Sandwich and Popcorn Books

Categories: Mystery & Suspense , Staff Picks , Fiction

Despite the food in the title of this post, I'm not talking cooking here! 

I went to a workshop where library staff talked about their favorite books of 2008.  One of the librarians described a nice, old-fashioned book as a sandwich:  "It's like a really good sandwich.  You finish it and you say to yourself, ‘Boy, that was a good sandwich.’"  I thought it was a great way to describe the book:  unpretentious, wholesome and satisfying. 

A food metaphor I often use is "popcorn books."  I mean those light, compulsive reads you finish in an evening.  Maybe they're not great literature, but there’s something to them, and you've just got to have them.  A little bit nutritious, tasty, and easy to devour.

Read on for one of my favorite popcorn authors and the title of the sandwich book.

Dick Francis's racing mysteries are among the books I'd describe as popcorn reads.  They're very similar to each other—an intelligent, physically hardy but reserved Englishman, frequently a steeplechase jockey, quietly outwits and outlasts bad guys to solve a crime and (usually) win a girl. 

The books are full of horseracing minutiae, and if the hero is a banker or a diamond merchant or something else instead of a jockey, there’s also a nice little bit of information about that field as well.

It’s a very successful formula, and formula done right is highly satisfying.

The latest volume is Silks.  Geoffrey Mason, a barrister who rides in amateur steeplechase races, is threatened when he becomes involved in a murder case.  The accused is top jockey Steve Mitchell, and the victim is his detested rival.  Mitchell looks guilty—but why the threats if the case is open and shut?  To prevent a miscarriage of justice and to protect himself and the people he loves from violence, Mason has to find the truth.

This isn’t my favorite Dick Francis—the Sid Halley series beginning with Odds Against easily outruns the competition—but I took it home and devoured it anyway, and it was quite enjoyable.  Popcorn.

And the sandwich book—that was The Blue Star, by Tony Earley, the author of Jim the Boy.