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In the fall of 1997, the British mystery writer Dick Francis published his thirty-seventh mystery novel, 10-Lb. Penalty, which, like many of its predecessors, was selected as a Book-of-the-Month Club main selection and a Reader's Digest condensed book and quickly made its way onto the New York Times bestseller list. As it happens, 10-Lb. Penalty differs in some significant respects from its predecessors, and I shall return to those differences. In many other respects, however, it manifests the essential features that have stamped all of Francis's work with a unique and haunting quality.

Unlike many leading mystery writers, Francis does not use a single sleuth or team of sleuths (Miss Marple, Hercule Poirot, Inspector Morse) to establish continuity from one novel to the next. Rather, he writes each in the first person voice of its main protagonist, and only three of the 37 share a common hero, the former jockey Sid Halley, whom Francis was persuaded to bring back by the demands of his readers. The diversity of protagonists, however, does not compromise the reader's sense that each new Francis mystery returns us to a familiar universe.

This sense of continuity owes much to the unity of Francis's narrative voice, and the forthright directness and immediacy of that voice swiftly engages the reader's confidence, which it sustains throughout, drawing us into the comfortable sense that the narrator is a man we should like to know and even, for regular Francis readers, someone we have met before. All of the Francis narrators are men, and most are not investigators by profession. Almost all have a direct connection to horses, and many are jockeys, former jockeys, or aspiring jockeys. A former steeple-chase jockey himself, Francis knows the world of British racing inside out and, in his mysteries, brings it vividly to life. It is impossible to read more than a few without acquiring a nodding acquaintance with British racecourses, jockeys' unabating struggles to keep their weight down, the respective roles of trainers and owners, the intricacy and magnitude of betting, and the responsibilities of racetrack and Jockey Club officials.

This profusion of concrete information about the world of racing also adds to the sense of continuity from one Francis mystery to another, although not all of them take place within that world. That some do not concern racing, or concern it only indirectly, nonetheless suggests that something more than a familiar setting accounts for the underlying sense of unity among them. Francis does, properly and understandably, write primarily about people and a world he knows preeminently well, and his depiction of both assuredly engages readers' interest and imagination. But, in the end, it is not so much the world of racing itself that engages us, although it does, as it is the way in which Francis represents it. We care about steeple-chasing or the ways in which it is possible maliciously and surreptitiously to prevent a horse from running to full capacity because Francis's masterful evocation brings us directly into the inner workings of racing and introduces us to its mechanics. In other words, Francis's real gift lies in his rare ability to present readers with a concrete understanding of the specific details that professionals would take for granted. When, in 10-Lb. Penalty, he turns to politics and a local election, the effect is the same.

What holds for Francis's use of detail to bring a specific world to life also holds for his ability to evoke the character of his narrator-protagonist. Both literary tasks are accomplished with a breath-taking terseness and economy. One would be hard pressed to find an extra word in a Francis mystery, much less an extraneous paragraph, and yet the reader always has enough information to understand the narrator, the action, and the relevant attributes of the main characters. We always know enough, never too much. Francis never lulls us into complicity with a flow of chat or a soothing, if extraneous, description, and his bare-bones, stripped-down prose wonderfully enhances the taut suspense that informs most of his plots.

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