How’s that for a convoluted post title?

If you believe the book jacket Felix Francis helped his father Dick write several of the later books in his long career, even before he started getting credit as co-author on the last four written before Dick died in 2010. Now he’s written one on his own, very much in his father’s style. I’m a little annoyed with its title, because it reminds me of all the knockoffs done in Robert Ludlum’s and Alistair MacLean’s name which include the deceased author’s name in big print above the book title. See here for an example.

The book by Francis is called “Dick Francis’s Gamble”, which is misleading. It implies the book is about Dick Francis and some gamble he took, right? Like, I dunno, deciding he’d start writing thriller/mystery novels after retiring as a jockey?

Well, no. The book fits the old Francis formula: an average man thrust into dangerous situations without a clue as to what’s going on. It begins with a murder at a racecourse on Page One (which immediately reminded me of one of my favorite early Francis books, “Nerve,” because the first sentence of “Nerve” is “Art Matthews shot himself, loudly and messily, in the center of the parade ring at Dunstable races.”) Similarly, the first sentence of “Dick Francis’s Gamble” describes the murder. The hero, Nick, (a former jockey who broke his neck in a racing accident, luckily was not paralyzed but was forbidden to race again by the medical advisers to the Racing Commission — hello, Sid Halley!) witnessed the murder at close range since he was standing right next to the victim. The two men were financial advisers working for a small London firm. Nick is startled to learn he’s been named executor of his friend’s estate, and even more startled to learn that Herb, who was American, was apparently running an Internet gambling operation for clients in the States from England, Internet gambling being illegal in the US.

Ah, but the Internet gambling operation is not the real crime which needs to be investigated here. No, the real crime is fraud being perpetrated on one of Nick’s firm’s clients in Bulgaria. It involves claims that a prosperous factory in that country doesn’t really exist, despite glowing reports to the contrary.

There’s a subordinate story involving Nick’s live-in girlfriend; her recent behavior has led him to believe she’s having an affair. When he finds out the truth about that it adds some poignancy to the usual “run/hide from the bad guys” formula Francis has always had in his books.

All in all, it’s pretty derivative of his father’s work, but Dick had a recognizable formula which worked. It’s a pretty good story, and the mystery remains until the last couple of pages. . The younger Francis learned how to tell a story pretty well.

Being a completist I’ll buy it, but I’ll wait for the paperback.