I discovered Dick Francis when I lived in eastern Europe and had a hard time getting books in English. Only at The British Council could I get free books; they had a lot of Dick Francis novels and I went through them lickety-split. 25 years later trying them again. I 'discovered' Rose Tremain and a few others. Dick Francis is the perfect down-time reading--doesn't matter if I stop and then continue, a handy fill-in novel between other books.

Many of us experience something akin to “comfort food” when re-reading a favorite book. I had that feeling as I began reading Dead Cert and it stayed with me as I turned the pages.

“…the protagonist is Alan York, an amateur steeplechase rider. He comes from a moneyed family in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), and when he's not riding, he works in this father's shipping firm in London.” My GR friend James Thane provides a great perspective on the author, Dick Francis, though he and I disagree a little bit on how much we liked the book.

"“My mother died when I was ten. My father might come some time if he is not too busy.” “Too busy doing what?” asked Uncle George interestedly. “He’s a trader,” I said, giving my usual usefully non-committal answer to this question. “Trader” could cover anything from a rag-and-bone man to what he actually was, the head of the biggest general trading concern in the Federation. Both Uncle George and Aunt Deb looked unsatisfied by this reply, but I did not add to it…and in any case for Dane’s sake I could not do it. He had faced Aunt Deb’s social snobbery without any of the defences I could muster if I wanted to, and I certainly felt myself no better man than he."

We have the thrills of the steeplechase, a violent death, a love interest and at least one deep mystery. York is a man to be respected and never under-estimated.

"On the train I asked myself, for at least the hundredth time, what chance remark of mine had landed me in the horse-box hornet’s nest. Whom had I alarmed by not only revealing that I knew about the wire, but more especially by saying that I intended to find out who had put it there? I could think of only two possible answers…. I remembered saying to Clifford Tudor on the way from Plumpton to Brighton that a lot of questions would have to be answered about Bill’s death; which was as good as telling him straight out that I knew the fall hadn’t been an accident, and that I meant to do something about it."

Author Francis may get better at plotting and other novels may include more depth about horses but this novel is a great place to begin to “ride along the course” with the jockeys, owners, trainers and the events that surround horse racing.

-Typical description
"Admiral was as superb to ride as he looked. He put himself right before every fence, making his spring at exactly the right moment and needing no help from the saddle. He had the low, flowing galloping stride of the really fast mover, and from the first fence onward I found racing on his back an almost ecstatic pleasure."

Started: December 1, 2007
Finished: December 3, 2007

***

This is another re-read by one of my favourite authors. Dick Francis was a highly successful jockey, and he used to ride the Queen Mother's horses. When he retired, he started writing books*, and I think they're brilliant. They all involve horse racing in some way (though some of them very peripherally), and with few exceptions, the protagonist (of which very few are repeated) is forced into the role of amateur detective, usually out of self-defense (or defense of his loved ones).

His books are almost all quite thin, and thus a quick read, and they are a capital example of how to pack a lot of story into a short book. He wastes no words, and has a deft hand at both characterization and story craft. There are no tricks, though the reader doesn't always know everything the protagonist knows, especially as all threads start coming together, but the denouement always makes spectacular sense. He ramps up the stakes for his characters by steady turns, and his protagonists are, to a man, well-rounded, interesting, flawed, human, and heroic.

It's been a long time since I read this particular volume, and I'd forgotten how much I liked it.

***


*Yes, I know that people have said it's his wife who wrote the books. Who cares? The books say "Dick Francis"; makes no difference to me if it's a pseudonym for his wife; the books are just as brilliant.

My Mom was a big fan of Dick Francis and I grew up reading his books, most of them more than once. Still, it had been long enough since my last reading of this one that I could enjoy it without being able to predict everything that happened.

