Word: authored
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...author is an expert on the painting of the 18th and 19th centuries and a teacher at London's Courtauld Institute of Art. Her six previous novels include Hotel du Lac, the 1984 winner of Britain's top fiction award, the Booker Prize. Yet despite her finished style and genteel settings, she is as hard-boiled as any writer of detective fiction. Many of Brookner's principals are updatings of that familiar character, the English spinster as connoisseur of other people's behavior. Rachel is not only unattached but detached, a state that suits her analytical intelligence and chilly rectitude...
Heather, needless to say, goes off to the arms of her handsome illusion. Rachel retreats to her solitary world, where she will undoubtedly continue to practice self-deception about what is real. And Author Brookner? She can take a small bow for her own skillfully executed illusion...
...most of the 25 horsey thrillers listed on the op-title page of Dick Francis' new entertainment. It is what goes on -- wheels turning in the murky unconscious, and all that -- when one of his characters, caught in some awkwardness, says "er . . ." That unmistakable Francis "er . . ." has got author and readers past many a potentially mushy spot and on to the good part, where the hero is gonked by hired gorillas or injected with horse tranquilizer, and then wakes up, aware that something is wrong, inside a locked steamer trunk...
...author's formula has become too predictable, however, and Hot Money is especially welcome because it offers a variation. No steamer trunks this trip, though as usual there are a few "ers" in the mixture, for flavor. Only the locked room of the mind (and the odd explosion) vex the hero, an amateur steeplechase rider named Ian Pembroke, as he puzzles out who is trying to murder his rich and autocratic father...
...several repellent wives. Recently someone knocked off his loathsome fifth, presumably to keep her from inheriting the family bundle. There are nine children, including Ian, and assorted spouses and their children. All are neurotic, vengeful and desperate for money, because Malcolm refuses to sweeten their small trust funds. The author's scheme neatly turns the King Lear plot inside out, observing the wreckage strewn about the heath when an aging tyrant fails to hand over power and wealth to his children...