The Power of the Psycho Bastard

I’ve been reading Dick Francis. I’ve going full speed ahead for so long that I hadn’t had time to read at all, I doubt I’ve read a novel in the past three years, but two nights ago, I looked at the list on my iPad and there was a Francis and I read it. Then I bought another and read it. In the past three nights, I’ve read six, four I’d read before and two new ones. I read them entirely for pleasure, but while I was reading, in the back of my mind I kept thinking, Why? I don’t care at all about racing, jockeys, all the stuff he’s expert in. I appreciate his expertise, his authority-in-the-text is absolute, but I’m sure as hell not reading for the horses. His heroes are impossibly strong men who can and do withstand tortuous pain to defeat evil, and they’re completely interchangeable, the Francis Guy. (Yes, I know I write the Crusie Girl. What’s your point?) I’ve been thinking about it for three days, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not the men or the pain–I like the one and abhor the other–it’s the evil. Dick Francis writes a great Psycho Bastard.

I’ve written before about the importance of the antagonist–the character who defines and shapes the conflict–but I think it’s in Francis’s books that you see that power unashamedly exploited. Francis’s bad guys aren’t misguided, they’re not conflicted, they’re not at all complicated, they are selfish, sadistic, sociopathic monsters, evil incarnate, doing incalcuable damage to good people, inflicting explicit torture on the hero, hissing and spitting with bile and hatred. His heroes are equally simple: good men doing the best they can, standing against evil without fanfare, taciturn and understated, the very best of British stiff-upper-lipped-ness without being jerks about it. It’s good vs evil, unadorned.

There’s something extremely cathartic about that. I don’t need to understand the Big Bad, I don’t need to see the Good Guy in internal conflict, I just watch as Right defeats Wrong after a terrific battle. It’s not sophisticated characterization (although it’s very well done), there are no shades of gray, which means that that when Right wins, there’s a tremendous sense of justice served, no second thoughts. I realize if I were a more sophisticated reader, a more literary reader, I would miss those shades of gray, that I would long for more complexity underneath the surface, but all I can say to that is thank GOD I’m not a literary reader. When I think of the writers I love best–Pratchett, Heyer, Allingham, Francis, Gilbert, Stout, so many others–the one thing they have in common is that their antagonists are completely irredeemable, bastards to the bone. Add in Joss Whedon (the Master, Glory, and most of all the Mayor) and I have come to the conclusion that I might be a much happier writer if I wrote what makes me happy as a reader: those selfish, venal, rotten-to-the-core villains.

I must cogitate on this. And read some more Francis. My fave of his is not in e-form yet (what were they thinking?) and my copy is buried somewhere in the garage (I hope), but it really doesn’t matter. Any one of his books that I pick up will feature a monster with a cattle prod and a good man who knows how to bring him down. And that’s exactly what I need right now.