DICK FRANCIS, the jockey who turned to writing bestselling thrillers set in the world of horse racing – and produced one annually for more than 30 years – has died at his Caribbean home on Grand Cayman at the age of 89, his sons said yesterday.
The thrillers were hugely successful, with a copy of his latest novel always sent to the queen mother, who had also been his patron on the track. Buckingham Palace said the queen, who does not usually comment on the deaths of thriller writers, would be saddened to hear the news.
Before he was a writer, Francis had been a distinguished jump jockey, riding 345 winners in a nine-year career, though his most famous ride ended in disaster when, in 1956, his horse Devon Loch collapsed on the verge of winning the Grand National.
The novels’ success – there were more than 40, selling more than 60 million copies – was scarcely dented by controversy 11 years ago when his biographer, Graham Lord, claimed they had been written largely by Francis’s wife, Mary.
Lord, a former colleague of Francis’s on the Sunday Express – Francis was racing correspondent, he was literary editor – claimed Mary told him the “masculine” books might lose their credibility if they had a woman as joint author.
Francis himself said at the time: “It is not the case that Mary writes the books. I do all the stories. I write them out in longhand. She then reads and edits them because she can manage my handwriting and I put them into the computer.”
Nevertheless, after she died in 2000, Francis, by then nearing his 80s, did not produce another book for six years before three more finally broke from the starting gates, co-written with his son Felix. A final novel is due later this year.
Francis, who left school at 15, always admitted that his wife, a former teacher and university graduate, helped with the research – she even learned to fly to assist with one book – and that she tidied his grammar, spelling and punctuation.
But she remained self-effacingly in the background, lurking behind the famous jockey whose name gave his taut and compulsively readable, if mechanically written, thrillers authenticity long after his racing career finished.
The couple had an arrangement with publisher Michael Joseph that all Francis’s books, including his first, a biography called The Sport of Queens, would remain in print so long as he produced a new novel each year. Accordingly, he sat down to write on January 1st and produced a finished manuscript on March 31st, before they both embarked on the research for the following year’s book.
Francis was champion jockey in 1953-54, but it was the Devon Loch disaster that made him a national hero, in the traditional British way as a gallant loser. The queen mother’s horse, well ahead of the field, was haring for victory when it suddenly did a belly-flop a few yards short of the winning post. By the time jockey and horse had recovered, most of the rest of the field had gone past.
Francis’s son Felix said: “My brother and I are of course devastated by the loss of our father but we rejoice in having been sons of such an extraordinary man. We share in the joy that he brought to so many over such a long life.”