Banker

"I remember being at the Cheltenham Races with my parents in around 1981. At that time, I was a teacher at Pate’s Grammar School in Cheltenham and they were staying with me. My father was driving, my mother sat in the front seat, and I was sat behind. At one point, we were invited into someone’s box for a drink. We spent quite a lot of the afternoon there and one of the people that my father was introduced to was a man called Michael Melhuish. He was a merchant banker who arranged loans for businesses and what have you and we had a nice time chatting to him. My father always liked to leave during the last race to avoid the traffic. He hated sitting in traffic jams and going in and out of Cheltenham racecourse can be quite difficult. So we left as the last race was running. He was about to start the car when he said, ‘I’m just going back. I want to ask a question. I won’t be long.’ Mum and I just sat in the car, waiting as the car park emptied around us. There were no mobile phones, so you couldn’t ring up and say, ‘Where are you?’ We were there for an hour and a half. Dad had gone back to the merchant banker and asked, ‘Would you lend me a million pounds to buy a stallion?’ A million pounds was a lot more in 1981 than it is today. So they sat down and went through all the details. The merchant banker didn’t realise it was research for a plot. He only found out when he asked, ‘What is the name of the stallion?’ And my father said he didn’t know yet. [SPOILER] That was the basis of the book. Tim Ekaterin is a merchant banker, and someone asks to borrow a million pounds to buy a stallion. The whole thing starts to go wrong because the offspring of the stallion start being born deformed. It’s a wonderful story but I don’t think I ever forgave my father for killing off Ginnie. As he said, at least she died happy because she’d worked out why it was happening and she knew it wasn’t anything to do with the stallion. So that was Banker . I love the intricacies of the relationships. You said you loved horses, but none of these books are about horses. They’re about people. Racing is simply the canvas against which we paint the human stories. C. P. Snow once wrote a review of one of my father’s books and said, ‘To not read Dick Francis books because you don’t like horses is like saying you don’t read Dostoevsky because you don’t believe in God.’"