DICK FRANCIS – The Danger. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, US, hardcover, 1984. Michael Joseph, UK, hc, 1983. Reprinted a number of times.

    For some time after he achieved bestsellerdom in the United States, it seemed that Dick Francis (according to some critics) was not keeping up the pace. But with The Danger, he is back in front, writing prose as crisp and taut and lean as a racehorse. This novel runs in the really big international thriller category, starting with “there was a Godawful cock-up in Bologna.” It’s about kidnapping with a touch of terrorism.

    Andrew Douglas works as a partner in the firm of Liberty Market Ltd., whose credo is to “resolve a kidnap in the quietest way possible, with the lowest of profiles and minimum action.” He successfully gets back the kidnap victim, Alessis Cenci, “one of the best girl jockeys in the world.”

    They go back to England, where he engages in some psychological rehabilitation. This leads to the next hurdle, another kidnap (literally, a kid this time), and he sees a thread of connection. Douglas has the opportunity to assess his opponent — “Kidnappers are better detectives than detectives, and better spies than spies.”

    Then, it’s a leap across the Atlantic, where the senior steward of the English Jockey Club is kidnapped in Washington, D.C. — a snatch related to the first two. Apparently Dick Francis likes the States, because he has his chief character say, “I feel liberated, as always in America, a feeling which I thought had something to do with the country’s own vastness, as if the wide-apartness of everything flooded into the mind.”

    Andrew Douglas finally comes face-to-face w,ith his adversary genius in an exciting climax.

         ———
   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.