Book Review - Longshot - Is Meekness Even Minorly Heroic?

I just finished reading Longshot by Dick Francis. I was particularly engaged by this book in that I thought I had read all of Dick Francis' books. Longshot was new to me. Or I read it so long ago I've completely forgotten it.

Two passages stuck out.

The first is at the very end of the book. The hero is a travel adventure writer and the killer is using the hero's manuals on shooting game and survival against him. By the end of the book, when the hero is about to reveal who the killer is, the killer commits suicide and tries to make it look like an accident.

"A copy of Return Safe from the Wilderness lay on a workbench, and I picked it up idly and looked through it. Traps. Bows and arrows. All the familiar ideas. I flipped the pages resignedly and they fell open as if from use at the diagram in the first-aid section showing the pressure points for stopping arterial bleeding. I stared blankly at the carefully drawn and accurate illustration of exactly where the main arteries could be found nearest the surface in the arms and wrists...and in the legs.
Dear God, I thought numbly. I taught him that too."

I thought this was excellent if only for the O-Henry-esque ending. Loved it. Saw it coming just a bit, but not so much that it wasn't fun to read.

The second passage occurs early in the book.

"The letter from Ronnie Curzon came on a particularly cold morning when there was ice like a half-descended curtain over the inside of my friend's aunt's attic window. The window, with its high view over the Thames at Chiswick, over the ebb-tide mud and the wind-sailing sea gulls, that window, my delight had done most, I reckoned, to release invention into words. I'd rigged a chair onto a platform so that I could sit there to write with a long view to the tree-chopped horizon over Kew Gardens. I'd never yet managed an even passable sentence when faced with a blank wall."

Finally, the title of this post alludes to an aspect of this book juxtaposed against my own endeavor. My editor revealed to me that he has never read a Dick Francis book. I was impressed when upon receipt of my manuscript he went out and borrowed one from the library, ostensibly to read. I say ostensibly because I found out later that he did not actually read it.

Throughout the manuscript he has written "your hero is too meek, not showing even minor heroic qualities" or words to that effect. In Longshot, as in most of Dick Francis' books, the hero is meek. Strikingly meek. These two things, reading Longshot, reviewing my edited manuscript, brought this into focus. Is it bad to have a meek hero? Can't he act as a foil, as so many of Francis' heroes do, to all of the characters that interact around and with him? A sponge? An everyman who plays off others and travels through his story reacting instead of acting?

At the very least I can be thankful that according to Matthew writing about Jesus in the Beatitudes, my hero is blessed and will inherit the earth.