Book Review: Odds Against
Feb. 11th, 2025 10:26 amA couple weeks ago, ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
thisbluespirit posted a link to Odds Abridged, an abridged retelling of Dick Francis’s Odds Against. Now, I haven’t read Odds Against, but I have read other Dick Francis, so I knew to expect a stoic and omni-competent hero in a mystery involving horses, which is all you really need to know to read this hilarious fic.
After cackling my way through the abridged version, I decided I owed it to myself to read the original Odds Against as well.
WHAT a book. This is the first Francis book featuring Sid Halley, the only Francis hero to actually get a series, presumably because Francis realized that Halley suffered too beautifully to be confined to one book.
Sid is the IRONEST of woobies. At the beginning of the book, he’s just been shot in the gut, and also his left hand is basically a deformed claw as a result of a riding accident two years ago, which ended his jockey career and therefore destroyed all his interest in life. He has spent those two years in a drifting depression riding a desk in a private investigator’s office.
After the gunshot wound, Sid goes to his father-in-law’s to recuperate! (Sid’s wife has left him, but no matter, his father-in-law isn’t going to lose a good chess player just because he’s not technically part of the family anymore.) His father-in-law has a little puzzle he would like Sid to solve! Said little puzzle involves introducing Sid to a bunch of houseguests as his useless wastrel son-in-law, without warning Sid beforehand, so Sid’s just sitting at the dinner table expecting a nice dinner (or at least a usually polite dinner; he can’t eat much because of the gunshot wound to the stomach) when his father-in-law is all “And this is Sid, my daughter’s worthless ex-husband who just won’t leave my house.”
Father-in-law drops by to explain that his plan is to make the evil houseguests underestimate Sid, hence introducing him as the most useless man alive, and presumably he couldn’t warn Sid beforehand because Sid wouldn’t look sufficiently pained about it if he knew it was coming.
Later on two of the houseguests hold him down while they drag his deformed hand out of his pocket to have a look at it. (“He’s squirming!” the lady houseguest chirps.) This is just how Sid’s life goes in this book.
I realize that IRON WOOBIE SUFFERS STOICALLY AND AT GREAT LENGTH is not everyone’s thing, but if it is YOUR thing, then do yourself a solid and read this book.
thisbluespirit posted a link to Odds Abridged, an abridged retelling of Dick Francis’s Odds Against. Now, I haven’t read Odds Against, but I have read other Dick Francis, so I knew to expect a stoic and omni-competent hero in a mystery involving horses, which is all you really need to know to read this hilarious fic. It is not true that jockeys don't feel pain. We do. We just don't talk about it, even when our skeletons are torn out; we don't feel the pain until people say something hurtful like "why aren't there any horses," and then we have to take all of that toughness and try not to break down and sob, because we are bastards and bastards don't cry, because if bastards start crying even a little bit then they just end up laying on the floor drinking their full bodyweight in brandy, empty, pitied; not having any horses at all, the horseless men of the horseless world.
Instead I said, "because when I put the menaces on people it works strangely well, because I'm so much smaller than them, and it makes them go, oh, look, he's so little and menacing, Gladys, give him a biscuit."
Then I thought about it some more and added, "And then I keep the biscuit."
After cackling my way through the abridged version, I decided I owed it to myself to read the original Odds Against as well.
WHAT a book. This is the first Francis book featuring Sid Halley, the only Francis hero to actually get a series, presumably because Francis realized that Halley suffered too beautifully to be confined to one book.
Sid is the IRONEST of woobies. At the beginning of the book, he’s just been shot in the gut, and also his left hand is basically a deformed claw as a result of a riding accident two years ago, which ended his jockey career and therefore destroyed all his interest in life. He has spent those two years in a drifting depression riding a desk in a private investigator’s office.
After the gunshot wound, Sid goes to his father-in-law’s to recuperate! (Sid’s wife has left him, but no matter, his father-in-law isn’t going to lose a good chess player just because he’s not technically part of the family anymore.) His father-in-law has a little puzzle he would like Sid to solve! Said little puzzle involves introducing Sid to a bunch of houseguests as his useless wastrel son-in-law, without warning Sid beforehand, so Sid’s just sitting at the dinner table expecting a nice dinner (or at least a usually polite dinner; he can’t eat much because of the gunshot wound to the stomach) when his father-in-law is all “And this is Sid, my daughter’s worthless ex-husband who just won’t leave my house.”
Father-in-law drops by to explain that his plan is to make the evil houseguests underestimate Sid, hence introducing him as the most useless man alive, and presumably he couldn’t warn Sid beforehand because Sid wouldn’t look sufficiently pained about it if he knew it was coming.
Later on two of the houseguests hold him down while they drag his deformed hand out of his pocket to have a look at it. (“He’s squirming!” the lady houseguest chirps.) This is just how Sid’s life goes in this book.
I realize that IRON WOOBIE SUFFERS STOICALLY AND AT GREAT LENGTH is not everyone’s thing, but if it is YOUR thing, then do yourself a solid and read this book.
