Forfeit

"Yes, he was a columnist for the Sunday Express , but it’s more than just that. In Forfeit , James Tyrone’s wife has polio and has a Spiroshell breathing system. It’s very personal because my mother had polio when she was 26. She spent eight weeks in an iron lung that did the breathing for her. She did recover, but her breathing was never very good. In an English winter, she used to take to her bed in November and reappear in April. One year, my parents spent some time in Penang in November. Dad was spending a lot of time there talking to Lester Piggott, because he was writing his biography. That winter my mother wasn’t unwell at all. So they decided that they would go off somewhere warm for the winters. They bought a place in Florida for the winters to start with, but the American government changed the rules and said that unless you lived there permanently, you could only stay for three months. So my parents took the difficult decision to leave the United Kingdom and lived in Florida for a while. My mother was very well after that, so it was a good move. She died of a heart attack at age 76. If anyone had told me that when I was growing up, I would have said, ‘Don’t be ridiculous, she’ll never live that long’ – because I had seen her come close to death on so many occasions. In Florida, they got involved in the politics of condominiums, which they didn’t like. They went on holiday down to the Caribbean and while they were there, my mother bought an apartment and they moved down there. My parents are now buried side by side, near their home in the Cayman Islands. My father got to 89. They had a very good life. They were married for 53 years, so they had a wonderful time. Forfeit was written when my father was still writing weekly articles for the Sunday Express . It was written in 1968, and it was the first book of his to win the Edgar Allan Poe Award in the US. He’s still the only person to have won three Edgar Allan Poe Awards for best novel. It’s a good story. it’s all about someone applying pressure to make someone do what they don’t want to do. That is a recurring storyline in this series of thrillers. He was a voracious reader of all sorts of things, mostly to do with racing, but yes, he loved thrillers. He was very much influenced by The Calendar by Edgar Wallace. He also became friends with many crime writers. He was a member of something called ‘the Detection Club,’ of which I am now a member. He lived in what is now South Oxfordshire, where I grew up, and the president of the club lived in Wallingford, which is not very far. Her name was Agatha Christie . When I got my driving license, aged 17, I’d drive my father there and I used to go in and make tea for them. What would I give now to have the opportunity to have just one of those visits again and to talk to her? I’d always get banished to the kitchen to make tea, so I used to chat with her husband, Max. He’d regale me with exciting stories of Egypt: he was an archaeologist. I read a great number of thrillers. I loved adventure stories more than straight detective novels. I loved Alistair Maclean and used to wait for his books to come out. And Desmond Bagley. I try and write books now that aren’t detective stories, they’re adventure thrillers. The other books I loved as a child was Arthur Ransome, the Swallows and Amazons series . My favourite was We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea , set around the Norfolk Broads. When I became a father, I used to read them to my children as bedtime stories, chapter by chapter. I loved those books. I used to go and spend all my pocket money at the Colophon bookshop, in Wallingford, buying every copy of Arthur Ransome I could find. They’re wonderful stories. They were written in the 1920s and 1930s, and I was reading them in the 1960s. It never seemed a worry to me to be reading about something that was a little bit old, so I hope that people reading the early Dick Francis novels are not worrying about the fact that they were published sixty years ago. They stand up."