastle come in the winner. Later, when a request comes in from a stud farmer for a loan to buy Sandcastle, it seems an excellent investment.
But, as we learn (after a year or so), someone wants to sabotage the horse. And they will not stop at murder to accomplish it.
Aside from the pleasures of reading a satisfying story from a master storyteller, Banker had other rewards for me. I enjoyed seeing the world of business, specifically the world of banking, portrayed positively, with the bankers presented as decent people who root for their creditors’ success.
“I can’t promise because it isn’t my final say-so, but if the bank gets all its money in the end, it’ll most likely be flexible about when.”
“Good of you,” Oliver said, hiding emotion behind his clipped martial manner.
“Frankly,” I said, “you’re more use to us salvaged than bust.”
He smiled wryly. “A banker to the last drop of blood.”
It was also pleasing to read, in a fairly recent book, of a hero who refuses to commit adultery when he knows he could, and could get away with it. The celebration of sexual virtue is a rare quality in literature nowadays.
Not Francis’ best, Banker is flawed but well worth the read. Recommended for teens and up.
Banker has always been one of my favorites. Francis was very good at giving us these peeks into another facet of horse racing that we’d never know about otherwise.
Every time I think I want a horse (a holdover from my childhood prayers), I remember a line from one of the Francis books (can’t remember which one now), where a young boy says, “Break your heart, horses do.”
I read this last night, on your rec. It is probably my favorite Francis to date. It does the neat but difficult trick of having a story that really isn’t a mystery story contain a mystery without having the mystery element seem forced.
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the ‘break your heart’ line is from Banker.
Banker was my first….I’ve since, over the years, had all of Francis’s …inventions. Now, in my years, long in tooth, I go after the son’s. May they pleasure me as well.