Rating: 7/10
- Plot: An amateur jockey sees his friend killed in a fall that was no accident, and follows the trail into a gang running race-fixing through a taxi firm.
- Clues: Practical and physical, from a wire across a fence to the logistics of racecourse traffic.
- Reveal: Solid rather than startling; the culprit’s identity matters less than the chase.
Alan York, an amateur steeplechase jockey, is racing behind his friend Bill Davidson when Bill’s horse falls at a fence and Bill is killed. York saw something glint. When he goes back, a wire has been removed from the fence. Nobody believes him, and soon somebody is trying to stop him asking.
Dick Francis had been a champion jump jockey, famously riding the Queen Mother’s Devon Loch when it collapsed yards from winning the 1956 Grand National. That experience is everywhere here: the weighing room, the cold dawns, the bruises, the peculiar courage required to ride half a ton of animal at speed over fences.
The racing detail is the book’s great asset. Francis writes about horses and riding with a physical authority no other crime writer could match, and the set-piece chase on horseback across country is thrilling in a way that doesn’t depend on guns.
His hero set the pattern for the forty books that followed: decent, stubborn, understated, able to endure punishment, and quietly competent. The first-person voice is crisp and unshowy.
As a first novel it has rough edges. The romance feels dutiful, the villains are sketchy, and the taxi-firm conspiracy is more functional than intriguing.
The 7 reflects a debut that already has Francis’s strengths: pace, decency and authentic detail. Later books such as Odds Against and Forfeit are better constructed, but Dead Cert shows the formula arriving fully formed..
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