For Kicks

"“The Earl of October drove into my life in a light blue Holden that had seen better days, and danger and death tagged along for the ride.” That’s the first line of For Kicks . The main character is Daniel Roke. He’s English but he moved to Australia. There is something going on at the Jockey Club (nowadays called the British Horseracing Authority) and they want to bring over someone they know is not involved to investigate. I really loved that book. Daniel ends up being a stable lad. When I wrote Triple Crown in 2016, my protagonist, Jefferson Hinkley, is recruited to go undercover and ends up acting as a groom in a stable yard in Belmont Park in New York. That book was my homage to F or Ki cks . For Kicks was the first book I read of the Dick Francis novels. I was twelve when it was published. I only went back and read the earlier books, like Dead Cert (1962), afterwards. I started with For Kicks , and, as they say, you never forget your first time. I loved the whole premise. It was a very close call as to whether to put For Kicks higher up on this list but, for all the reasons I mentioned, Bonecrack is my favourite. The others could be in any order, really. I wasn’t in on the research for the early ones, because I was too young. The first research I did was designing the remote-controlled bomb that blew up the aeroplane in Rat Race (1970). My physics teacher and I built it in the science labs at Mill Hill School — not the explosive bit, just the remote control. Nowadays everyone uses infrared remote controls — for your TV, your garage door, your car key fob — but back in 1970, there weren’t many. The one we built was made of solenoids and magnets. It was the summer, and we were on holiday down in Devon. My father was talking with my mother about how you could set off a bomb by remote control. He didn’t want it to be on a timer — he wanted it to happen at a specific moment. I must have said, ‘You just need switches that are controlled by radio and magnets and solenoids’ and he asked if I could find out for him. So when I went back to school in September, I went to see my A-level physics teacher and we made it. That was the first bit of research I did for a Dick Francis novel, but I did quite a lot of others. If you go to 1981, Twice Shy , I wrote the computer programme in that book. By then I had done computer studies and electronics at university. It was quite cutting edge at the time, but it’s out of date and embarrassing now."