SOURCE: "Champion Rider to Champion Writer," in The Chicago Tribune, November 20, 1990, pp. 1, 2.

Dick Francis no longer needs to ride a horse.

He has just issued Longshot, his 29th novel and 31st book, and, like previous Francis works, it is being displayed on the best-seller shelves of the nation's bookstores. This puts it in a league with Straight, his novel of last year, and The Edge, released the year before that.

In January, he'll begin his next one, and a year from now the bookstores very likely will be making a lot of shelf room for that one too.

It's hard to think of a more celebrated and avidly read mystery writer in Francis' adoptive United States or his native England. But he used to ride horses quite a lot, and has many more honors than the designation as England's champion jockey of 1954 to prove it.

Over coffee one bright, brisk recent morning as he prepared to drive out to the Virginia horse country to help preside over the running of the 53rd International Gold Cup steeplechase race, Francis recalled that his trophies have included a few broken bones:

"The collar bones, six times each side. Broke my nose five times. I crushed some vertebrae, and I broke my arms—and my wrist. Not my legs. I've always been able to walk about. But ribs? No end of ribs. Couldn't count those. You'd just strap yourself up and ride if you possibly could. When you got warmed up, you couldn't feel it."

Just turned 70 and an official "resident alien" of the U.S., Francis and his wife of 43 years, Mary, live a sunny, comfortable existence in an oceanfront high-rise in Ft. Lauderdale. He turns up as an honored guest at race meetings all over the fabled, rolling horse country of the U.S. and Britain. This year as last, he helped present the extravagantly grand trophy to the winner of the Virginia International, adding his luster to one of the most prestigious events in American steeplechasing.

But that's about as close as he gets to the intimidating, giant fences he used to take at full gallop, mile after mile, day after day, simply as a way of making an ordinary living.

"I don't ride much at all," he said. "When I go back and stay with my oldest son, Merrick [a British horse trainer], I might go out in the morning and ride one of his horses to watch the others work, but I don't ride enough to say I still ride."

But he sure did. Few of the world's top mystery and thriller writers have lived the lives of their protagonists, relying instead on vivid imaginations and hard research to produce their compelling stories. Mickey Spillane was never a private eye. Freddy Forsyth was a journalist, not a spy (or assassin). Neither was spymaster Len Deighton, who also wrote Bomber and another best-seller about fighter pilots called Goodbye, Mickey Mouse, without benefit of World War II aerial combat experience.

Francis, who incidentally was a fighter pilot and bomber pilot in the war, came to novel-writing with 11 years' experience as a jockey, much like those who serve as the heroes of his books, all of which involve horse racing. He once asked his publisher if she'd mind if he wrote a book that wasn't about racing.

"We'll publish anything you write," she said. "We'd rather you didn't, though."

And, yes, he concedes, those dogged, likable guys who always manage to prevail over Francis' rich assortment of villains are based on him.

"I'm not as clever or as brave as they are," he said. "But I never ask my characters to suffer anything or do anything I haven't suffered or done myself. The things that happen to them are the sort of things that happened to me on racecourses. In Knockdown, the man suffered from a recurring dislocated shoulder, and it was pulled out when he tried to open a door. That happened to me. I've got a recurring dislocated shoulder, and that's more painful than any break."

In a steeplechasing career lasting from 1946 to 1957, Francis won between 350 and 400 races (he can't recall exactly). He was so good he became jockey for the horses of Elizabeth, England's queen mother, and it was in her service that the extraordinary incident occurred that led to his turning to writing.

He said it was old age (37) that prompted him to retire from the sport. "The breaks were taking longer to heal." But the decision involved the sort of odd twist of fate that figures in his stories.

"I was the queen mother's main jockey," he said, "and was riding her horse Devon Loch. He was winning the race—I was having a wonderful ride on him—and I jumped the last fence and was half a mile to the winning post.

"There were a quarter of a million people there, and they were all yelling for the queen mother. You don't really hear the noise from the sidelines when you're riding, but I heard it when I was jumping the last fence. I thought no more of it, and rode on. About 25 yards from the winning post—I've looked at the film many times—Devon Loch sort of pricked up his ears and this crescendo of cheering hit him.

"I thought, 'God, what's that?' and his hindquarters refused to act for a slight second, and down he went on his belly and slid along the ground. How I didn't fall off him, I didn't know. If he'd got to his feet and I got him going again, I was still in front enough to have won. But he pulled all the muscles in his hindquarters and more or less collapsed again. I had to get off him and walk away in disgust."

Though he lost the race—the Grand National—the "fantastic happening" made him an instant celebrity. An agent told him it was the perfect time to write his autobiography. It was also, Francis decided, a good time to get out of racing. A friend advised that "if you stop now, you'll get all sorts of things offered to you. If you train, you'll get horses sent."

Francis didn't want to become a horse trainer, but his fame and his progress on his memoir, The Sport of Queens, inspired the sports editor of the London Sunday Express to hire him to write a half dozen articles on racing, which led to his becoming a professional journalist and writing a weekly racing commentary for the next 16 years.

Steeplechase jockeys weren't paid very much in those days ("7 pounds, 7 shillings; another 10 pounds if you brought in a winner"), but newspaper writers earned even less. After four years of this, he said, his wife said to him: "'We've got two boys to educate, and the carpet's beginning to wear out. The car's beginning to knock. What are you going to do? You always said you were going to write a novel. Now's the time.'"

Called Dead Cert, the novel came out the next year, and Francis has been writing a novel a year ever since.

At 5 foot 8—a typical height for a steeplechase jockey (in racing attire he weighed 140 pounds)—Francis was "born to the saddle," the descendant of a long line of Welsh horsemen and the son of a successful trainer. He began riding ponies at age 3. His father tried to discourage him from becoming a jockey, but at age 18 he signed up with a racing stable. Before he could get into a race, his patron was killed in an automobile accident, and shortly afterward World War II broke out in Europe.

Beginning his military service as an enlisted man in a Royal Air Force ground crew, he was promoted to pilot, flying Spitfires in Africa and over northern Europe, and then transferring to bombers as the pilot of a Lancaster.

He met his wife at a cousin's wedding in the midst of the war. "She said if I had asked her to marry me that day, she'd have married me straight away, but it took me 18 months to persuade her in the end," Francis said.

Leaving the service with the rank of flying officer, he commenced his career as a jockey in 1946.

Their son Merrick now has three children, and their other son, Felix, a schoolmaster, has two. The two families visit the Francises frequently in Ft. Lauderdale, where Francis took up permanent residence several years ago because of his wife's asthmatic aversion to cold.

Their principal recreation is travel. It takes Francis from early January to late May every year to write his books, and he and Mary spend much of the rest of the time wandering about the globe, doing research for the next book.

For example, his latest, Longshot, grew out of his son Felix's journey to the jungles of Borneo with a group of his pupils. The hero is a travel writer who gets caught up in a racing mystery.

Francis wouldn't reveal the plans for his next novel. But he did admit that as soon as the Virginia Gold Cup race was over, he was returning to Florida, where he and his wife were joining Felix and his family for their first visit to Disney World.

Hmmmm. Could there be a plot in the works about a jockey who goes to Orlando in search of a horse named Goofy?