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 realistic, arise naturally from the greed, corruption and violence that lie behind the champagne, big cars and titled Stewards; they concern horse-pulling and betting frauds, and lead to wads of used notes in anonymous envelopes, whispered warnings by telephone, and sudden hideous confrontations with big men in stocking masks.
[The elements of steeplechase racing and mystery] are welded into adult reading by the Francis hero. Francis has no recurrent central character, no Bond or Marlowe; his heroes are jockeys, trainers, an owner who manufactures children's toys, a journalist, a Civil Service screener. But they tell the story in the first person, and they tend to sound alike…. Their narratives are laconically gripping, and graphic in a way that eschews Chandler's baroque images and Fleming's colour-supplement brand names. They combine unfailing toughness with infinite compassion.
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