Dick Francis
DICK FRANCIS was one of the most successful post-war National Hunt jockeys. The winner of over 350 races, he was champion jockey in 1953/1954 and rode for HM Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother. On his retirement from the sport he published his autobiography,
The Sport of Queens, before going on to write forty-one bestselling novels, a volume of short stories (Field of 13), and the biography of Lester Piggott. He was rightly acclaimed as one of the greatest thriller writers in the world.
Dick Francis was the winner of the prestigious Crime Writers’ Association’s Cartier Diamond Dagger and the only three-time recipient of the Mystery Writer of America’s Edgar Award for Best Novel, winning for
Forfeit in 1970,
Whip Hand in 1981, and
Come to Grief in 1996, the same year he was make a Grand Master for a lifetime’s achievement. He was awarded a CBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours list in 2000.
His last three novels –
Dead Heat, Silks and
Even Money - were written in collaboration with his younger son, Felix, a former teacher who, over the last forty years, has helped research many of the Dick Francis novels.
Dick's legacy will live on with the publication of
Crossfire in September which he and Felix were working on before his death in February.
Felix Francis
FELIX FRANCIS is the younger of Dick’s two sons. Born in 1953, Felix studied Physics and Electronics at London University before embarking on a 17 year career teaching Advanced Level physics at three schools, the last seven as head of the science department at Bloxham School in Oxfordshire. He took on the role of managing his father’s affairs in 1991.
For 13 years until 2005, he was also the deputy chairman of a major leadership training company and was a leader on four expeditions to such varied destinations as the Himalayan and Andean mountains, and the jungles of the Amazon basin and Borneo.
Felix remembers conversations around the Francis breakfast table being focussed on the Francis family business and somewhat unconventional. ‘The production of a Dick Francis novel has always been a mixture of inspiration, perspiration and teamwork. The first one was published when I was nine, and I grew up in a house where breakfast talk would be about the damage a bullet might do to a man’s guts rather than the more mundane topics of everyday life’, he says.
Over the last forty years, Felix assisted with the research of many of the Dick Francis novels, not least Twice Shy, whose hero is the mild-mannered Physics teacher, Jonathan Derry. In his youth, Felix was an international marksman, something Dick put to good use in his 2000 novel,
Shattered, and later in
Under Orders. With the publication of
Dead Heat, Felix took on a more significant role in the writing –
Silks was the second novel of this father-and-son collaboration.
Even Money, the third, was published in September 2009.