Odds Against

Dick Francis

Dick Francis was a British mystery author — he died in 2010 at the age of 89 — and he’s one of the all-time greats. He wrote 44 thrillers, mostly set in the world of horse racing, and it remains a mystery why he’s not as beloved as Agatha Christie.

The narrators in Dick Francis’ novels are almost always amateur sleuths solving mysteries against their will. But Odds Against introduces Sid Halley, a hero who works at a proper private detective agency. And he’s a hero for the ages.

Instead of bone and cartilage, his spine is made of integrity and fortitude. Life has knocked him down plenty: his father died before he was born, and his mother passed when Sid was just 15. He prevailed and slowly, deliberately built a life as a successful steeplechase jockey. Then he was robbed of that by a tragic accident that took his left hand.

Despite it all, or perhaps because of it, Sid is generally even-keeled if a bit resigned. The worst has already happened to him. Even so, at the beginning of this book, he’s vaguely depressed: He’s been working at Hunt Radnor Associates, but he drifts through his days like a ghost, still grappling with the loss of his hand and his recent (heart-breaking) divorce.

It doesn’t help that he feels useless around the office. Radnor’s is a bustling, full-service agency with a missing persons department, a section devoted to divorce investigations, guard services, and the racing section. For a fee, horse trainers can check on the character of a prospective buyer, bookies can verify their clients, jockey clubs can investigate new members. The phrase ‘OK’d by Radnor’ is racing code for ‘trustworthy.’

But Sid’s boss has never given him anything juicy to do. He’s never walked on racecourse security patrol, kept an eye out for pickpockets on race day, or done a stakeout to protect a champion runner. He mostly hangs around the office, reading other people’s reports.

When Sid is eventually assigned to a case, things go horribly awry, and he takes a bullet to the gut. While lying in his hospital bed, he’s feeling pretty sorry for himself: ‘Time passed slowly. The police didn’t find [the shooter], [my ex-wife] didn’t come, Radnor’s typists sent me a get-well card, and the hospital sent the bill.’

Sid’s father-in-law Charles — adored by Sid and vice-versa — visits the hospital and invites Sid to convalesce at his opulent manor house. But Charles has ulterior motives; he lures Sid back to life by tricking him into investigating a new case. Soon, Sid is using his newfound detective skills to place himself in harm’s way and ferret out the bad guys. And the bad guys are very, very bad.

Dick Francis is a master of efficient, tidy prose. His writing is like a British take on Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett — it’s spare and descriptive, but warmer. More affable.

He’s also really good at specificity. At Sid’s side, we learn the best way to search a room, describe a suspect, pick a lock, and misdirect someone’s attention.

This is a high-stakes mystery, but it’s also a moving character study. Sid grapples with heavy stuff. He’s in deep mourning about his disability and the dissolution of his marriage. At one point, he admits, ‘I wanted nothing… I’d had what I wanted most in the world and lost it irrevocably…. I stared at the ceiling, waiting for time to pass.’

If you’re worried about Sid, rest assured that Dick Francis’s heroes always triumph.

According to a New York Times review, ‘Just about the nicest thing you can do for a person who loves mysteries is turn them on to the works of Dick Francis.’ So this is us, turning you on to the works of Dick Francis.

If you want to see the inner workings of a detective agency in the company of a wounded, flawed, but lovable hero, this book is an excellent place to start.

Pssst: Dick Francis wrote three more books about Sid. Throughout the series, our hero continues to evolve in his detective career and come to terms with his injury. Unlike some other literary detectives who never age, Sid matures throughout the books, so reading them feels like keeping up with an old friend.

They had never given me a Bona Fides assignment. This work was done by a bunch of inconspicuous middle-aged retired policemen who took minimum time to get maximum results. I’d never been sent to sit all night outside the box of a hot favourite, though I would have done it willingly. I had never been put on a racecourse security patrol. If the Stewards asked for operators to keep tabs on undesirables at race meetings, I didn’t go. If anyone had to watch for pickpockets in Tattersalls, it wasn’t me. Radnor’s two unvarying excuses for giving me nothing to do were first that I was too well known to the whole racing world to be inconspicuous, and second, that even if I didn’t seem to care, he was not going to be the one to give an ex-champion jockey tasks which meant a great loss of face. As a result I spent most of my time kicking around the office reading other people’s reports. When anyone asked me for the informed advice I was supposedly there to give, I gave it; if anyone asked what I would do in a certain set of circumstances, I told them. I got to know all the operators and gossiped with them when they came into the office… At intervals I remarked to Radnor that he didn’t have to keep me, as I so obviously did nothing to earn my salary. He replied each time that he was satisfied with the arrangement, if I was. I had the impression that he was waiting for something, but if it wasn’t for me to leave, I didn’t know what. On the day I walked into Andrews’ bullet I had been with the agency in this fashion for exactly two years. — Dick Francis

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