Anything Dad could do... Felix Francis, son of thriller writer Dick Francis, pens his first solo effort - Telegraph
Anything Dad could do... Felix Francis, son of thriller writer Dick Francis, pens his first solo effort
The former teacher reveals the family secrets behind a publishing success    story.
Felix Francis: 'I had practice writing fiction in school reports'  Photo: ANDREW CROWLEY
By Peter Stanford
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Felix Francis is demonstrating what must surely be a unique talent. He can, he claims, recite the opening lines of most of Dick Francis’s 40-odd horse-racing thrillers. So far, I have failed miserably to catch him out.
He has, of course, a natural advantage. Dick was his father and writing the best-selling series of books, which appeared at the rate of one-a-year from 1962 until 2000, was something of a collective effort at the Francises’ home, with the former champion jockey’s wife, Mary, playing a key (though publicly unacknowledged) role in their production.
We are sitting in the bar of London’s Goring Hotel, to discuss 58-year-old Felix Francis’s first solo novel, Gamble, out next month. However, the shadow of his famous father, who died last year, is proving hard to escape. This place, for instance, had been Francis Senior’s favourite home-from-home. It even boasts a “Dick Francis corner” of books and memorabilia in one of its private dining rooms.
But then, arguably, Felix Francis isn’t trying too hard. His own name may be there in big bold gold letters on the jacket of the book that lies on the table between us, but present, too, in only slightly smaller print, is the catchline “A Dick Francis novel”. Does he ever feel like a perpetual runner-up, trailing in over the finishing line a few furlongs behind his dad?
“Absolutely not,” Francis Junior protests. “No, not at all,” he adds, in case I haven’t quite got it. “I’m immensely proud of all my father’s books.” For added emphasis, he picks up a yellowing paperback of Dead Cert, the first-ever Dick Francis thriller, which I’d been reading while waiting. “This feels as much a part of me,” he says, brandishing it, “as Gamble.”
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It is a disconcerting moment, not least because Felix looks very like his father – the same warm eyes, perpetual half-smile and toothy jowliness. Though he is the first to raise the pragmatic marketing advantages of cloaking himself in his dead father’s brand, he is also evidently sincere in his heartfelt wish to walk unashamedly in his shoes, turning on its head the conventional wisdom that every son wants to compete with his father and prove he can stand on his own two feet. For Felix, his dad’s shadow is apparently not a burden but a blessing.
The common ground between Gamble and the Dick Francis back catalogue is extensive. For a start, Felix has set his book in the world of horse-racing. He has used many of his father’s creative trademarks – including the first-person narrator and the amateur central character who finds himself inadvertently at the scene of the crime, but who proves more resourceful than the police in solving it. The writing, in true Francis style, is spare, efficient and unflashy, but inexorably draws you in.
Felix did, of course, serve an informal apprenticeship before taking over the literary reins. After the death of Mary Francis in 2000, he filled her co-authoring role on the next four Dick Francis books, albeit with a small print credit on the cover. “My father insisted on that,” he says with an unmistakable pride.
He is busy building a plausible case that, in professional terms, becoming his dead dad is a perfectly normal and personally uncomplicated thing to do, but I still can’t help seeing it as slightly unsettling. Wouldn’t it have been healthier for Felix Francis – who spent almost 20 years as a physics teacher before becoming manager to his ageing parents – to run his own race in literary terms?
“No, this is what I want,” he stresses. “When people ask me what I do, now, I reply, 'I write the Dick Francis novels’. It is the biggest joy of my life. I feel as if I have found happiness being an author.”
To those who will – inevitably, he acknowledges – suspect that he is simply trying to squeeze a few more royalties out of his father’s name, the curse of every child who offers any form of public tribute to a celebrated parent, he replies that the Dick Francis books lend themselves to such treatment more than most. “They were always more a brand than an individual. For my family, they were a kind of method. I saw them as a way of life.”
It was, he says, “the worst-kept secret in publishing” that while his father had the ideas for the books, and would write the first draft in long-hand, his mother, Mary, would give them plenty of polishing and finessing as she typed them up.
“Joint effort” are the words he uses to describe their co-operation. So why wasn’t her role acknowledged? “My father was always suggesting it, but she didn’t want it,” he replies, somewhat defensive at the implied slight on his father’s honour. “My mother always called my father Richard because her sister was married to a Dick,” he explains, “so the name Dick Francis was in a way a combination of Richard and Mary.”
I’m not sure that is how readers saw it – Dick Francis having been the name his father used when capturing the public’s imagination first as champion jockey in the 1953-54 season and then with heartbreak on the Queen Mother’s horse, Devon Loch, when it pulled up in the 1956 Grand National with victory in sight.
But it seems that the books were unequivocally regarded as the family business. “I designed the bomb that featured in Rat Race [1970] on the basis of my A-level physics studies,” Felix recalls. “And Twice Shy [1981] featured a physics teacher who was based on me. Another book, Driving Force [1992], was about a horse-transportation business – which was what my older brother Merrick was doing then.”
Keeping the books going, then, is more than a marketing ploy – it sounds like keeping a way of life going. “I remember growing 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.”
Though there were always horses around, Felix didn’t follow his father into the saddle. Hip problems as a teenager ruled that out. They also put an end to his ambition to be a pilot –he was turned down on medical grounds by British Airways and, by his own admission, drifted into teaching. So how can he recreate that other vital element of a Dick Francis book, the insider knowledge of racing? “Well, I may only have a degree in physics,” he jokes, “but I do have a good imagination. And I had plenty of practice writing fiction in school reports. But, if I want to check any horse-racing details, I go to my brother, Merrick.”
Anyway, teaching, he says, is not so distant from writing books. “I always felt that you had to be entertaining in order to get the children to listen. And I remember my father would say that he’d watch people in bookshops opening a novel, reading the first paragraphs and then deciding whether it was entertaining enough to buy it.”
Felix admits that he has ambitions to grow and develop his inheritance. He tried to get TV and film interested in the novels, but a badly made US series of adaptations starring Ian McShane blighted his plans.
He is now, however, writing a screenplay for Dead Heat, the first of the novels he co-wrote with his father in 2007.
And he’d like to develop his own technique. “It would be wrong to say that I am copying my father’s style. I write what comes naturally. I don’t believe you can fake that. This,” he insists, picking up Gamble, “is my book. If what has come out sounds like my father, then perhaps it is something in my genes.”
'Gamble’ by Felix Francis is published by Michael Joseph today at £18.99