SOURCE: A review of Long Shot, in The Armchair Detective, Vol. 26, No. 1, Winter, 1993, pp. 107-8.

In the following review, Ross discusses survival in Francis's Long Shot.

Survive is what the first person narrators of Dick Francis' very successful novels do and survival is what Long Shot is all about. Thirty-two year old John Kendall, an erstwhile employee of a travel service specializing in strenuous outings for adventure seekers, has published six survival guides for such trips. An expert photographer, helicopter pilot, specialist in wildernesses hot, temperate, and cold, Kendall has had a first novel (about the survival attempts of people isolated by a disaster) accepted. On the strength of that success, he has severed his ties with the travel service and is attempting to make his living as a writer of fiction.

Francis employs a standard convention: a group of people—related by blood and marriage—living together...