What is it, all at once, with Canada? First we had Sondra Gotlieb, wife of the Canadian ambassador, being quoted saying witty things about us and them; then we had the brouhaha up north about our trade agreement with them, making for the first Canadian election in history to be covered seriously in the U.S. press; and now we have Dick Francis, giving us an amiable train ride all across the breadth of Canada, pointing out items of interest long the way. Maybe this is Canada's 15 minutes.

Dick Francis, as everybody knows, gives a good ride. He did so when he first came to fame as a jockey, and he does so now, as one of our premier purveyors of the classic English detective story. The Edge, in a way, refers more directly to Francis himself than to anything in the novel; in both of his professions, he is a consistent winner not because of any particular flash or dash, but because he has the edge he is just that little extra bit better than anybody else in the race. And that's enough.

Which he proves again this time, in a novel that combines in a smooth and palatable way three elements that shouldn't mix well at all: a villain-hunter story; a mystery game with actors playing out a trumped-up plot over several days in front of an audience with its attention primarily elsewhere (on horse racing, in fact); and that train ride across Canada, a travelogue that really ought to bore the pants off us, but doesn't.

Several years ago I took that same train trip, from Toronto to Vancouver, and I can attest that Francis deals with it both accurately and delicately. The scenery across Canada is wild and beautiful and boring—the thousandth mile of great plain looks pretty much like the first, and one tumbled boulderscape can do for them all—and Francis conveys all this without once calling attention to himself calling attention to the scenery. That isn't easy.

Much of what Francis does looks easy and isn't. Here, for instance, is his hero's first sight of the train: "The great train was standing there, faintly hissing, silver, immensely heavy, stretching away in both directions for as far as one could see in the gloom." I've read many train-in-station descriptions—we all have—but I've never before read two words like "immensely heavy" that so effectively lifted me out of my chair and planted me on the platform.

The hero who rides this train is young Tor Kelsey, an undercover investigator for the British Jockey Club, hired because Jockey Club Security needed "someone who knew the racing scene … An eyes and ear man … A fly on racing's wall that no one would notice." Having recently returned to England to claim a hefty inheritance after several years wandering abroad, Tor takes the job because he's alone and idle and the best times of his life had been spent as a teenager with a race-mad aunt.

His current assignment is to get the goods on a "villain" named Filmer, whose previous bad actions are known but unprovable. (In classic style, Filmer is a villain because he's a villain.) Filmer goes to Canada to join a promotional gimmick for Canadian racing—"Briefly, the enterprise offered to the racehorse owners of the world a chance to race a horse in Toronto, to go by train to Winnipeg and race a horse there … and to continue by train to Vancouver, where they might again race a horse"—and Tor follows, disguised on the train as a dining-car waiter.

Also aboard is an acting troupe, performing one or two scenes a day over the course of a week in a mystery story they've concocted: They pretend to be horse owners and trainers and so on, and Francis is, I think, too kind to them. (In real life, it takes much less than a week for such shenanigans to pall.) But, quoting Hamlet's "the play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king," Tor eventually takes over the mystery-within-a-mystery and rewrites it to affect the action in his own story.

The recipe includes as well a teaspoon of romance, a walloping tablespoon of action (Tor at one point must save the becalmed Race Train Special from being crashed into full-tilt by the overtaking high-speed regular passenger train, the Canadian), and an oddly real and affecting love story between young Tor and a dying elderly lady he's never met, who is his telephone link to the authorities back in Toronto. The development of that character sidebar is touching, must be sincerely felt, and is just one more way in which Dick Francis demonstrates his edge over the rest of the crowd.

If there's a flaw in The Edge it is in Filmer, the villain. His personality and motives remain unclear, and finally we simply have to accept his villainy as a given. Iago at least declared himself; Filmer never does. It may be that Dick Francis is simply too fundamentally decent to give roundly imagined life to someone fundamentally nasty; not a bad flaw to have, really.

At the end of the train ride, Tor and the actors part company, the chief of the troupe saying, "Don't lose touch now … Any time you want a job writing mysteries, let me know." "OK," says the narrator. Good. OK, Dick, you've got the job.