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Dick Francis

Overview

The standard history of Dick Francis must mention that this Grand Master mystery writer officially began his sporting career after WW2 as an amateur jockey and retired in 1957 as the preferred jockey of the Queen Mum. In 1956 he came heart-breakingly close to winning the Grand National. Upon retirement at the age of 36 he turned his attention to writing, beginning as the racing correspondent for a British daily. He released his first mystery novel in 1962 and has since turned out about one a year. Our handy-dandy Benét's Reader's Encyclopedia, 3rd ed. informs me that Francis' novels, long popular in England, became so in the U.S. after a 1980 television series based on his 1965 novel Odds Against.

As stated above, Francis churned out novels at a one per year pace starting in 1962. However, about 3 weeks after the release of Shattered in 2000, Dick's wife Mary died of a heart attack at the couple's home in the Cayman Islands. Her death had a major impact on Dick's writing since she did a large part of the research and editing of the novels. Indeed, Dick Francis - A Racing Life, an unauthorized biography written by Graham Lord, alleged that she was the sole author. Lord has built a specialty of sorts with unauthorized biographies of British authors, with works on John Mortimer (author of the Rumpole books) and Alf Wight (aka country vet James Herriot). Fans of the authors are usually quick to condem Lord's bios with allegations of shoddy research and a muckracking agenda. In any case, no Dick Francis books came out for 6 years following Mary's death until, in September of 2006, Under Orders was released. Wikipedia informs me that Dick's son Felix has taken over Mary's duties as research assistant. Perusing the reviews on amazon.com for the book shows that readers are in two camps: either you love it and are so happy that Dick Francis has returned or you hate it and implicitly agree with Graham Lord.

Francis' mysteries take place against a horse racing background and I suppose that initially I shied away from his books because of this. After all, I figured, how many times can you read about some jockey who is forced by circumstances to be an amateur private eye? Luckily, however, I was wrong in my assumptions. While some of the novels (particularly the early ones) do have jockeys moonlighting as mystery solvers, many have lead characters who are involved with racing via more indirect capacities. In Reflex the hero is a photographer who shoots pictures of the racing life, in Driving Force the hero owns a horse transport firm, in Wild Horses the protagonist is a director of a film loosely based on a racing scandal and so on. Granted, some of these heroes are ex-jockeys, but that adds to the realism. There are two sequences of novels with recurring characters: the Sid Halley series (Under Orders, Odds Against, Whip Hand & Come To Grief) about a jockey turned full-time private eye and the consecutive novels which feature Kit Fielding (Break In & Bolt). Regardless of the particulars, most Dick Francis novels consist of a first person account of some criminal matter linked to horse racing. The protagonist is always brave, sensible and calm in the face of danger.

With such constancy of characterization, Dick Francis novels might run the risk of becoming boring after you've read three or four. After all, you know that the narrator, after getting in a couple of sticky situations, is going to have everything solved by the end of the book. And the mysteries aren't head-scratching, body-in-a-locked-room affairs either. But what saves the typical DF book is the fact that you're being introduced to a new environment. Part of the fun of reading Dick Francis is that often one is introduced to a new profession. Forget about the mystery; it's entertaining to peek inside the new world and learn a little something about banking or film making or British politics. For amusement, try reading Smokescreen and Wild Horses back to back; one has an actor as the leading man while the other has a director.

In addition to the 39 novels, Francis also has written his autobiography The Sport of Queens and a biography of jockey Lester Piggot A Jockey's Life. The latter is also available as Lester: The Official Biography. Field of 13, a collection of short stories (five written for the book), came out in 1998. - wej

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http://www.thrillingdetective.com/trivia/francis.html

Although only two of his heroes appear in more than one book, and only a handful of them are professional investigators or security consultants, former Queen's jockey Dick Francis has, in fact, been responsible for a long line of what might be considered non-PI PI novels. A former Welsh steeplechase jockey, Francis has become one of the most respected and popular mystery writers in the world, and in 1996, was voted a Mystery Grand Master by the CWA. His heroes are invariably cool, aloof loners, calmly professional, at loose ends with their lives, and often scarred, either physically or emotionally, and often both. They may not all be "official" eyes, but they certainly end up doing the job, even if the job description doesn't mention it. and, of course, each novel touches somehow on racing and horses.

To overlook Francis' work, or dismiss it as merely horsey versions of Agatha Christie, is just wrong. Dame Christie would never people her quaint little villages with such an assortment of villainous psychopaths and sociopaths, or put her heroes through such physical and mental torture. People get hurt in these books, and their pain isn't easily walked off. The bad guys are nasty, and brutal, and the books are often hardboiled almost to the point of noir. Fans of the PI genre could do a lot worse than to check out his work.

