Jeffrey Bernard
people Mr Davis has written about come out of this book pretty badly. One notable exception is our own Duke of Devonshire who is quoted as saying, 'I am one of the most fortunate people in the country.' Quite so. What a far cry from the compla- cent drivel uttered by Terence Conran the Habitat tycoon who saYs, 'It doesn't make any difference whether you have £1 0,000 in the bank or £10 million.' Really? y my reckoning £1,990,000 has gone on the miss- ing list. But, of course, those of us with no socks to pull up can always console ourselves with the knowledge that money can't buy happiness and that it's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God. Yes? Go on, pull the other one. Take a look at some more disgusting pro- verbs and one-liners. `No one is really rich if he can count his money,' Paul Getty. `The larger a man's roof, the more snow it collects,' Persian proverb. If your heart is not yet bleeding then how about this from Prince Philip, never see any home cook- ing. All I get is fancy stuff.' Come along now, Philip, that is home cooking. And Mr Davis knows his way around the Royals. How's this for name-dropping? On the Queen: 'I once discussed money with her at a Buckingham Palace lunch and she com- plained about inflation, "Everything," she said, "is so expensive these days."' Davis reckons the Queen to be worth something in the region of £100 million. Peanuts com- pared to the Duke of Westminster's estimated £600 million. Mr Davis is at his best when writing about the Americans. Their vulgarity is as- tounding and the best laugh in the book is a remark George Kaufman made about the Rockefeller estate: 'It's what God would have built if he had the money.' But snob stuff about what's 'in' and 'out' in the houses of the rich is really rather silly. If a man wants a television set in the main room why shouldn't he? The rich, of all people, should be immune from such nonsensical pressures. Or is it because the servants,
waiting to be set ulapst proverb quoted, poor dears, are linmonge
examples? Oh yes, and I'd be grateful if anybody could tell me what on earth it means: 'Fame is the step- mother of death.' That beats the Persian platitudinarian with snow on his roof. Adventure story writers in Victorian times were fond of breaking off in the mid- dle of the yarn to inject a little education and I suspect Dick Francis was brought up on a diet of G.A. Henty and Percy F. Westerman. Reflex was a treatise on photography and Banker is a threefold text- book on merchant banking, horse doping — chemistry if you like — and thoroughbred breeding. Mr Francis can ob- viously write a good thriller — who am Ito argue with a few million readers? — but I really find the stereotyped characters a shade corny. His people remind me of old movie types. Naughty, wicked girls have black hair and good girls are blond. It has been rumoured and joked about in racing circles for some time now that Mr Francis's wife writes the sexy bits in his thrillers and I'm sure it's not true. However I looked forward to the sexy passages in Banker and was disappointed to find there isn't one. And that's another complaint. His heroes seem to me a little wet although they sustain the most severe thrashings in penultimate chapters. The hero in this offering irritated me by not laying his best friend's wife and I think Dick Francis's thinking is becoming more unrealistic the more he writes. Even heroes aren't as squeamish about sex as this one. His villains are much better. They're quite chilling and Francis is mustard at con- veying a sense of evil. The fact that he knows racing inside out helps too. At this rate he can't fail to get into the second edi- tion of Davis's The Rich.
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