This was Dick Francis’s first foray into the world of novel writing, I think. Since he was formerly a jockey, his novels all take place within the world of horse racing in some facet or another. In this one, an amateur jockey named Alan York is directly behind his friend Bill Davidson in a steeplechase race course which Davidson is sure to win on his horse, Admiral. Inexplicably, Admiral falls while attempting a jump and Davidson is killed as a result of the fall. York has seen something suspicious and when he goes back later to check, he finds evidence of foul play. He begins asking questions and finds out that as he delves into things, he is stirring up a hornet’s nest. He’s a canny fellow (as are all of Francis’s protagonists) and looking at seemingly disparate crimes going on, he realizes that they are all connected, but the closer he gets to the truth, the more danger he faces. In this book, York freely and happily consults with the local police inspector, but in future books, Francis’s protagonists almost always eschew contact with the police.

There’s always an element of romance in Francis’s books as well and in this one, Alan meets a young and beautiful first-time racehorse owner named Kate with whom he immediately falls in love (which to the reader seems quite contrived). She’s a lively and interesting character, however, and sets up a mostly friendly rivalry between Alan and another jockey named Dane.

I love Dick Francis; his stories always seem familiar and comforting. I enjoy listening to audio books while I commute and his books are often read by Simon Prebble, who is quite enjoyable. Although it's not great literature and it's sometimes predictable, Dead Cert is a great read/listen.

A really good investment

In print for almost sixty years as of 2019, this is a very nice read. The hero, as Dick Francis' heroes often do, finds true love and wins a few races. He doesn't win the race the book closes with, but he gains a moral victory of no small size in it.

Along the way he busts up a vicious criminal enterprise, and this, of course, is the meat of the book.

In this, Dick Francis' first novel, he established the basic parameters from which he did not vary for the entire length of his writing career, producing roughly forty novels. That all of them are still in print(some, like this one, only metaphorically so) tells its own tale.

So if you can stand to read a novel written BCP - before cell phones - go ahead and buy this one. It's very unlikely you will regret it.

This was a fun little mystery. The characters had no arc and the plot, including the ending, was predictable, but it was still fun to read because it was so different from the modern mysteries I read today. It was written in 1962, so no cell phones, computers, listening devices, etc. There was no grisly murder and, possibly because the setting is England, not much gun play. Kinda a cool look back in time. It was also interesting because it taught me a lot about horse racing. I don't think I'll read many more of these, because the novelty will wear off and because I've been told they are all about horse racing. I read it on the recommendation of a friend and as a result I know him a little better. That is always a good reason to read a book :)

You can tell it's his first book, mostly because of plot, but it's still worth many re-reads. Gotta love the hero and especially this horse, Admiral.

This book was a turning point in my life, although I didn't know it at the time. I was just 14 when I read it and 'on the run' from school again (I was a frequent truant). I've never forgotten the first line ..."The mingled smells of hot horse and cold river mist filled my nostrils." It drew me in immediately and I read it in one sitting.

If you'll forgive me for not summarizing the plot, as a normal reviewer would - others have done that well enough - I'll tell you what Dick Francis and Dead Cert did for me.

The following weeks just seemed to slip out of my life as I spent them reading all the Dick Francis I could get hold of. When I'd consumed everything, I found that it had consumed me. Horse racing consumed me, and I began searching for anything to do with the sport. The fascination even led me to haunt the doors of my local betting shop, still five years short of legal age.

I skipped school even more often to go and work (unpaid) as a 'lad' in my local racing stable. The outcome was expulsion from school aged 14 without a qualification to my name. All I knew was how to read and to calculate winnings on bets.

There is so much to tell of what Dead Cert led me to, and it's probably best laid out by pasting here a blog article I wrote a couple of years ago.

Seventeen years ago today I was having breakfast in Winterborne Cottage where I was living at the time. It was the shortest commute I’d ever had, nestled in the trees about a hundred yards west of the winner’s enclosure at Aintree racecourse. Aintree’s 270 enclosed acres held a few properties and I was fortunate to live in one, at a peppercorn rent. I’d left SiS the year before to become Aintree’s first marketing manager.

At 8.20 my mobile rang. Aintree MD Charles Barnett, perfect diction unruffled as ever said, ‘Joe, Red Rum died this morning. He’s on his way here. We want him under the ground before telling the press. Can you meet me by the winning post in half an hour?’

It was a job. I didn’t stop to reflect on my life or the part Red Rum had played in it, or the path that had led me from a pit village in Lanarkshire to the best racecourse in the world. I was a mongrel working class boy whose habitual truancy led to a note from the headmaster to my father eight weeks short of my fifteenth birthday: “If your son dislikes school so much, tell him not to come back.” (Oh those pre-politically correct days!).

