Breaking down any bestseller to its essence is an invitation to either parody or dissatisfaction. It’s a joyous exercise applied to the likes of Barbara Cartland: “Boy of dashing aspect and… noble birth… gets girl after a suitable period of… modest resistance… on her part; ellipses indicate heaving of bosoms and gnashing of teeth.” Or, to the self-help genre: “Practise The Laws of Attraction and you, too, can do anything you want — but to really rake in the loot, be like me and focus on writing a wildly successful bestseller.”
In those terms, analysing the success of Dick Francis, who died of old age this Sunday, is an exercise in futility. Upright, tough jockey/ stable owner/ racing world insider discovers skulduggery on the course/ in a bar/ at the stables, sets out to put the world to rights. Our hero may or may not have a disabled wife/ suffering sibling/ unhappy marriage/ minuscule bank balance, but he is guaranteed to have integrity/ rippling muscles/ a good friend and/or the company of an attractive woman. There will be few passages of seething romance, but he will usually be beaten up, several times, by gangs of toughs, sustain bruises and sometimes break bones before his unshakeable integrity and his bruised (but still rippling) muscles carry the day.
That, in a nutshell, was the plot of the 40-odd bestsellers Dick Francis produced in his second career as a writer, but it doesn’t explain why he fell into the relatively small category of bestselling authors who provide the esoteric and the amateur reader alike with an inordinate amount of satisfaction. Dick Francis, like Stephen King, or Tom Clancy, or James Michener, wrote page-turners that were also what a friend calls “guilty pleasures” for those of us who were aware that this wasn’t the stuff of High Literature, but enjoyed reading them anyway.
So much attention is paid to the craft of literary writing that we often forget to analyse what goes into the life and work of a long-playing bestseller writer. Dick Francis exemplified some of the characteristics that divide the reliable popular fiction writers from the one-season wonders.
Know your turf: Before he turned to writing, Dick Francis was an exceptionally good jump jockey — he almost won the Grand National on Devon Loch, the Queen Mother’s horse. He admitted that the world of racing was far less corrupt than he made it out to be in his thrillers, but his insider knowledge of how the turf worked allowed his novels a degree of consistency. Jeffrey Archer’s most consistently interesting work explores the worlds of politics and finance, two areas that he knew from personal experience. Ludlum, Clancy and Michener were all relentless researchers.
Have a work ethic: The best pulp and popular fiction writers see their writing as a job. Dick Francis would spend up to six months of the year writing, and dispatched his new novel to his agent every year in April — except for a delay one year when his wife, co-researcher and perhaps co-writer, Mary was ill. Thriller writer Robert Parker used the discipline of his teaching life in his writing career — he wrote 500 words a day, five days a week. Shobha De once spoke of writing 1,000 words a day, and that’s still amateur league compared to Alexander McCall Smith, who writes 3,000 words a day, regardless of the other interruptions in his life.
Be consistent: Stephen King is one of the few exceptions to this rule, departing from the horror fiction that made him famous to write novels as Richard Bachman, or fantasy sagas such as the Dark Tower series. But King began experimenting after he’d already built up a core, loyal readership; and he placed the early experiments under the Bachman name to avoid confusing his readers.
Tom Clancy, questioned about writer’s block, asked the reporter whether he’d ever had a bad day and got into the office anyway. “That’s all there is to it,” said Clancy. Jack Higgins, asked whether he ever got tired of the “thriller formula”, said: “As long as people don’t get tired of reading them, I don’t get tired of writing them.”
Francis knew one of the secrets of the trade: yes, there was a formula to his books, and yes, some of us reviewers could probably review a Dick Francis book without needing to actually read it. But that was precisely why he had readers — they came back for the magic of the same story in different forms, as many times as he cared to write it. It wouldn’t work for a literary writer, but it’s part of what makes the bestseller list work: the promise of suspense and excitement, within the same old comfortable, reassuring framework.
And readers like me feel some sadness at his passing: there will always be thriller writers to illuminate the worlds of spies or tough cops, to cover the mean streets of a city, but there will never be another chronicler who could make the esoteric, adrenalin-filled world of racing seem so beguiling.
