Under Orders

by Mark Daniel

Georgie has always managed to charm his way out of whatever trouble is cooking. But this time there is more than money and his marriage at stake. And when the National Hunt stewards try to enlist his help on a project of their own, Georgie becomes the man in the middle of a deadly game.

292 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1990

Reviews

[Michelle Bacon · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a very disjointed story of a young racehorse jockey who gets caught up in a corrupt race, fast women and enough alcohol to flood the Titanic.
The story is hard to follow because there's no fluid transition and the characters seem to just show up unannounced. I didn't even realize that the main character (Georgie Blane) was having his life threatened.

[•*•.suprasixxcinco.•*• · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not an awful book but I would read it again.

[Esdaile · Rating 3 out of 5]

Racy is the pun that springs to mind to describe this racing thriller. Events are narrated by the bog-trotter Georgie Lane, a professional jockey. An explanation for the reason that I bought, read and am reviewing a book which would under normal circumstances would not be on any "to read" list of mine, is that I was at school with the author, who died in 2014, directly from pneumonia but pneumonia is opportunistic and the writer's was a constitution weakened by the booze. The writer and I were in the same A level English class together for two years. He was incorrigibly arrogant, obviously intelligent, energetic and a strong character and very colourful personality. Mark Daniel, it is no longer a secret, was the pen-name for Mark Fitzgeorge-Parker, described by the Telegraph obituary writer, in a broadly hostile obituary, as a "louche writer and jailbird". (He did time for purloining valuable books and selling them to second hand bookshops, an activity in this new post-Papyrus age of kindle and knock down prices for old books, which would probably not earn him either much money or such a severe sentence!) A leading passion of Mark Fitzgeorge Parker was horse racing and the love of horses and racing is evident on nearly very page of this thriller, a thriller which has the great merit of being readable, intelligent and compelling This is a thriller with no certain ending. Amid the cynicism, arrogant professionalism, and the conceited “I know the ways of the world, son” which permeates this tale, there is genuine love tale striving to emerge, rather in the manner of the unexpected softness and pathos in Ian Fleming's "On Her Majesty’s Secret Service".
Georgie Blane, an Irish jokey made good who uses sophisticated language, is caught in an insecure marriage and falls in love half way through the story, strikes me as an implausible sort of character. More unconvincing than the character Blane is the language that he uses. This bog Irish cynic, was suspiciously stagy to my mind. Do people really talk and write like George Blane? Well, perhaps some Irish jokeys do, a group of whom the writer knew much and I know nothing and the Irish are a people known for the many hams and amateur Thespians and raconteurs who act as ambassadors for their country; nevertheless, Georgie Blane is an unlikely admixture of public school boy and a working class lad made good. He has to be taken with rather too much salt, or whisky.
The writing is quite humorous at times, in the way that witty travel reviews can be:. Here is a taste:
"We dine on decentish winter fare at a nice little pub out Kingston Warren way. There's a seafood platter-a few prawns that taste of scrapbooks, a few crevettes crevées, a few tiny rolls of smoked salmon, three mussels and a queen scallop shell filled with unidentified pulverised piscatorial particles Mornay, all balanced precipitously on rather tired feuilles de chêne-then a noble pie of steak, kidney and prunes stewed in Guinness." Crevette crevée (deceased shrimp) is an example of the public school boy humour. I say that not maliciously but as a statement of fact. It is the sort of joke one would expect a public school boy to make. The juxtaposition of the wholesome British fare and the meagre and dubious continental sea platter reads like a nod in the direction of the author's work for UKIP (he is said to have been Nigel Farage's ghostwriter). I suspect that the constant juxtaposition of sophisticated language, Catholic undertones and Mickey Spillane world weary tough guy and Dick Francis crime world set among the gee-gees constitute too many diverse ingredients for "Under Orders" to appeal strongly to any identifiable group of readers. But anyone wanting to read a thriller with sophisticated language and enthusiasm for the milieu in which the story takes place will not be disappointed by this quirky, fast moving tale of crime and sport.