Wild Horses
Putnam, 1994
Characters
- Valentine Clark
- blacksmith turned newspaperman, dies of cancer
- Thomas Lyon
- film director
- Dorothea Pannier
- Valentine's sister
- Ed
- Thomas's assistant director
- Robbie Gill
- Valentine's doctor
- Howard Tyler
- writer
- Moncrieff
- director of photography
- O'Hara
- producer, American
- Nash Rourke
- American actor (plays Jackson Wells in Thomas's movie)
- Paul
- Dorothea's son
- Ivan
- stuntman, double for Nash
- Silva Shawn
- female star in Thomas's movie
- Ziggy Keene
- stuntman, "no one better on a horse"
- Jackson Wells
- lives on Batwillow Farm, grows willows for cricket bats
- Lucy Wells
- Jackson's daughter
- Ridley Wells
- Jackson's brother
- Alison Visborough
- widow of the deceased Rupert Visborough
- Audrey Visborough
- Yvonne's sister, Alison and Roddy's mother
- Rupert Visborough
- Audrey's husband, died of a heart attack, (Cibber in book)
- Roddy Visborough
- Alison's brother
- Pig Falmouth
- jockey
- Prof. Meredith Derry
- lecturer in medieval history, knife expert
- Yvonne
- Jackson's first wife, her death is the basis of Howard's book
Favorite passages
Do you feel that they usually ruin a book when they make it into a movie? Are all those changes to the story completely necessary? Do the actors look different than you imagined the characters? One group members says, :) Wild Horses shows the director's point of view. I have two favorite quotes from Wild Horses - both short. First: And the second describes Thomas's feelings for Lucy:
I feel the movies should be prefaced by 'Any resemblence to the book is purely coincidental.'
Never attack anyone, old Valentine had once written, unless you've counted the cost of winning.
There was no thunderbolt: just an insidious hungry delight that never went away.
Chosen by members of the reading group in the late 1990s. From Wild Horses by Dick Francis.
The group read it
We discussed Wild Horses on June 1, 1998.
This page was first written for the reading group's original site in the late 1990s and was lost when AOL Hometown closed. It has been recovered from the Internet Archive.