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Product Description
This is a brilliant collection of thirteen short stories, written by the Master of Crime. Although some of the stories have been published before, all but one of them have had a very limited circulation and the vast majority of Dick Francis fans will be reading them for the first time. Ranging from the "National Hunt Festival" at Cheltenham to "Churchill Downs in America", each of the stories contains an array of five-star Dick Francis characters, a brilliant plot to marvel over and an ingenious sting in the tail to gasp over.
Amazon.com Review
This first collection of short stories by Dick Francis (author of 10 Lb. Penalty and more than 30 other horseracing mysteries) pulls together five new tales with eight that have appeared scattered in periodicals over the last three decades. One of the pleasures of his stories is witnessing the breadth and variety within Francis's racetrack milieu. In "Dead on Red," a jealous jockey named Davey Rockman hires Emil Jacques, a French assassin and gun collector, to kill the famed rider who stole his job; but Rockman is haunted by his deed much in the same way as is the protagonist in Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart." "Raid at Kingdom Hill" tells of Tricksy Wilcox's scheme for a not-so-bright bomb scare, a plan that still might yield the payoff of a lifetime. "Collision Course" is free of murder but frames a delightful conflict between an out-of-work newspaperman and a bounder whose faux manners threaten to bring him down at the peak of his racing syndicate career. The Kentucky Derby story, "The Gift," follows Fred Collyer, a drunken writer who overhears plans for a major racing swindle and struggles against alcohol to publish the story by his deadline. And the collection ends with a what-if story called "Haig's Death" that examines the consequences of the sudden passing of Christopher Haig, an animal feed consultant and race-meeting judge.
Poe, who most historians of literature credit as the creator of the short story, declared that a good short story should have nothing extraneous. Francis's stories, for the most part, obey Poe's dictum. Each character and description fits tightly into an unfolding plan so that the mystery or twist is revealed with a satisfying economy of words. While Field of 13 will appeal to Francis loyalists, newcomers, too, will find much to relish in the short fiction of this mystery grand master. --Patrick O'Kelley
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catsalive (Australia) (2012/08/14):
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A bomb scare at Aintree halted the Grand National in 1997 and the racecourse was evacuated; twenty-two years earlier, Dick Francis had written a short story describing such an event at another course. Now, for the first time, Francis has compiled a volume of short stories, the settings ranging from the National Hunt Festival at Cheltenham, where a middle-aged owner falls hopelessly in love with her jockey, to the Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs, where the demon drink and wilting willpower take their toll. Ther are diverse characters from bookmakers to news editors, from crooked lawyers to contract killers.Stories include: Raid at Kingdom Hill; Dead on Red; Song for Mona; Bright White Star; Collision Course; Nightmare; Carrot for a Chestnut; The Gift; Spring Fever; Blind Chance; Corkscrew; The Day of the Losers; and, Haig's Death.
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