| # | Fact |
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| 1 | Francis's novel Whip Hand won both the Gold Dagger Award and the Edgar Award for Best Novel. It is one of only two novels to do so. The other is The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John Le Carre. |
| 2 | Dick Francis was the son of George Vincent Francis and Catherine Mary (maiden name, Thomas) Francis. His father and grandfather were both horsemen - his father a professional steeplechase jockey and a stable manager - and Dick was riding from the age of 5. |
| 3 | Dick Francis began riding show horses at the age of 12 and always aspired to be a jockey. |
| 4 | Like his character Sid Halley, Dick Francis dropped out of high school at the age of 15. |
| 5 | He served as a pilot in the Royal Air Force during World War II. His wife Mary, years later, also learned to fly. Their expertise is evident in the 1966 novel "Flying Finish.". |
| 6 | In 1946, he made his debut as an amateur jockey and, in 1948, turned professional. |
| 7 | In 1947, he married Mary Brenchley, a former publisher's reader; she helped editorially on all his books. |
| 8 | At the peak of his career, Francis rode in as many as 400 races a year. He was ranked among the top jockeys in Great Britain in every one of the 10 years that he rode. |
| 9 | In 1954, he began riding the Thoroughbred horses of Queen Elizabeth II in races at many racetracks. "Queen's Jockey" is a prestigious occupation. |
| 10 | In 1957, at the age of 36, he retired at the top of his profession. Many of his characters are jockeys who are approaching the mid-30s and fearing retirement, or ex-jockeys who remember that fear and wish they could keep racing. |
| 11 | In 1957, Francis went to work as a racing correspondent for The London Sunday Express, a newspaper where he worked for 16 years. |
| 12 | He wrote an autobiography, "The Sport of Queens," with the help of his wife Mary, refusing to employ a ghostwriter; it was published in 1957. |
| 13 | From 1973 to 1974, Francis was the Chairman of the prestigious Crime Writers' Association. |
| 14 | Dick and Mary had two sons, Merrick and Felix (born 1953). Merrick owns Lambourn Racehorse Transport Ltd, which transports many of the horses of Lambourn, England; it is the largest horse transport business in Europe (as of the late 2000s), and he has trained horses, as well. |
| 15 | Dick Francis has received numerous awards including the Silver Dagger award from Britain's Crime Writers Association for "For Kicks," the Gold Dagger award for "Whip Hand," the Diamond Dagger award in 1990, and three Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Allan Poe Awards, for "Forfeit," "Whip Hand," and "Come to Grief," as well as the Edgar Award for Grand Master in 1996. |
| 16 | In his biography of Dick Francis, Graham Lord alleges that Dick's wife, Mary, was the main writer of the books, on the grounds that Dick's poor educational background would preclude him from writing so eloquently. Dick and Mary worked as a team: Dick devised the plots and wrote a first draft and Mary then improved the grammar in places. Mary also did a lot of the non-horseracing research for the books: she learned to paint for "In The Frame", she learned to fly and ran an air taxi company for "Flying Finish" and "Rat Race", and she became a proficient photographer for "Reflex". |
| 17 | Talking after the death of Dick Francis, his son Felix said about the rumours that his mother was the real author of the books: "It was the worst-kept secret in publishing. Dick Francis was *always* known by all the publishers to be two people. My mother always called my father Richard. And to me, my father was Richard and my mother was Mary, and together they were Dick. Was it Mary or was it Dick who did it? Well it was neither - they did it together. Everyone knew that - there was no mystery, no hoodwinking.". |
| 18 | The events in the lives of some of his characters were based on his own experiences and those of his family. In "Knockdown", Jonah Dereham suffers from a dislocating shoulder, something from which Dick Francis suffered after he was thrown from a horse during a race. In "Forfeit", James Tyrone's wife is crippled with polio, with which Dick Francis's wife Mary was afflicted following the birth of her first child. In "Twice Shy", Jonathan Derry is a physics teacher, as was Felix Francis, Dick Francis's younger son. In "Driving Force", Freddie Croft runs a horse transport business, which Merrick Francis, Dick Francis's elder son, used to do. |
| 19 | He was awarded the C.B.E. (Commander of Order of the British Empire) in the 2000 Queen's Birthday Honors List for his services to literature. |
$1.2 Million
