Dick Francis

I read my first Dick Francis novel when I was a teenager and I was hooked from the start. Francis stopped writing in 2000 and his son took up the reins.

Felix Francis, son of champion jockey and bestselling author Dick Francis, started secretly writing books under his father’s name while he was still alive.

Now a bestselling novelist himself, the 70-year-old former physics teacher tells Donna Ferguson that his father never wrote another novel after his mother Mary – who used to ‘polish his father’s prose’ – died in 2000.

Felix took up his father’s legacy and started writing ‘Dick Francis’ novels in 2005, to boost demand for his father’s backlist.

Having read the later novels, I couldn’t tell that it was a different writer, so he had the style off pat.

The reason this interested me is because Francis influenced my writing. When I decided to have a crack at writing a novel, it was very much written in his style. First person narrative, fast paced, plenty of intrigue and peril and a sudden twist – although no horse racing. Ransom is, however, different to any other novel or short story I’ve written because of this. By the time I started on Rebellion, my own style was starting to assert itself. I switched from the first person to the third person omniscient, allowing me to move around the story and characters to tell the story from different points of view, which is denied the first person narrator.

My pace still tends to be brisk and I still like a nice little twist, but with each of my subsequent stories, my voice comes out rather than someone who influenced me. I am still grateful to Dick Francis for giving me that inspiration, but now I am very much my own writer, as the proof reader who is currently reading through Recovery pointed out. All of that said, I have stuck to something that Dick Francis did. All of my novels have single word titles. I like the idea of one word that tells the reader what to expect. I went one further and indulged in alliteration. This started as coincidence with the first two, but then became a private joke ever since. Hence, Ransom, Rebellion, Resolution, Reiver, Renegade and shortly to be published, Recovery and I’ve just started on Rose.