And I never went back, considering myself expelled at 14. I rejoiced and headed out into the world without a qualification to my name but armed with a twenty-two carat romantic view of life gained from all the books I’d read, huddled in the corner of warm libraries when I should have been at school.

The only teacher I ever paid attention to was one I’d never met, Dick Francis. I’d got through a book of his a day.

On a patch of old farm land behind St Pat’s school in my village, an optimistic farmer called Jim Barrett trained a dozen horses. I never thought then how incongruous it was, these ten acres or so, surrounded by steelworks and abandoned pits. I never noticed the smoky industry; I saw Uplands, Saxon House, Seven Barrows. But no Lanzarote or Bula was housed there.

Still, third-rate thoroughbreds were racehorses, creatures of unlimited potential and I’d be there in many frozen dawns to groom and muck out and sometimes ride and watch the stable jockey, three years my senior and better known in the village as the son of the owner of the fish and chip shop. His name was Len Lungo and a couple of years later he headed south to ride Martin Pipe’s first ever winner, Hit Parade.

The Guv’nor (oh, how I loved calling him that) used to weigh me once a week and I’d starve in the previous twenty four hours hoping that next day he’d tell me I’d make it as a jockey. But he never did and I never stopped growing. Jim Barrett died a relatively young man and I was cast adrift looking for some way to stay in ‘the sport’.

The best I could manage was a job with Ladbrokes the bookmakers. By the time of Red Rum’s first National I was nineteen and managing a busy betting shop in Hamilton and cursing Red Rum not just for catching the magnificent Crisp in the dying strides of that wonderful race, but for being the best bet for many at 9/1 joint-fav with the runner-up.

Those were the days when settling was done without machines. We worked furiously through around 5,000 betting slips as the queues of happy punters snaked around the shop and out the door.

That was the first of Rummy’s Nationals. It was the first of mine as a bona fide worker in the betting industry. That race, that finish, the participants were to play a huge part in my life - unplanned, never knowingly sought. Had someone told me that day how it would all pan out, even at my most romantic and optimistic, I’d never have believed it.

Twenty two years later, breakfast abandoned, I sat in Winterborne Cottage drafting the press release to fax to my great friend Nigel Payne who had recruited me to SiS and had been instrumental in me getting the job at Aintree. The plan was to give the old horse a quiet burial without the media swarming all over the track. One of the reasons for the secrecy was, I suppose, the fact that it is almost impossible to bury half a ton of thoroughbred in a dignified manner.

Walking toward the winning post on that fine dry morning, I passed the place where I’d stood with Red Rum on the day of his 30th birthday, five months before.

May 3rd was to be just another meeting at Aintree. We were down to five meetings a year. In the 60s, Aintree had staged about 17 meetings a year, flat and jumps, but as the course fell further into disrepair, Mrs Topham gradually surrendered meetings till we were left with just a handful.

Anyway, preparing for that May meeting, I noticed in Red Rum’s Timeform essay that he’d been born on May 3rd 1965. I suggested to Charles Barnett that we call our meeting Red Rum’s 30th Birthday Meeting. Charles, always open to ideas said “Crack on.”

I rang Ginger to see if the horse would be well enough to attend and, cheery and helpful as ever, he said. “Of course he will, old son.” It didn’t take long to get a buzz going. The BBC and ITV asked if they could send news teams. We were getting calls from the international media and I got kind of carried away and told Charles I was going to create a special racecard and order 10,000 of them. That May meeting had seldom attracted more than 3,000 racegoers.

“You won’t sell them, Joe.”

“We will. Trust me. I’ve got an interview with Ginger in there, a special portrait of Red Rum on the cover. Timeform have agreed to let me publish their full essay on him from Chasers and Hurdlers!”

“There’s no way, you’ll sell close to ten thousand.”

“Trust me, Charles!”

He smiled and gave one of his shrugs (think Hooper in Jaws trying to dissuade the men in the overcrowded boat “They’re all gonna die!”)

