More than 20 years ago I wrote an admiring article about Dick Francis. I made, if I recall, only one mild criticism: that he sometimes piled a bit too much misfortune on his damaged heroes. There was, for instance, the novel in which the narrator’s wife was in an iron lung and the villains put pressure on him to abandon his investigation by invading her bedroom and threatening to switch off the electric current that kept her alive. This was going a bit far, I suggested. A couple of weeks later I got a charming letter from Francis thanking me for all the nice things I had written, and then saying that as a matter-of-fact his wife Mary had spent some time in an iron lung, and he had found himself wondering ‘what if…?’ ‘What if?’ is the perfect kick-off for a novel of suspense.
Actually I was wrong about the damaged heroes of Francis’s early novels. Giving them a flaw or some sort of psychological impairment made them more interesting, more convincing because more vulnerable. Sid Halley, former champion steeplechase jockey, had lost a hand and was horribly conscious of his disability, terrified when the villain in (I think) the second of the Halley novels threatened to smash his other hand. Daniel Roke, in For Kicks, was dissatisfied with his dutiful life in Australia, even though it took some horrible experiences to make him realise the attraction danger held for him. Philip Nore, in Reflex, is embittered by his grandmother’s rejection of his beautiful feckless mother who died a heroin addict.
Robbie Finn, the hero of Nerve — perhaps the best of the 40 or so novels — feels himself an outsider, the only non-musical member of a family of famous musicians.
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