1962 Most novelists have their rituals. Few have been as obsessively ritual about the dates of starting, delivering, and publishing their work as Dick Francis.
Francis was born in Pembrokeshire in 1920 of semi-gentrified stock. His father was a prosperous dealer in horseflesh, and the child grew up surrounded by the beasts that would be the most important thing in his life. Infant Dick won his first race aged eight, and left school at fifteen, intending to be a jockey. A sudden growth and weight spurt in his teens meant that his chosen line would be ‘jump’, not ‘flat’ – the sport of kings and midgets. Francis may have been an unusual child in wanting to grow up but not to grow.
Of military-service age when war broke out, Francis volunteered for the cavalry but was recruited into the RAF – first as a non-commissioned engine-fitter and then, after much pestering on his part, as a pilot. He got his wings, and his pips, in 1944. In his autobiography, he says that he was actively involved in the Dambuster raid. Since that heroic event took place in 1943, he was not – unless as a civilian stowaway. In fact his war service was disappointingly uneventful.
Not, it must be said, from any lack of personal pluck. The career he chose on leaving the service in 1947 meant at least one bone-breaking fall a season and bruises all the way. On his marriage, in the same year, 1947, the groom’s right arm was in a sling. Francis would break his collar bone nine times in his riding career – a recurrent injury that eventually drove him out of the sport.
His wife Mary was a graduate in modern languages, a teacher and a woman of extraordinary energy (even after a bout of polio in 1949) and of volubly right-wing views. There would be two children to the marriage. 1947 was a good year in every way for Francis, with sixteen wins and the woman of his life.
Francis was always reckoned in the top ten of his profession, and as champion jockey in 1953–4 he rode for the Queen Mother. But a year later Francis’s life, as he liked to say, ‘ended’. Everything else would be afterlife. It was a dramatic final act. In the 1955 Grand National, riding for the QM and leading the field by many lengths, Francis’s horse, Devon, mysteriously collapsed only yards short of the finishing line. Francis had never won the National, the peak of a jump-jockey’s career. His disappointment was bitter.
Was Devon nobbled? Perhaps; it’s a recurrent theme in Francis’s thrillers. But the most likely explanation seems to have been a gigantic fart that was so explosive as to prostrate the unluckily flatulent beast.
Francis retired, having ridden 2,305 races and 345 winners. In his retirement he turned to authorship. His first racing-world thriller, Dead Cert, came out in 1962. He would thereafter, until 2001, produce one a year.
According to the novelist himself, he was no Henry James: ‘I start at Chapter 1, page 1, and plod on to THE END.’ Starting gates and finishing lines made him comfortable. His invariable practice was to begin a new book on New Year’s Day, and deliver the MS to Michael Joseph on 8 May for publication in September.
According to Julian Symons (the critic who made crime fiction critically respectable), ‘Francis has been overpraised’. One of the more famous overpraisers is Philip Larkin, who declared Francis ‘always 20 times more readable than the average Booker entry’. Francis was also a favourite with Kingsley Amis, Queen Elizabeth II, and, of course, his employer, her mum.
Dick and Mary Francis, both broken in body, retired to Florida in their last years. Graham Lord’s flagrantly ‘unauthorised’ biography, published in 1999, alleged outright that Mary ghosted every one of the ‘Dick Francis’ novels. According to Lord, she confirmed his thesis, telling him that her authorship was suppressed in order to preserve the ‘taut … masculine’ feel of the works.