Dick Francis; Guardian obit
Hyfler/Rosner
Champion jockey who became a bestselling thriller writer
http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2010/feb/14/dick-francis-obituary
Dick Francis, who has died aged 89, was a unique figure, a
champion steeplechase jockey who, without any previous
apparent literary bent, became an international bestselling
writer, the author of 42 crime novels, selling more than 60m
copies in 35 languages. Right from the start, with Dead Cert
in 1962, the Dick Francis thriller showed a mastery of lean,
witty genre prose reminiscent - sometimes to the point of
comic parody - of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. It
was an American style that many clever people in England had
attempted to reproduce without much success, and it was a
wonder how a barely educated former jump jockey was able to
do the trick with such effortless ease. People said his
highly educated wife wrote the books for him. It was a
mystery that was never satisfactorily solved.
The most dramatic incident in his racing career was also a
mystery. In the Grand National at Aintree in 1956, his mount
Devon Loch, the Queen Mother's horse trained by Peter
Cazalet, had jumped all the fences and, well ahead, only 50
yards from the finish, without another horse near him,
suddenly collapsed and was unable to continue.
Some said the horse had attempted to jump an imaginary
fence; another theory, put up years later by Bill Braddon,
Cazalet's head lad, was that the girth was too tight and the
horse suddenly let loose an enormous fart. Braddon said he
had tightened the girth just before the off, "one notch up
and another for luck", without realising that Cazalet had
already done it in the saddling enclosure.
There was no question of Francis, like a crooked jockey out
of one of his own books, having pulled the horse. It had
been his great dream since he was a lad of eight in 1928 and
listened to the Grand National on the radio as Tipperary Tim
won at 100-1, to be a steeplechase jockey and win that
ultimate prize. Ironically, Devon Loch's melodramatic
collapse in front of a roaring crowd cheering him to the
finish has ensured Francis a place in the history of the
race he would not have had if he had been merely another
winner.
Francis was champion jockey in the 1953-54 season. He rode
the Queen's horses for Cazalet, the royal trainer, from 1953
until 1957. Some said he always rode like an amateur, and
failed to have a really strong finish. He had indeed started
as an amateur, going professional in 1948, but he was a
masterful rider and a perfect size for a jump jockey, 5ft
8in and 10 stone. Only the great Fred Winter was a better
chase jockey.
In 1957 the Queen Mother sacked him. The Marquess of
Abergavenny, racing administrator and friend of the Queen
Mother, summoned Francis to his flat near Hyde Park and told
him it was time to stop racing. He suggested that Francis
had suffered too many injuries in falls - he had dislocated
his shoulder so many times that he had to be permanently
strapped for the rest of his life - and should quit while he
was ahead. Francis was shattered by this oblique dismissal
by the Queen Mother, for whom he had a rather old-fashioned
reverence.
He asked what he was to do for a living. The Marquess said
something always turned up. Francis had wept when Devon Loch
fell and he wept again, walking away through Hyde Park. "I
nearly flung myself into the Serpentine, I was so
depressed," he said, years later.
He wrote a racing column for the Sunday Express, but it paid
only �20 a week, not bad for newspapers at the time but far
less than he was used to earning. He said his wife, Mary,
always read the copy before he delivered it on a Friday, and
there was a story at the Express that once when she was ill
he was unable to write the column and had to have it
ghosted. Other Express men said this was untrue.
Francis was not a particularly good tipster, but he was
rather brave in his attacks on the Jockey Club and the toffs
of racing. He continued this in his thrillers. But his years
at the Sunday Express did not make him love Fleet Street,
and journalists were usually low, dishonest characters in
his books.
The Queen Mother, though, was a fan of his books. He always
got a special first edition to her, and said he did not put
in the usual sex and bad language of the genre because he
knew the Queen Mother would be reading it; she did once
complain about the violence.
Born at Coedcanlas Farm in the Pembrokeshire village of
Lawrenny, Francis came from a line of farming gentry and
horsemen. His father was a show rider and manager of hunting
stables, his grandfather a farmer and gentleman jockey.
Uncles on both sides of his family were Masters of
Foxhounds. The family home was a beautiful old farmhouse but
it had neither gas nor electricity and was lit by
candlelight.
He went to a one-class village school, attending on average
only three days a week and riding the rest of the time,
until the family moved to Maidenhead in Berkshire where his
father was manager of a stable. Dick went to Maidenhead
county boys' school, but his attendance was no better and he
left at 15 to work for his father. At one time it was
suggested that he should drink gin to keep him from growing
so he could become a flat jockey, but his love was
steeplechasing. He was also a successful show rider.
