Dick Francis

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Back in the Saddle Again

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In the following review, Mortimer praises Francis's storytelling ability in Wild Horses.
SOURCE: "Back in the Saddle Again," in The New York Times Book Review, October 2, 1994, p. 26.

In many ways the writer is made by the day job. Where would Chekhov and Conan Doyle have been without their medical training, or Dashiell Hammet if he hadn't learned about the sleazier side of San Francisco as an operative in the Pinkerton detective agency? If Dick Francis' father hadn't been a steeplechase jockey, and if he hadn't decided to follow his father's breathlessly dangerous profession, we certainly shouldn't have had 33 novels that have entertained millions and won the approval of such as Philip Larkin, the fine but notably grumpy English poet, who was by no means easy to please.

"The mingled smells of hot horse and cold river mist filled my nostrils. I could hear only the swish and thud of galloping hooves and the occasional sharp click of horseshoes striking against each other. Behind me, strung out, rode a group of men dressed like myself in white silk breaches and harlequin jerseys, and in front, his body vividly red and green against the pale curtain of fog, one solitary rider steadied his horse to jump the birch fence stretching blackly across his path." The opening of Dead Cert, his first novel, published in 1962, in fact portrays Dick Francis chasing his subject. In this pursuit he reckoned that he hit ground at 30 miles an hour every 12th ride and suffered a fractured skull, six broken collarbones, five broken noses and no end of shattered ribs. To this day his face looks as though it had been blown in by the wind. As a method of acquiring material for a novel this seems a good deal harder than lying in a cork-lined room, remembering a childhood beach or the taste of a madeleine.

Many years ago Dick Francis the jockey was riding the Queen Mother's horse Devon Loch with the Queen watching, and he had established a lead of 10 lengths at the last fence of the Grand National. Suddenly, 30 yards from the winning post, Devon Loch mysteriously sank to the ground. (Several theories were advanced for the collapse, including the possibility that Devon Loch had suffered a sudden, severe muscular cramp in his hindquarters.) After this disappointment, and many injuries, he decided on the even chancier life of a novelist. What he brought with him from the race track were the crowed-pulling powers of suspense, surprise and the shared enthusiasm to discover who's going to win.

He still talks in the voice of an old steeplechaser, cutting off his final g's. Whereas he once said, "My father said a day's huntin' was better than a day's schoolin'," he now says, "I'm writin' a book a year."

The excitement as well as the pain of his former life have given Dick Francis an extraordinarily clear view of the racing world and the squalors, as well as the beauties, of the English countryside. It's a place where the fields and downs have been defaced by motorways and the old towns wrecked by shopping malls. The villains, bookmakers or dubious trainers, wear camel's-hair coats, drive Bentleys and live in vast spreads of red brick houses, swimming pools illuminated by carriage lamps and white fences. The jockeys, pulling on laddered nylon stockings under their racing boots, or shivering on early-morning rides on the downs, are Spartan. Their idea of a treat is a plate of bacon and eggs and a cup of strong tea after a long fast. They live in bungalows or mobile homes, and their bodies are broken by falls and the bully boys hired by the villains. Their careers are in the hands of the stewards of the Jockey Club, who are not jockeys but upper-crust, elderly men who treat fearless riders as though they were inferior and frequently dishonest servants. On the whole Dick Francis' view of the racing world is not shaped by any inherent assumptions about class. If a lord appears, wearing a tweed suit and a waxed coat, living in a drafty house that smells of wet dog, he's quite likely to turn out to be the source of all villainy.

Philip Marlowe walked down mean streets, and Mr. Francis' heroes frequent some pretty mean race tracks. Raymond Chandler set out the standards of decency he required of the detective: he must be neither tarnished nor afraid. "He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct and inevitability, and certainty without saying it. He must be the best man in his world, and a good enough man for any world." Dick Francis would not express the creed of the mystery-story here so resonantly, but what makes his books attractive is his sense of decency and honorable behavior. He put it more succinctly when he said, "What it comes to is that I never ask my main character to do anything I wouldn't do myself."

One of the results of this is that while in today's world of best sellers you can't get through three pages without stumbling across throbbing members or meeting flowing juices, there's not much sensational sex in the Francis novels. In Banker, the hero and the heroine, although passionately in love, don't sleep together until her husband dies, conveniently, of a brain hemorrhage on the last page. In Dead Cert, the hero kisses the girl he loves discreetly and, although he feels inclined to carry her off to the downs and "behave likes a cave man," he resists the temptation. Perhaps it's inevitable that more sex has crept into the books, occasionally salted with a twist of sadomasochism, but making love still ranks far lower than racing. In his latest work, Wild Horses, the sexual behavior is very rare and exotic; but fortunately it happened long before the book began and the hero, who though a film director is still an extremely decent chap, had absolutely nothing to do with it.

Thomas Lyon has come to Newmarket, "the town long held to be the home and heart of the horse racing industry worldwide," to direct a drama about racing. He has been recruited because he's already made several successful films and because "I'd spent my childhood and teens in racing stables." The film is based on a recent best-selling book, a fictionalized account of a scandal that had occurred in Newmarket 26 years earlier, when the wife of Jackson Wells, a horse trainer, had been found hanging in a stall and her husband was suspected of having killed her. But he was never charged, the film script does not identify a killer and the death remains a mystery that Lyon finds himself increasingly eager to solve.

His pursuit is at first driven by the idea that some sort of resolution would aid the film. And then, inevitably, he finds that his inquiries have stirred up a variety of unappetizing, smarmy characters, among them a killer. Like many of Mr. Francis' heroes, Lyon finally must find the truth to save his life.

We live in a time when many highly regarded and prize-winning novelists have forsaken plot. Stories are regarded as somewhat down-market and fit only for airport bookstands and poolside reading. Stories go with pina coladas and Ambre Solair suntan lotion, proper novels with arugula salads and chardonnay. But the best writers, as well as the most popular, have always known that telling a story is the only way of inducing the reader to turn the pages. Dick Francis takes from Jan. 1 to May 8 each year to write a novel, and his latest, produced at the age of 73, is as compulsive as ever.

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