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BOOK REVIEW Other people have tried novels in a similar vein but not succeeded as wildly; what do you think is the Francis secret? The main characters are people that the readers like and care about. If you don't care, you probably won't finish the book. The reader gets inside the main character's head because it's written in first person. The character has to go on a journey, to be a different person at the end than at the beginning. The characters are the sort of people readers would like to be: courageous, not always but overall, and my father always believed that loyalty was the greatest attribute a man could have, so my characters are loyal. They all have the attributes that readers would like to see in themselves. I'd like to think they're like me but younger and fitter and that they do the things I'd love to do. I had a friend who asked, "What happens to Geoffrey at the end of Silks?" I said, "That's a difficult question because Geoffrey doesn't exist. What would you like to happen?" He said, "No, what really happens?" It ends in a place where he could get into a lot of trouble. I thought, "I really don't want to tell him that the character is made up." I said, "Well, he got off, and he wasn't persecuted." He said, "How did he manage that?" People believe in who you write about, and that's a wonderful thing. How or when do you devise the plots? Quite a lot when I'm driving, I'm just thinking. Mostly I'm adapting real-life situations to things I can do in the book. I get an idea here, an idea there. It's not always that easy. People say, "What is more important, plot or character?" They're both important. What is more important, the bride or groom? You need both for marriage. The plots slowly develop. I expand the schemes and hope like hell things come to mind while writing. I don't always know where it's going when I start. I know roughly what happens but not exactly. Why do you think the racing world is so ripe for nefarious characters? Is it really seedy? Racing lends itself uniquely among sports. Certainly in this country it's a sport for everyone. The most famous breeder is the Queen, then you have the Arab sheiks, the landed gentry. And yet anyone goes in to gamble, across the whole spectrum of financial and social classes. There's lots of money involved, and anytime there's a lot of money, people will always be trying to extract it by illegal means. People like to believe racing has a shady side, though it has less of a shady side than I tend to give it. A lot of effort goes into keeping it clean, so much so that writing books about it has become almost impossible to think up something the authorities wouldn't already be testing for. What's the hardest part of creating your novels? Making them exciting at the end. The last thing you want is people shutting book saying, "Oh, that was bit of a fix," or, "You signal the villain early on, and it's not a surprise." Any author who says he doesn't look at reviews is telling you lies. And there's nothing better than hearing that the ending is brilliant. Why do these characters always have to take the law into their own hands? Do you have a jaded opinion of law enforcement? I generally write about characters who are not members of the establishment. Usually my characters are reluctant investigators. They don't even know at the beginning what they're investigating. They need to find out what they're investigating in order to find out who did it, and I find that exciting. I don't have a really jaundiced look of law enforcement, do I? You've got to have a story. Otherwise, you won't have a book. I'm always on the lookout for stories. Given the ending of Refusal, I'm guessing we see Sid return again. Are you already at work on the next book? I'm not writing about Sid at the moment, but a younger man who is with the British horse racing authority. [Sid] will be back again for a sixth outing, but not just yet. I'm 12,000 words into book 9, which will be out this time next year. I have a contract after that and hope for more in due course. If I go on until I'm 80, that will be another 20 books. But I won't get to 39; I didn't start soon enough. C H RO N O F H O R S E .CO M W INTER 2013 91

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