When the war came, he joined the RAF as an aircraftman and
served in the Western Desert before going to pilot training
in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). He never flew in combat, but he
was a Spitfire and Hurricane pilot before being transferred
to heavy bombers. His lack of schooling gave him trouble
with navigation.
In 1947, he married Mary Brenchley. A well-off middle-class
girl whose main interest was the theatre, she was assistant
stage manager at the Hereford Repertory Theatre at the time,
and also worked as a publisher's reader. She could ride, but
had no love of horses or racing. The story goes that Dick
and Mary went to see a murder mystery at the Oxford
Playhouse and came away thinking they could do better. Be
that as it may, Dick produced Dead Cert and gave it to
Michael Joseph because he had ridden horses for the
publisher.
It is said that originally Francis wanted Mary's name on the
book as co-author, but it was thought better business sense
to have only Dick's. In his excellent unauthorised
autobiography, Dick Francis: A Racing Life (1999), Graham
Lord produces some telling circumstantial evidence that Dick
could not have written the books without Mary. It was always
acknowledged that she did much of the research for him, but
Lord seemed to think it went further than that. The
speculation may have arisen because Mary was a well-educated
woman with a degree in French and English Literature from
Royal Holloway College, London University. What is clear
about the thrillers is that whoever wrote them had a wide
knowledge of the American tough-guy school of detective
fiction. Here a knowledge of French literature would seem to
be no help, while 'tec stories and thrillers would perhaps
be the sort of thing a steeplechase jockey would read. The
fact that when highbrow interviewers spoke of formalism and
hermeneutics Dick did not know what they were talking about
proves nothing. Hammett and Chandler would probably not have
known either.
Dick and Mary had a very close and happy marriage, spending
seven months of the year travelling and researching, and
five months writing the novels. Once Francis was under way,
a book appeared every year in time for Christmas. They were
all bestsellers, both in Britain and North America. By the
end, in Britain alone each new book would sell 100,000 in
hardback and 500,000 in paperback. Francis won several gold
and silver dagger awards from the Crime Writers' Association
and was given the Cartier Diamond Dagger for outstanding
contribution to the genre. In the US he was made a Mystery
Writers of America Grand Master. He was appointed OBE in
1984 and CBE in 2000.
The books were unusual for bestsellers in the genre because
Francis did not have a hero like Holmes or Poirot to win the
love of the reader. Only Sid Halley, an injured jockey
turned detective, makes repeat appearances, in Odds Against
(1965), Whip Hand (1979) and Come to Grief (1995). The
Francis tales are told in the first person, and the
hero/narrator, whether an ill-educated jockey or the son of
an earl - Lord Henry Grey in Flying Finish (1966) - were
always the same upstanding character, all men with a secret
sorrow. When asked about his damaged heroes, Francis, in a
rather marvellous throwaway line, said he had "to have
something to fill up the pages".
The plots, too, ran to a formula. Some reviewers protested
that racing could not be as crooked as depicted in the
Francis novels, but real life (as in the case of the Shergar
kidnapping) came in to prove how realistic his stories were.
As well as the thrillers, he wrote his autobiography, The
Sport of Queens (1957), and Lester (1986), a biography of
Lester Piggott.
Francis became immensely rich. Because of Mary's poor
health - she had suffered from polio - and his many
injuries, they fled English winters for Florida and then
Grand Cayman in the British West Indies. Although surrounded
by the super-rich, they continued a rather suburban
lifestyle, and each year returned to the Radcliffe hotel in
Paignton, Devon, for a family holiday. Mary died in 2000.
Their two sons said they worked together "like Siamese twins
conjoined at the pencil". As neither Dick nor Mary could
type, perhaps there will be manuscripts among Dick Francis's
effects that will show which one was the prime mover.
After her death in 2000, when no new crime novels appeared,
it looked as if Mary might have written them. But then, six
years later, Francis came out of retirement to produce Under
Orders, which had all the old Francis flavour. The next
year, 2007, he published Dead Heat, then Silks (2008) and
Even Money (2009). Much of the research for the novels was
done by Francis's son Felix, who left his job teaching at
Bloxham school in Oxfordshire to work for his father. His
other son, Merrick, was a racehorse trainer and then ran a
horse transport business which was the background for the
1992 book Driving Force. They both survive him.
. Richard Stanley Francis, jockey and writer, born 31
October 1920; died 14 February 2010