Odds Against

"Sid Halley makes his first appearance in Odds Agains t. He was never intended to be a recurring character. My father had no intention of writing about him again, but Yorkshire Television did a series in the late 70s called The Racing Game , and they used Sid Halley as the character. My father suddenly felt that he had to write another Sid Halley book to come out when the TV series aired, so he set about writing Whip Hand . Sid became the first character to have been in two books. In fact, Sid’s now been in four more books. I’ve written three of them. When I took over, the first one I wrote had Sid Halley in it. It was easier for me to use an existing character to write a Dick Francis novel than to create a new one. In a lot of my father’s (and my) books, you have an investigator who’s an amateur, a reluctant investigator. Sid was a champion jockey, but his hand was very badly injured when a horse landed on it. The horse’s trainer had saved a bit of money by reusing racing plates and that had led to the damage to Sid’s hand. He had to stop riding and didn’t know what to do. He’s offered a job as an advisor at a private detective agency which has a racing section, but Sid doesn’t do much. He sits around the office. Before long, Sid finds himself involved in an investigation. I love the first line of Odds Against : “I was never particularly keen on my job before the day I got shot and nearly lost it, along with my life.” Always grab the reader on the first line! People in bookshops read the first page —don’t let them put the book back on the shelf. I loved the idea of Sid. His father was a window cleaner who fell off his ladder and died before Sid was born. His parents were engaged but hadn’t gotten married by that stage, so he’s illegitimate. Sid didn’t know anything about horses, but when he was sixteen, his mother was dying of cancer and she deposited him at a racing stable, simply because he was small. He turned into a champion jockey. Odds Against came out in 1965. Interestingly, Willie Carson, the many-times champion jockey and Derby winner, had a similar story in that he had no contact with horses at all, but his mother sent him off to a racing stable because he was small. Reality is always reflected, either before or after, in a Dick Francis novel. They say truth is stranger than fiction. If I’d written a book that had Devon Loch collapsing forty yards from the winning post, everyone would say, ‘Don’t be stupid.’ And yet, it happened. There’s that wonderful bit at the beginning where he goes to stay with his ex-father-in-law, Charles. When they first met, Charles didn’t think Sid was up to much. Sid left school early, much the same as my father had. It doesn’t mean you’re not clever. Sid beats him at chess, and suddenly his father-in-law sits up and takes notice. Later, when Sid divorces his wife, Jenny, he stays friends with her father. Sid is invited by Charles to come down for the weekend. The other houseguests are all told that the dinner is black tie, but Charles doesn’t tell Sid. The picture of Sid riding, which normally hangs on the dining room wall, has been replaced. It’s all because Charles thinks that the people staying with him are villains and he wants Sid to investigate them. He’s trying to get them to underestimate Sid in the same way he had underestimated him initially. But Sid doesn’t know anything about it. I love that. You can feel Sid squirming in his seat and wondering how his father-in-law could be so cruel. He knows it must all be for a reason, so he doesn’t say anything. He just lets it happen to him. It’s the book that established Sid’s character, which both my father and I went on to use again and again."