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Product Description
With his remarkable blend of unrelenting suspense, finely tuned narrative, and lean, stylish prose, Dick Francis's thrillers have led readers to the winner's circle year after year. From his very first novel, Dead Cert, to his most recent, 10 lb. Penalty, the three-time Edgar Award winner has treated his fans to a world of equine thrills and human frailty in a string of bestsellers of unparalleled excellence. But with Field of Thirteen, Dick Francis takes on his biggest challenge yet. In this superbly crafted collection of short stories--many of them new and never before published--the settings range from a spring race meeting at Cheltenham, where a middle-aged owner falls hopelessly in love with her jockey, to a running of the Grand National interrupted by a bomb scare, to the Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs, where demon drink and wilting willpower take their toll. Dick Francis's fans have a wonderful treat in store--thirteen tightly-knotted plots to marvel at, thirteen sets of classic Francis characters to admire, and thirteen stings of the tail to gasp over. Field of Thirteen proves Dick Francis is as much the master of the short story as he is of the novel.
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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