It was the late Edmund Crispin who recommended Dick Francis to me. "If you can stand the horse parts", he said, "the mystery parts are quite good," I found this an understatement in reverse. The horse parts, as everyone knows by now, are brilliant vignettes of a tiny portion of English life: the world of steeplechase racing. Novel by novel we meet the jockeys, the trainers, the owners (usually being taken for a ride in another sense), the bookmakers, the bloodstock agents, the sporting journalists. We learn what it is like to be a stableboy at a skinflint North Country trainer's, to ride in freezing February fog (the first sentence of the first novel is "The mingled smell of hot horse and cold river mist filled my nostrils"), to be Clerk of a run-down course that wrongdoers are determined to close. But the mystery parts, if inevitably less...