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.

The tone is set from the opening line. In 10-Lb. Penalty,

"Glue sniffing jockeys don't win the Derby."

I'd never sniffed glue in my life.

All the same, I stood before the man whose horses I rode and listened to him telling me he had no further use for my services. He sat behind his large antique paper-covered desk fidgeting with his clean fingernails. His hands were a yellowish white, very smooth.

A few lines later, we learn that "I was not yet eighteen," and, a few lines beyond, that the man whose horses he has ridden calls him Benedict.

Later in this first chapter, we learn that Benedict's surname is Julliard, that his father, George Julliard, calls him Ben, and that he has "dark curly hair (impervious to straightening by water)," "brown eyes, thin face, lean frame," and stands "five foot eleven (or thereabouts)."

Thereafter, relevant information about Ben appears, as we need it to follow the plot. At no point, however, does Francis break into the central narrative to give us a full account of Ben's childhood and schooling. Only in bits and pieces do we learn that, while at school, he has become an expert skier and marksman as well as a talented apprentice jockey. What we do, however, learn, almost immediately, is that more than anything Ben loves horses and racing and has set his heart on becoming a professional jockey. The opening scene shatters those dreams, freeing Ben for the action of the novel, which turns on his role in his father's run for a seat in Parliament. Indeed, as we rapidly learn, Ben's father, having ascertained that Ben would be too large ever to be a top jockey, engineered the scene, instructing the trainer, Sir Vivian Derridge, for whom Ben was riding, to fire him in a way that brooked no discussion. Thus does the scene draw us into Francis's real subject, Ben's coming of age and the evolving relations between father and son.

Francis's heroes typically live on the edge of dangers that would reduce most of us to jelly—dangers to which they are likely to respond with a rare combination of cool wits and sang-froid. And in Francis's fictional universe the opportunities to display their self-effacing, understated heroism abound. A typical Francis mystery unfolds under the shadow of menace and frequently includes one or more scenes of heart-stopping violence. For Francis's view of our world unquestionably includes a disquieting dose of genuine evil. This recognition of evil and of the havoc it wreaks upon bodies and souls testifies directly to what I take to be Francis's deeper concerns, and they amply justify our serious attention.

Evil casts an ominous shadow of danger over most of Francis's mysteries, and the sense of its lurking presence weighs equally upon the hero and the reader. Francis never hesitates to name evil and clearly wants his readers to grasp its true horror. At the same time, he never suggests that the evil, which percolates beneath so many ordinary, apparently peaceful situations, is normal. Pervasive it may sometimes be, but even at its most insidiously pervasive, true evil remains unambiguously aberrant.

None could be less naive than Francis about human vulnerability to temptation and propensity to sin. His novels abound with characters who rarely pass up a near occasion of sin. But he never confuses the ubiquitous manifestations of our fallen condition with genuine evil, and it is striking how often he endows run-of-the-mill hired thugs or petty cheats with some marginally redeeming feature that locates them within the pale of predictable human frailty. Typically, such characters agree to provide information to the hero in return for a payment or inadvertently let drop something about the nature of their bullying assignment that helps the hero to identify their employer, the real villain.

Thus, in Whip Hand, the second Sid Halley novel, the Scottish thugs who have been imported to rough up Sid and his man Friday, Chico, resist the command of a secondary villain to kill Sid and Chico. "Kill him yourself," one retorts, "we're not doing it." And, when Peter Rammileese, the secondary villain, repeats the command, the hired thug continues, "Grow up mon. … We'd be gassed inside five minutes. We've been down here too long. Too many people've seen us. And this laddie, he's won money for every punter in Scotland. We'd be inside in a week." The Scots have enthusiastically showered Sid and Chico with punishing blows, but they draw the line at killing. And, in the end, the passing remark about having been down here too long proves an indispensable link in the chain of information that Sid is piecing together, and that finally enables him to identify the shadowy figure who has set the events in motion.

Time and again, Francis encompasses such figures within the predictable limits of ordinary human nature, which he never romanticizes. True evil, in contrast, exceeds the predictable, which it mocks and threatens. An important feature of Francis's special talent consists in the ability to discriminate between the ordinary and the aberrant, and it is precisely his gift for evoking the ordinary that ultimately permits readers to recognize the full aberrance of evil. Francis's heroes serve as a lens to focus our attention on evil, for, in Francis's fictional universe, evil is always experienced in its full human dimension. It is, in other words, always represented as a deeply disordered personality that commits or orders the commission of actions against others, frequently against the hero himself, although almost as frequently against horses, who represent a moving combination of power and vulnerability.

In Bolt (1986), the ruthless villain kills a succession of racehorses to warn their wealthy, aristocratic owner of her vulnerability—her inability to protect the animals and humans she loves against predatory aggression—and she and Kit, her jockey and the novel's hero, grieve for them as for friends. Kit thinks to himself that, on the scale of world terrorism, the killing of three great horses is a small matter, "but rooted in the same wicked conviction that the path to attaining one's end lay in slaughtering the innocent." In Come to Grief (1995), the third Sid Halley novel, a recklessly ambitious amateur-jockey-turned-talk-show-host fatally maims horses to recover the sense of thrilling speed that he experienced during races. In these crimes we see a cold, intelligent form of violence, worlds removed from the pummeling of the Scottish thugs—and even further removed from the calm accepting intelligence of the victimized horses. In Come to Grief, Sid dashes to Berkshire to help a woman whose colt has just been maimed. When he arrives, everyone but the colt is breathing worry and impatience:

The young horse watched me with calm, bright eyes, unafraid. I stroked my hand down his nose, talking to him quietly. He moved his head upward against the pressure and down again as if nodding, saying hello. I let him wiffle his black lips across my knuckles.

