Reading and Riding

BONECRACK

by DICK FRANCIS

201 pages. Harper & Row. $5.95.

The often shattering and usually infectious joys of the turf are remarkably difficult to describe or explain, especially to outsiders. One of the very few writers who can do so successfully, appropriately enough, is a 51-year-old ex-jockey named Dick Francis.

Before becoming a writer in 1962, Francis was for some years the best steeplechaser in England, eventually becoming jockey to the Queen Mother. He knows the hedges and hazards, the sites and social slights of British steeplechasing the way a car owner knows the dashboard of his five-year-old sedan. He has used his experiences to produce ten more or less equestrian suspense stories that are also novels of metier and manners. His best books are Dead Cert (the first, written in 1962), Nerve (1964), For Kicks (1965), Odds Against (1966) and Forfeit (1969). At that level he belongs in the company of writers like John Buchan, who created a highly personal genre and then used it, beyond sheer entertainment, to express a lifetime's accumulation of knowledge and affection.

Francis' plots customarily run briskly over a fast, dry track, and Bonecrack, his latest, is no exception. It tells how a member of the European Mafia, with threat of muscle and mayhem, foists his sulky amateur rider-son on a professional British trainer. He orders that the boy is to ride the stable's best horses in a series of important races. The book is not absolutely first-rate Francis. It does not hold a tight enough rein on incredulity (a rare thing for Francis), and its crisis boils up too fast and fizzles out too bloodily (also a rare thing for Francis). But as always, readers are deftly induced to care about the people as well as the horses, and there is a quota of familiar set-piece scenes that Francis' admirers now happily expect. Among them: "the beating" and what might be called the "ride-for-life."

The ride-for-life, of course, is a horsebound version of those great chases across the English countryside in which Buchan heroes, and their heirs and assigns, foiled pursuit in everything from Bentleys to borrowed bicycles. The true Francis classic (Dead Cert), pitted the jockey hero, up on a splendid horse named Admiral, against the forces of darkness who chivvied him about in a swarm of radio taxis. By contrast, Bonecrack's ride is modest. The trainer, galloping prodigally crosscountry on his best racer, tries to head off the sulky boy-jockey from inadvertent assassination by one of his Mafia father's goons.

Crisp Prose. "I was hurting far more than I would have believed possible," the trainer hero of Bonecrack reflects, after being worked over in Chapter I by two mysterious men in masks. The tone is typical of Francis. Though his people are regularly, often bizarrely, set upon by musclemen intent on altering the result of a horse race, their dramatically understated encounters somehow do not seem sadistic. Francis' heroes, among other things, have been hung up to freeze in icy tack rooms (Nerve) and had a broken hand rebroken with a poker (Odds Against). Yet they regularly turn up--all grit and sticking plaster--to ride or retaliate, faster than anyone could have suspected. Their sudden recoveries seem convincing partly because Francis, like all steeplechase jockeys, fell regularly, and knows the pain of riding with assorted broken ribs and collarbones.

Francis has a positive genius for inhabiting the psyche of existential outsiders with small chips on their shoulders and a large resolve never to give in. Most British jockeys are small and underpaid in a flossy, fat social sport where the term "gentleman jockey" had to be coined to designate the rare exception. When that is not enough motivation, Francis throws in a physical handicap, or a grudge against a Victorian parent.

Francis himself stands 5 ft. 8 1/2 in. --tall for a jockey--and has pretty much been a winner ever since he quit school at 15 to ride. He has been a sports columnist, a horse trainer and a flyer, and he now owns a plane-rental service. All these experiences have been tidily folded into his crisp prose.

There is little sign that Francis has exhausted his subject. But if he ever opens a detective agency or joins the British intelligence service, some of the supersleuths of literature will have to tend to their laurels.

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