SOURCE: "High Life and Low In a Pair of Mysteries," in The New York Times, October 20, 1994, p. C19.

In the following excerpt, Lehmann-Haupt complains that the characters and plot of Francis's Wild Horses are forced.

At the opening of Dick Francis's latest racetrack thriller, Wild Horses, a dying old man, mistaking a young friend for a priest, asks to be forgiven for killing "the Cornish boy" and leaving "the knife with Derry." The friend goes along with the charade and absolves the dying man, assuming the confession to be senile rambling.

Certainly it would have nothing to do with the movie young man is directing on location nearby in "Newmarket, Suffolk, England, the town long held to be the home and heart of the horseracing industry worldwide." After all, the novel on which the movie is based is only a fictionalized version of a local murder case that...