Forfeit
by Dick Francis
Summary
James Tyrone writes for the Sunday Blaze, racing journalism's respectable end, and the novel opens with a colleague going out a window: Bert Chekov, the tipster whose column had lately developed a pattern, ante post certainties trumpeted for weeks that quietly failed to start on race day, leaving the bookmakers holding a fortune in forfeited bets. Drunk, Chekov had shouted something to Tyrone about being owned; sober, he is dead on the pavement, and Tyrone starts pulling the thread.
The scheme he uncovers is Francis at his most elegant: a betting shop magnate who has industrialised the non runner, buying influence over owners and journalists so that heavily backed favourites are scratched late, the ante post money forfeit by rule, no fixed race required, corruption conducted entirely through paperwork and pressure. The pressure, as Tyrone gets close, becomes the personal kind, and here the book carries its second, extraordinary weight: Tyrone's wife Elizabeth is paralysed by polio, alive by grace of a breathing pump, and everything he does, the investigation, the money worries, the affair he conducts with self lacerating honesty, happens inside the arithmetic of her care. When the villains understand his one vulnerability, the machine that breathes for her, the thriller's stakes arrive somewhere the genre almost never goes.
The riding scenes are earned the usual way, and the climax runs through a fog bound racecourse with everything in the balance.
Around two hundred and forty pages.
Best for readers who want Francis past the formula's reputation, the racing thriller carrying a marriage of terrible tenderness at its centre.
Historical Context & Significance
Forfeit won the Edgar for Best Novel in 1970, the first of an eventual three for Dick Francis, a total James Lee Burke has since equalled, and the book's authority was autobiographical twice over: Francis had been champion jumps jockey and the Queen Mother's rider before the fall that ended his career, and then spent sixteen years as racing correspondent for the Sunday Express, the trade Tyrone works; the wife kept alive by machinery drew directly on his own wife Mary's life: she had contracted polio while pregnant with their first child, and she was, by her husband's own acknowledgment, his full research partner across the whole shelf.
The Edgar establishment adopted him permanently: Whip Hand and Come to Grief completed the treble, both on this list, and the Grand Master title followed.
Forty odd novels, one a year with the reliability of a race calendar, made Francis a fixture of the bestseller lists; the connoisseurs' consensus keeps this early, heaviest book at or near the top.