United States Eventing Association

Eventing USA is reinventing my book column for the 21st century. Now I am online each month instead of in print bi-monthly. In e-format, I can include webtrolling results and hope to cause more reader commentary.

Dead Heat

by Dick Francis and Felix Francis

(Putnam 2007)

I'm not cashing in on Big Brown, I promise. I finally got a hold of the latest Dick Francis. Or is it? Picture the scene. Kitchen of a family friend. Me as a kid wolfing down chocolate cake. Mom: You like it. You really like it? Me: not answering because my mouth is full of my third piece of cake. The punchline was that the cake was from a mix. The baker had added pudding mix to retain moisture. (This was before cake mixes came with wet additives as a matter of course.) My mother had been painstakingly making cake from scratch for my school lunches, since I turned my fussy little nose up at mix cakes. Turns out I didn't care where the cake came from, just how it tasted.

Mr. Francis? Mrs. Francis? Son Francis? Who cares as long as the cake tastes good. The food metaphor is apt. The hero of the moment is a chef with a restaurant in Newmarket. Surrounded by horse folk, he doesn't comprehend horses himself, "As far as I was concerned, both ends of a horse were dangerous and the the middle was uncomfortable.” That's about it for horses in the book. Stir in horse people, nefarious plots, a love interest, complications, and so on. Sure it's a recipe, but so are chocolate chip cookies.

Wikipedia, that font of all wisdom, has links to audio interviews http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Francis. The Offical DF website [www.dickfrancis.com] has racing, family and military pictures.

The idea of a dead heat ties in better to the book of the same title by William Murray (Eclipse 2005). [Not to be confused with the William J. Murray in Wikipedia. Google can lead you to strange places.] Objectively, Murray's book is “better written”: more descriptive racing scenes, more complex characters, a more intricate plot. Yet, it took me over a week to find the time to finish the book. On the other hand, Father and Son Francis had me up until the wee hours the day I got their book. So, what it is about sheer Story? What is it about books that don't score as well with English professors, yet keep us turning the pages?

On The Muscle: Portrait of a Thoroughbred Racing Stable DVD (Pony Highway 2005)

Ever since I promised no more racing books (saving Dick Francis & Co.) awhile back, I have been trying work in this DVD. Visit with Hall of Fame Trainer Richard Mandella . No seamy underbelly, not much explanation of racing dynamics, just pretty horses being well-treated by nice people. It is as the subtitle says, a portrait: beautifully shot, well-edited, and fun to look at. My racing consultant says that Mr. M is a) a huge deal and b) really is that nice, “A trainer we can all be proud of.”

Mandella's words of wisdom: Never let the horse hear the plan. If he knows there is a race on Friday, he'll run a temperature on Thursday.

We've all been there.