The calm nobility and intelligence of horses runs like a thread through Francis's mysteries. In many, individual horses figure as minor characters in their own right, and each of those we come to know by name has his or her own personality, sometimes willful, sometimes courageous, always distinct. Their palpable reality confirms the essential goodness of God's creation, which evil is ultimately powerless to negate.

The delicate contrast and tension between tenderness and violence marks all of Francis's novels, not simply as a Manichaeism that pits good guys against bad but also as the conflicting tendencies in the human soul. The very heroes who dispatch threatening villains and push themselves and their horses to the limit in pursuit of victory evince a moving sensitivity to the women they love, who themselves embody fierceness as well as warmth. A web of nuanced human relations weaves through each of the novels, but Francis clearly ascribes a special importance to those between fathers and sons. Hot Money (1987), for example, places the relations between Ian Pembroke and his father, Malcolm, stage center, and 10-Lb. Penalty returns to this theme, which dominates the plot.

Indeed, compared to previous Francis novels, 10-Lb. Penalty is remarkably free of mystery, danger, and suspense. To be sure, there are several attempts upon George Julliard's life and several ominous attempts to destroy his rapidly rising political career, but we are rarely in much doubt about who lies behind them and are rarely frightened that they will succeed. Even the novel's representatives of pure evil, A. L. Wyvern and the loathsome, malicious journalist Usher Rudd, never assume the terrifyingly sinister proportions of earlier Francis villains. The true action of 10-Lb. Penalty lies in Ben and George Julliard's coming to know and trust one another and in Ben's growing from a boy into a talented, resourceful, and self-assured man—every inch, if in different guise, his brilliant father's natural heir.

10-Lb. Penalty exudes a gentleness that has been latent throughout Francis's novels, surfacing in specific scenes. It is a mellow book and one that the supercilious might well find too close to the sentimental. But such sentimentality as it contains is tough, not maudlin, and it wonderfully calls attention to the aspects of life Francis demonstrably values. Ben Julliard takes second place to none of Francis's heroes in courage or intelligence, but he is younger and, unlike Sid, who has come up the hard way, he has always had the backing of his father's money. What he has not had is his father's presence, and this permits Francis, in highlighting the arresting similarities between the powerful, successful father and the unfinished son, to emphasize the importance of nature and genes in what any of us become. Without ever suggesting that nature will triumph over outright abuse and extreme deprivation (Ben has always been emotionally and financially cared for), Francis does firmly suggest that character and talent are not gifts that the world bestows. And, although the word never appears in Francis's pages, it is hard for a Christian not to sense that his understanding of nature has as much to do with grace as with mere material life.

Nowhere in his novels does Dick Francis suggest he is a Christian, and indeed there are reasons to suspect that he may not consider himself a believer. Toward the end of Whip Hand, Charles Roland and Sid sit in the library at Aynsford, mulling over the events of the novel. Musing on Sid's victory over the forces of evil, Charles asks Sid if he feels any temptation to gloat. Sid responds with astonishment. What did you do, he asks Charles, when, during the war at sea, you saw your enemy drowning, "Gloat? Push him under?" Charles answers that he took the enemy prisoner, to which Sid rejoins that the life of the corrupt racetrack official he has exposed will be prison enough. But then, Charles asks, "And do you forgive him as well?" Sid tells him not to ask such difficult questions and thinks to himself: "Love thine enemy. Forgive. Forget. I was no sort of Christian, I thought. I could manage not to hate Lucas himself. I didn't think I could forgive; and I would never forget."

But the conclusion of 10-Lb. Penalty does offer a surprisingly Christian image of manliness. Ben, now in his twenties and successful in his own work, simultaneously saves his father from Wyvern's attempt to shoot him and exposes Wyvern's malevolence that has been percolating since his father's first election to Parliament, thereby clearing the way for George Julliard to become prime minister. Father and son stand together. "The next prime minister gripped my hand. I gripped his tight, as if he would give me comfort and security when I needed them badly. I gripped his hand as if I'd been a little boy."

Readers may choose for themselves how much to read into Francis's words, never sure how much he intends us to read into them. But it seems difficult to doubt that a writer of his consummate skill has offered us all of these possibilities without knowing he was doing so. At the very least, we may know that his novels repeatedly and with increasing forthrightness touch upon the central themes of Christianity, and, at the most, we may fairly view them through the lens of Flannery O'Connor's thoughts about writing:

Art is not anything that goes on "among" people, not the art of the novel anyway. It is something that one experiences alone and for the purpose of realizing in a fresh way, through the senses, the mystery of existence. Part of the mystery of existence is sin. When we think about the Crucifixion, we miss the point of it if we don't think about sin.1

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese teaches history, literature, and women's studies at Emory University.

1. Letter to Eileen Hall, March 10, 1956. From A Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor, edited by Sally Fitzgerald (Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 1979).

Copyright © 1997 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail bceditor@BooksAndCulture.com.