When the track emptied after the meeting I was left staring at a stack of unopened boxes holding about 7,000 racecards. But CB never ever said “I told you so,” and the fact that he didn’t meant a lot to me.

Anyway, on that May evening, I’d walked out with Red Rum and his handler from the old stables. We came across behind the stands, Rummy looking splendid in his coat in the fading sun, ambling along quietly. But just as we came around the end of the Queen Mother stand, about thirty yards beyond the winning post, Rummy raised his head quickly and pricked his ears. His eyes became brighter and he stood very still for what seemed a long time, just watching. Lord knows what he was remembering but I will never forget that image.

Twenty four weeks later he was back close to the winning post he loved so well. This time he was lying on his left side, head toward the red and white disk above him, eyes closed, breath gone. No pallbearers, no coffin, no shroud.

Ginger was on my left, Charles on my right beside the only other man there, Bob Dixon, head groundsman whose precious turf had been gouged by the shovel of a yellow JCB which scooped out more than enough earth to make sure there’d be no embarrassing ‘rehearsal’.

Charles turned toward Ginger. Ginger looked at his oldest equine friend one final time and nodded. Charles raised a thumb to the JCB driver and the shovel was lowered to slip slowly below the spine of the finest Grand National horse that had ever galloped those acres since the first National in 1839. Slowly, slowly, slowly, Rummy was pushed toward the edge of his grave until gravity took over. Ginger walked forward and threw in a handful of fresh earth. I turned and went to my office to place an order for his headstone and to write his epitaph for it.

It didn’t take long for me to figure out that a square yard of marble was never going to be enough on which to do credit to a true equine legend and I settled for the simplest of words. I showed them to Charles and to Ginger and they agreed there was nothing more to say.

A couple of weeks ago, on a beautiful morning, another player in that 1973 National sat with me on Fred Winter’s memorial bench outside his old yard Uplands, the place I’d dreamed of as a teenager. Richard Pitman and I published our first novel 20 years after Rummy’s first win and Richard’s heart-rending defeat on Crisp.

I’d wanted to go there with Richard. Next year is the 40th anniversary of the great race. From that famous yard behind us, Crisp had been driven north to Liverpool. He came back having endeared himself to anyone who had a heart. His jockey came back with the memory of an experience no other human being would ever have. Richard never claimed to be a great jockey. He wasn’t, but he has always been too modest. There were few who could get a horse jumping the way he could and even fewer who would blame themselves for losing the most famous race in the world when giving 23lbs to what turned out to be the greatest Grand National horse in history.

Sitting on that bench Richard explained to me, “It wasn’t so much picking up my stick before the Elbow that was the mistake, it was taking my hand off the reins to use it.” He has had almost 40 years of being tough on himself. I have had 40 years in a sport I love. I never knew the touchstone for me would turn out to be the 1973 Grand National. I helped bury the winning horse. I wrote novels with the man who rode Crisp. I have not sat on a racehorse these past 40 years but it has turned out a great ride through life for me - no skill required from the pilot, carried safely round the course by Lady Luck.

Joe McNally

I loved this, especially the e citing ending, which I won’t elaborate on, Incase I spoil it for others. I’m re-reading all Dick Francis’s books, as I enjoyed them so much 15 years ago. The ending of this book, over several chapters, has stayed with me all these years. Re-reading it hasn’t spoilt the enjoyment at all. I thoroughly recommend that you read this. It’s excellent.

After reading the latest too-clever pseudo-mystery that tried too hard to be darkly funny, I had to get that taste out of my mouth with an actual mystery. I know I can always count on Dick Francis for an interesting murder in the world of horse racing.

True to form, a likeable fellow is killed off in the first chapter leaving just enough clues for our narrator to track down the culprit with minimal involvement from the police. The mystery in "Dead Cert" was complicated enough to keep me guessing for most of the chapters, but still gave me a chance to figure it out before the detective. The main character is likable, has a love interest, and an affection for horses. The plot is a frothy mix of drama, danger, and humor, and the setting of English steeple-chasing is entertaining.

It's a fun book. It may not be a psychological mind-bender or dramatically original or startling intense or some other book jacket proclamation, but it's what books should be: enjoyable.

One that I reread