Don’t do it!
Wendy Doniger
- Field of 13 by Dick Francis
Joseph, 273 pp, £16.99, September 1998, ISBN 0 7181 4351 5
Any Dick Francis novel about horses and crime satisfies my definition of a myth: like a myth, it is one of a corpus of interrelated stories (most, though not all, about horses, and many about an ex-jockey named Sid Halley) held sacred by a group (Dick Francis fans, or Franciscans of a sort, Francisfans, who recognise one another, like ((Star)) Trekkies, across several continents, without benefit of secret handshake or decoder ring) over a period of time punctuated by ritual events: once a year since 1962, when, after a long career as a champion National Hunt jockey, he published his first novel, Dead Cert, we have celebrated the new Francis novel.
You are not logged in
- If you have already registered please login here
- If you are using the site for the first time please register here
- If you would like access to all 12,000 articles subscribe here
- Institutions or university library users please login here
- Learn more about our institutional subscriptions here
Vol. 20 No. 20 · 15 October 1998 » Wendy Doniger » Don’t do it! (print version)
page 37 | 1820 words