TO THE HILT

Rating:
Summary: How to improve this book: Making the pages of chocolate
Review: All of Dick Francis' stuff is great, and here's no exception. It's a quick read and nobody at a university is going to assign it as fine literature. Yet, Francis deftly involves issues of personal character in the presence of money and titles, not unlike Shakespeare's greatest hits.
Continually underscoring the two human races: the decent and the indecent (good and evil are too pure of terms for true-to-life characters), the author always emphasizes through his first-person account the stiff-upper-lip culture and maturity of England's ideal man.
Inventing tasteful ways to present sex and gore both, Dick Francis shows off good writing skills for even a jaded modern audience.
This tale combines all of the above and spices it with Scottish landscape, royal jewels, treachery, jealousy, castles, a National Trust busy-body, and of course...horses.

Rating:
Summary: To the Hilt-No guilt
Review: Dick Francis's To the Hilt, May be read without any guilt -- The man's at the top of his game, Though his heroes are always the same-- This one's named Al, he's a Scot, Who gallops through the usual plot -- Some thugs search him out; beat him up, To lay hands on the King Alfred Cup -- The cup causes all sorts of bother, In service of his ailing step-father -- Who's moping around in a funk, 'Cause his treasurers gone;done a bunk -- His brewery's money is gone, Can Al help the plant carry on? -- He hides his kinsmen's chief pleasures, The cup, hilt and some other treasures -- Among them a thoroughbred horse; You knew there was one, of course -- Does he put all the bad guys to rout? Well, read the book and find out! -- If mystery tales are your style, This one's a guaranteed smile

Rating:
Summary: Always dependable, always enjoyable
Review: Usually if one said that an author and his novels were dependable that would be synonymous with dull and boring. Not so with Dick Francis. He always manages to create stories and characters that grab the reader and hold on until the end.

In "To the Hilt," we have Alexander Kinloch, a painter whose specialty is golf and the places and people that involves. He lives in a bothy in the Scottish highlands where the solitude makes his work not only possible, but extraordinarily wonderful. However, the world intrudes in the shape of four burly men who beat the pulp out of him. They want to know where "it" is, and when they realize he has no idea what they mean they throw him down the mountain to his fate.

Over the next few weeks, he finds out what they were seeking and why. When Ivan, his step-father, has a heart attack, the authority to protect the older man's empire is given to him, a responsibility he is both willing and loath to accept. His step-sister, who resents his interference, begins intruding on his life and that of their parents. As she struggles to wrest power from him her father dies, leaving Alexander with total authority. Part of that responsibility is a string of race horses, bringing into the story the one absolute certainty of a Francis story.

However, he really shines in this tale when describing the artist's passion and obsession. Alexander meets an older woman, an antiquities expert, bent on "saving" a precious heirloom, and becomes haunted by her face, to the point that he feels compelled to paint her portrait. The reader gets the brush strokes and the feelings as the work forms under his hands. Even a non-artist has to say, "Yes, that's how it is." When she sees the finished work, she says, "You have made me immortal."

Anyone who likes mysteries will enjoy the clean writing in a Dick Francis novel. For the most part both story and characters are unambiguous. This is a quick read and totally enjoyable.