Dead Cert.

FRANCIS, Dick.

$1,600.00

Item Number: 144334

London: Michael Joseph, 1962.

First edition of the author’s first novel. Octavo, original cloth. Near fine in a very good dust jacket. Jacket design by Trevor Denning.

"A chance encounter with a literary agent led to his writing The Sport of Queens, published the year after he retired. Emboldened by its success (and further motivated by his paltry wages as a journalist), he began writing Dead Cert. Drawing on his experiences as a jockey and his intimate knowledge of the racetrack crowd — from aristocratic owners to Cockney stable boys — the novel contained all the elements that readers would come to relish from a Dick Francis thriller. There was the pounding excitement of a race, the aura of the gentry at play, the sweaty smells from the stables out back, an appreciation for the regal beauty and unique personality of a thoroughbred — and enough sadistic violence to man and beast to satisfy the bloodthirsty" (The New York Times). "Right from the start, with Dead Cert in 1962, the Dick Francis thriller showed a mastery of lean, witty genre prose reminiscent -- sometimes to the point of comic parody -- of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. It was an American style that many clever people in England had attempted to reproduce without much success, and it was a wonder how a barely educated former jump jockey was able to do the trick with such effortless ease" (The Guardian). Dead Cert was featured in the 2007 book 100 Must-Read Crime Novels and was filmed by Tony Richardson in 1974.