Dick Francis
Dick Francis was a British crime fiction novelist and former jockey, born on 31 October 1920 in Pembrokeshire.
He was educated at Summer Fields School and Ewell Castle School before building a career as an equestrian and jockey. He later turned to writing, working in English to produce crime fiction that drew on the world he knew from the saddle. He died on 14 February 2010 in Grand Cayman.
Over the course of his career, Francis received a remarkable range of honours from the crime writing community and beyond. He won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Novel, the Gold Dagger, and the Cartier Diamond Dagger. He also received the Grand Master award, the Malice Domestic Award for Lifetime Achievement, and Gumshoe Awards. Outside the literary world, he was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire and elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. His work sat firmly within the crime fiction genre, and that grounding in a specific professional world — the world of horse racing and equestrianism — remained a consistent thread running through what he wrote.
Quotes by Dick Francis
Crime to many is not crime but simply a way of life. If laws are inconvenient, ignore them, they don't apply to you.
Yet all we had was here and now, and here and now was always where the struggle toward goodness had to be fought. Toward virtue, morality, uprightness, order: call it what one liked. A long ever-recurring battle.
The only thing better than getting away with doing a crime was to get someone else convicted for having done it.
It’s difficult to say just where a marriage goes wrong, because the accepted reason often isn’t the real one.
I’d always found goodness more interesting then evil, though I was aware this wasn’t the most general view. To my mind, it took more work and more courage to be good, an opinion continually reinforced by my own shortcomings.
Life has a way of kicking one along like a football, or so I’ve found. Fate had never dealt me personally a particularly easy time, but that was OK, that was normal. Most people, it seemed to me, took their turn to be football. Most survived. Some didn’t.
I looked into his sandy brown eyes, at one with the hair. At the business- like outward presentation of the man who daily printed sneers, innuendo, distrust and spite and spoke without showing a trace of them. ‘Off the record,’ I said,‘bash his face in’.