Come to Grief
by Dick Francis
Summary
Sid Halley has taken on aristocrats, syndicates and torturers, and this book hands him the case that costs the most: the evidence, assembled reluctantly and against his own heart, that the man mutilating champion ponies across England, lopping the off fore foot with something like shears, by moonlight, for no gain anyone can name, is Ellis Quint, ex jockey, beloved television presenter, national charmer, and Sid's best friend.
Francis opens after the accusation has been made, with Quint charged and the country furious, at Sid: the columns call him jealous, the public mail runs vicious, Quint's father is issuing threats with a lunatic edge, and the friendly witnesses are being buttonholed one by one. The novel then runs both directions at once, backward through the investigation that led Sid to Ellis, the maimed ponies, the pattern only he would credit, the child whose beloved colt was the case's first heartbreak, and forward through the trial's approach, as the machinery of celebrity sets about grinding the accuser. The mirroring is the book's quiet engine, the amputations echoing Sid's own lost hand, one maimed man reading another, and the question underneath is the one Francis kept returning to: what integrity costs when the price is exacted publicly, friend by friend.
The resolution arrives through the oldest Francis currency, physical courage exercised at close range, and the last pages settle the friendship's account without softening it.
Around three hundred and twenty pages.
Best for readers who want the Francis formula at its most morally loaded, the thriller as a study of accusation, celebrity and the loneliness of being right.
Historical Context & Significance
Come to Grief won the Edgar for Best Novel in 1996, completing a treble: Dick Francis's third Best Novel Edgar, at the time the only writer with three, and the second for Sid Halley, the only character to win the award twice, the maimed jockey having carried Whip Hand to the prize fifteen years earlier.
The book's celebrity monster read topically then and reads more so now, the beloved television face shielded by public adoration while the whistleblower absorbs the punishment, and Francis, television's own favourite racing personality, wrote the machinery from inside knowledge.
The MWA named him a Grand Master the same year; the CWA's Cartier Diamond Dagger and a CBE eventually rounded the set. After Mary Francis's death in 2000 the books paused and returned as collaborations with his son Felix, Halley himself handed on into the continuation volumes; the treble stands as the family firm's monument.