Whip Hand
by Dick Francis
Summary
Sid Halley was champion jockey until a fall and a horse's hooves destroyed his left hand, and the melancholy engineering of his life since, a myoelectric prosthesis, an investigator's practice, a divorce that still bleeds, makes him the most interior of Francis's heroes. The book hands him four cases that braid: a trainer's wife, frightened, begs him to find out why her husband's brilliant two year olds keep developing heart murmurs as three year olds; the Jockey Club asks him to vet the syndicates buying into racing, and the vetting turns up a fixer with friends; his former father in law, the book's finest relationship, sets him after a conman fleecing Sid's ex wife; and someone with resources starts arranging for Sid Halley to stop.
The engine is the mares case, which resolves into the series' most elegant villainy, sabotage by biology, undetectable by any dope test, and the pressure applied to Sid runs at the book's true theme: a man with one hand and a reconstructed life calculating exactly how much more he can afford to lose, and choosing, in the novel's central scene of moral arithmetic, to proceed anyway. Francis writes courage from inside better than anyone in the genre, precisely because his heroes itemise the cost first.
The climax collects every strand in a single reckoning, and the quiet last pages, Sid and the machinery of his hand, close on the theme rather than the plot.
Around three hundred pages.
Best for readers who want Francis's deepest book, the racing thriller as a study of damage refusing to be the whole story.
Historical Context & Significance
Whip Hand won the Edgar for Best Novel in 1981 and the CWA Gold Dagger for 1979, the first book to take the top American and British crime prizes together since le Carré's Spy, a double that marked it, by the profession's own vote, as the peak of the Francis shelf; his third Edgar overall would follow with Come to Grief, a hat trick only James Lee Burke has since matched, and Sid Halley the character carrying two of the three.
Halley had been created for Odds Against and revived here after fourteen years, partly at television's prompting, the Mike Gwilym series The Racing Game airing as the book appeared; Francis returned to him twice more across the decades, the maimed champion becoming the series inside the series.
The Francis operation itself, forty years of annual bestsellers, Mary Francis's research partnership acknowledged late, career honors on both sides of the Atlantic, treats this book as its exhibit A: the one the committees, rather than the market, keep electing.