Field of Thirteen - Dick Francis [0]
THE SPORT OF QUEENS (autobiography)
DEAD CERT
NERVE
FOR KICKS
ODDS AGAINST
FLYING FINISH
BLOOD SPORT
FORFEIT
ENQUIRY
RAT RACE
BONECRACK
SMOKESCREEN
SLAY-RIDE
KNOCK DOWN
HIGH STAKES
IN THE FRAME
RISK
TRIAL RUN
WHIP HAND
REFLEX
TWICE SHY
BANKER
THE DANGER
PROOF
BREAK IN
LESTER: The Official Biography
BOLT
HOT MONEY
THE EDGE
STRAIGHT
LONGSHOT
COMEBACK
DRIVING FORCE
DECIDER
WILD HORSES
COME TO GRIEF
TO THE HILT
10-lb PENALTY
FIELD OF 13
Dick Francis
MICHAEL JOSEPH
LONDON
MICHAEL JOSEPH LTD
Published by the Penguin Group
27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, England
Viking Penguin Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia
Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2
Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, Private Bag 102902, NSMC, Auckland, New Zealand
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England
First published in Great Britain 1998
Second impression September 1998
Third impression September 1998
Fourth impression December 1998
Fifth impression December 1998
Sixth impression December 1998
Copyright © Dick Francis 1998
All rights reserved.
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
The moral right of the author has been asserted
ISBN: 978-0-14-192960-6
My thanks to a whole host of researchers:
MARY
MERRICK FELIX
JOCELYN
ANDREW
JEFFREY JENNY
LAWYERS GALORE
PROLOGUE
Notes on the Racecard
Tell me a story, and tell it strong and quick.
Tell it so I go to sleep at bedtime. No bloody corpses, no horrors, no hung, drawn and quartered heroes.
Can’t promise that there won’t be any deaths. Still, bodies were not my brief.
Amuse, enthuse, raise the protest, sink the fearsome terror. Pull wide a window, watch the play within. Close the curtains. Try the next house, look into the fridge there, tumble its ice cubes down sleepy necks.
Thirteen assorted flavours. Recipes second to size. Never mind the contents, feel the length. Three thousand best words, here please, and eight thousand or so there. Newspapers and magazines like to cut the tale to fit the space. (Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy the game.) So some of the excursions are longer and some are short. Some have tight belts, others float.
Some date from way back, some are recent. Meet a few old friends here. See if new acquaintances shake hands.
If one has to be plain, eight of these thirteen stories were originally commissioned by various publications who kindly dictated only length, not content. The other five stories are new, their length – and content – my choice.
When the field of thirteen runners were assembled and ready to parade to the start, there arose as in all of life the question, ‘Who Goes First?’ Should the book lead off with the first story written? Did primogeniture rule?
Leave it to chance, we said in the end, so we held an impromptu draw.
‘We’, in this instance, meant four of us gathered contentedly for a before-lunch drink. ‘We’ are my wife Mary, my son Felix, my literary agent Andrew Hewson and myself.
We wrote the titles of the thirteen stories on thirteen sticky-back labels and folded them up carefully, and put them into a splendid glass champagne cooler that had been given to my wife and me by Phyllis and Victor Grann as a house-warming present for our apartment beside the Caribbean Sea. (Mrs Phyllis Grann is the President of PenguinPutnam Inc., who publish D. Francis in the USA.)
The four of us took turns to stir the folded labels in the cooler and pick one out.
Each choice was unfolded, read, and sticky-backed in order onto a board. Thirteen labels