Bonecrack

"Bonecrack has always been my favourite book, so that was an easy choice. I was 18 when it was published and it was set in Newmarket. There are all sorts of things about the book which I absolutely loved. It isn’t a whodunit because you know whodunit right from the beginning. It’s a ‘how the hell do I get out of this mess?’ book. It’s about a father-son relationship. That’s quite poignant for me because of my relationship with my father. I managed his life for more than 20 years, and I took over writing the Dick Francis books. So for all those reasons, Bonecrack was easy to put as number one on this list. The others were harder to choose. At the core of the book is the relationship between a father and son who are not very close: the main character, Neil Griffon, doesn’t get on with his father. He hasn’t spoken to his father for a long time before the book starts, but then his father ends up in hospital, having had an accident, and Neil takes over his training yard. He’s a reluctant trainer who then has pressure applied to him. The pressure is applied by another father, Enzo Rivera, who is a megalomaniac. He will do everything in his power for his son, Alessandro, including threatening people. And his son wants to ride the favourite in the Derby. It’s nonsense of course! Enzo uses force to thrust his son, an inexperienced rider, into the training stable and insists he rides the best horses. It’s a balancing act, but Neil finds out that Alessandro is not bad at all at riding and encourages him. Enzo has always provided everything for Alessandro. Here, the son is able to do something from his own expertise, and the father doesn’t like it because it’s taking away his son’s reliance on him. So Bonecrack is really about the relationship between two fathers and two sons, and also how the relationship that grows between the sons affects the relationship between the fathers and the sons. It’s a complex story, but it’s one I adored and have always felt was the best. Refusal , the book I wrote that was published in 2013, was a homage to Bonecrack . It was the same in that it isn’t a whodunit — you knew whodunit right from the start. How do you come up with plots? You go to places, you watch people, and you listen to conversations. Sometimes a plot just hits you and sometimes it takes a while. Sometimes I start a book and I’m not quite sure what the main crime will be. I think it was the same with my father. It helps that we don’t have the same character going through all of them (though Sid Halley’s been in six books). It makes it easier when you start with a new character. You think of the character first, and the job that the character does, and sometimes that gives you a bit of the storyline. There are now 56 of them, so it’s more and more difficult to think up something that hasn’t been done before. In my latest book, No Reserve , I decided I’d write about the Newmarket bloodstock sales. They have never been written about in any of the Dick Francis novels (though way back, in 1974, one novel did feature a bloodstock agent). I decided my character would be an auctioneer. That, in itself, is a good step towards getting your plot, because you then look at what an auctioneer does. Then you think about what scenarios could take place that the character could be involved in — pressure that could be put on them or something they could discover. As I write in No Reserve , racing thoroughbreds and gambling are intertwined, but the biggest gambles occur in the bloodstock sales. Last month I spent three days at the October sales in Newmarket. One horse sold for 2 million guineas! With so much money going around, there always are people that are trying their best to get a cut. It was a joint effort. Mum used to polish the prose. I took over partly by accident. There’d been five years with no Dick Francis books. My father’s literary agent said, ‘We need a new hardback because all the backlists are going to go out of print.’ I looked at him and thought, ‘Are you crazy?’ My mother had been dead for five years by then, and my father was eighty-five. To write a book, one thing you need is a good memory, and his memory was failing him. I said, ‘You’re not going to get one.’ He said, ‘I’m asking your permission to get an established crime writer to write a Dick Francis novel, just to stimulate the backlist.’ Well, I must have had a few glasses of red wine by then and I said, ‘Before you ask anyone else, I’d like to have a go.’ He didn’t roll his eyes or laugh. He simply said, ‘I’ll give you two months to write two chapters, and then we’ll see.’ He openly admitted afterwards that he thought he’d get the permission he was seeking after those two months. But when I sent him the two long chapters that I’d written, he said, ‘There are two things you’ve got to do. You’d better get on and finish it, and you’d better go and talk to your father.’ Dad was not in favour to start with. But then, when I finally talked him into reading the chapters I’d written, he was very excited. Under Orders was the result. In my view, if it was going to stimulate the backlist, it had to have Dick Francis on the cover. It didn’t have my name on the cover at all. It sold, of course it did – it had Dick Francis on the cover. But I was afraid that all the reviews would say that Dick had lost it. Fortunately, they didn’t. They said, ‘The master is back.’ After that, I started writing Dead Heat . You might say that I’ve done one a year ever since. No Reserve is number seventeen, and I’m already working on number eighteen. When Dead Heat came out, the American publishers took fright, so it had “Dick Francis” in big letters on the cover and underneath, in the smallest font they could find, “and Felix Francis.” If you look at No Reserve, my name has gotten bigger, but his is still there. I call them Dick Francis novels. That is my choice. I feel that Dick Francis is now a brand, and that he is still as much a part of my books, as I now feel a part of his. The best news is that all the Dick Francis backlists are still in print, so I must be doing something right. Some of them are a little bit out of date in terms of the technology. Nowadays all horses are microchipped and all foals are DNA-tested so some of the things that went on, for example in a book like Blood Sport , you couldn’t do any longer. You couldn’t kidnap a stallion because you could never use it: the DNA would show that it was not the stallion everyone thought it was. Also, the money amounts are quite amusing in some of the early novels because the value of money is different. But the stories stand the test of time. I always say to people, ‘You don’t need another author! Just read these. By the time you get to the end, you can start again at the beginning.’"