A race well run

More than 20 years ago I wrote an admiring article about Dick Francis. I made, if I recall, only one mild criticism: that he sometimes piled a bit too much misfortune on his damaged heroes. There was, for instance, the novel in which the narrator’s wife was in an iron lung and the villains put pressure on him to abandon his investigation by invading her bedroom and threatening to switch off the electric current that kept her alive. This was going a bit far, I suggested. A couple of weeks later I got a charming letter from Francis thanking me for all the nice things I had written, and then saying that as a matter-of-fact his wife Mary had spent some time in an iron lung, and he had found himself wondering ‘what if…?’ ‘What if?’ is the perfect kick-off for a novel of suspense.

Actually I was wrong about the damaged heroes of Francis’s early novels.