Particularly recommended are the Sid Halley books, where Francis actually does write about a private eye, for once. Coincidentally, I think they represent some of his best work. They might also look at a few of his actual professionals, David Cleveland (another investigator), Andrew Douglas (kidnapping/security consultant) and Tor Kelsey (train security expert).

Francis learned to ride when he was five, on a donkey of all things. The story goes that his older brother bet him sixpence that little dick couldn't jump a fence while sitting backwards on the donkey. It took a few tries, but eventually did it, collecting the wager and earning, as he put it, his "first riding fee."

Francis became an amateur steeplechase rider when he was 26, and two years later began riding as a professional steeplechase jockey, eventually winning more than 350 races. At 36, he retired as a jockey, and became covered racing for the Sunday Express. He published his autobiography, The Sport of Queens, in 1957, and his first mystery novel, Dead Cert in 1962. Since then he has written close to forty mysteries, averaging one a year, until the death of his wife and partner Mary Margaret Brenchley, in 2000. The 1999 unauthorised biography, Dick Francis: A Racing Life, had suggested that Francis' books had in fact been written by Mary herself, although Francis never confirmed the rumours. Certainly, though, Mary did do much of the research and editing of Francis' novels and stories, particularly the latter efforts. Afterher death, it was widely believed that Come to Grief (1995) would be Francis' final novel, but in September 2006 readers were treated to the unexpected appearances of a fourth Halley novel. Under Orders found Francis' series character Halley back on his feet (after the events of 1995's Come to Grief) and, if anything, more determined than ever.

Much like Francis himself, evidently.

2007 saw the publication of Dead Heat, a new (non-Halley) novel, co-written by Francis and his son Felix.

UNDER OATH

• "Dick Francis is my favorite author. This is not just from my perspective as a reader, but also from my perspective as a writer. When I sat down to write Chapel of the Ravens, one of my early novels, I literally took a paperback copy of Dick Francis's For
  Kicks apart in order to study in-depth how Francis structured his plots. Over the years I have returned to Francis time and again for comfort reads and to be inspired as a writer by the incredibly easy flow of his narrative."
  (Paul Bishop, from a post to DorothyL, November 1999)

 http://www.dickfrancis.com/site/DIFR/Templates/Home.aspx?pageid=3&cc=GB

 Biographies

Dick Francis

DICK FRANCIS was one of the most successful post-war National Hunt jockeys. The winner of over 350 races, he was champion jockey in 1953/1954 and rode for HM Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother. On his retirement from the sport he published his autobiography, The Sport of Queens, before going on to write forty-one bestselling novels, a volume of short stories (Field of 13), and the biography of Lester Piggott. He is rightly acclaimed as one of the greatest thriller writers in the world.

Dick Francis is the winner of the prestigious Crime Writers’ Association’s Cartier Diamond Dagger and the only three-time recipient of the Mystery Writer of America’s Edgar Award for Best Novel, winning for Forfeit in 1970, Whip Hand in 1981, and Come to Grief in 1996, the same year he was make a Grand Master for a lifetime’s achievement. He was awarded a CBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours list in 2000.

His last two novels – Dead Heat and now Silks - have been written in collaboration with his younger son, Felix, a former teacher who, over the last forty years, has helped research many of the Dick Francis novels.

Father and son are already working together on a new novel for publication in 2009.

Felix Francis

FELIX FRANCIS is the younger of Dick’s two sons. Born in 1953, Felix studied Physics and Electronics at London University before embarking on a 17 year career teaching Advanced Level physics at three schools, the last seven as head of the science department at Bloxham School in Oxfordshire. He took on the role of managing his father’s affairs in 1991.

For 13 years until 2005, he was also the deputy chairman of a major leadership training company and was a leader on four expeditions to such varied destinations as the Himalayan and Andean mountains, and the jungles of the Amazon basin and Borneo.

Felix remembers conversations around the Francis breakfast table being focussed on the Francis family business and somewhat unconventional. ‘The production of a Dick Francis novel has always been a mixture of inspiration, perspiration and teamwork. The first one was published when I was nine, and I grew up in a house where breakfast talk would be about the damage a bullet might do to a man’s guts rather than the more mundane topics of everyday life’, he says.

Over the last forty years, Felix assisted with the research of many of the Dick Francis novels, not least Twice Shy, whose hero is the mild-mannered Physics teacher, Jonathan Derry. In his youth, Felix was an international marksman, something Dick put to good use in his 2000 novel, Shattered, and later in Under Orders. With the publication of Dead Heat Felix took on a more significant role in the writing – Silks is the second novel of this father-and-son collaboration.