Why did you become a writer?
 

It was totally by accident.

Shattered, published in 2000, was my father’s thirty-ninth mystery book and he announced that it would be his last. It was well named, he was tired, 80 years old, and he was retiring. And that, everyone thought, would be that.

But everyone was wrong.

Five years later I had lunch with his literary agent.

“We have a problem,” said the agent. “All your father’s books will soon go out of print.”

A problem indeed.

“It’s not that the stories aren’t good enough,” he explained. “It’s just that, after five years with no published novel, people are forgetting. What we require is a new Dick Francis hardback.”

He must be mad, I thought. My father was now 85 and he could hardly remember what he’d had for breakfast, let alone enough to write a novel. I shook my head.

“What I’m actually asking,” the agent went on, “is your permission to ask an established crime-fiction author to write a ‘Dick Francis’ novel. Just to stimulate sales of the backlist.”

Well, I must have had a few glasses of red wine by this stage because I jumped straight in.

“Before you ask anyone else,” I said to him, “I would like to have a go first.”

I had written parts of the Dick Francis books for years – all the scientific bits. I designed the remote-controlled bomb that blew up a light aircraft in Rat Race and created the computer program in Twice Shy. I had even penned the last third of Shattered when my father was clearly struggling. Surely I could have a go at a complete novel?

Thankfully the agent didn’t roll his eyes at my foolishness. He simply told me to go home and write the first few chapters and then we would see, quite expecting to get my permission for his scheme when my own attempts failed.

Eight weeks later I presented my chapters and, to my delight, he loved them and told me to get on and finish it.

Under Orders was published in September 2006. I argued that, in order to stimulate sales in the Dick Francis backlist, it had to have the name ‘Dick Francis’ alone on the cover. I knew it would sell, because of that name, but I was worried that the reviews would all say that Dick had lost his touch. But they didn’t. Instead, they all claimed that “The Master is Back.”

The book went to the top of the bestseller lists on both sides of the Atlantic and there was a clamour from the publishers for another one, and hence, quite suddenly, I became a full-time writer. My first novel had been intended only to help sell my father’s previous stories but it developed a life of its own, and I’ve now written 15 of them in 15 years, with no end in sight.

What’s a typical day for you look like?
 

I write between September and March. April & May is for editing and proof reading. June and July are for holidays and rest, and August is for planning and research for the next story. On a good day, I get to my office soon after nine o’clock and read through what I had written the day before continuing, trying to complete 1000 new words in the day, something that usually keeps me busy until the end of the afternoon. Then it’s time for a glass of wine and a relaxing evening. Of course it doesn’t always work out that easily, with events, book promotion, family and friends filling far too much of my time. I try to keep my diary as empty as possible, especially in January and February but, even so, it is always a struggle.

Where do you write?
 

Wherever I can. I use a laptop computer and I can even write on trains and planes provided I have a table and no one around me is talking loudly. I prefer silence and I couldn’t write a single word with music playing in the background. I think I do my best work at home in the quiet of my office but I also go away to the sun in January for 12 days to write solidly and break the back of the novel – at least I hope so.

What’s your advice to aspiring writers?
 

Don’t give up, don’t give up, and don’t give up!

Write to entertain. If your work doesn’t entertain you, then it won’t entertain anyone else.

Make your readers care about what happens to the people in the story as the book progresses. In doing so you will need to take your characters on a journey of discovery, to make them change and evolve as a result of events. If your readers don’t care, they will put the book down and never bother to pick it up again.

Don’t be afraid to write emotion – I make myself cry at times – why not, if you want your words to have the same effect on others?

Don’t try and put too much unnecessary detail into your prose – allow your readers to create their own mental image of the setting. Dialogue should be short and snappy, rather than expansive and flowery. Speak it out and listen to yourself as if you are overhearing a conversation between your characters.

And, most importantly of all, ask someone else to read what you’ve written out loud to you as you go along. My wife does it for me and yes, if it sounds like rubbish, it is.

What are you working on next?
 

Novel number 16. Thinking up a new story is the most difficult part. After 54 ‘Dick Francis’ books one might believe that all angles of skulduggery in horse racing have been covered. At times it feels like it even to me. But then a kernel of an idea floats into my brain – I hope – and it’s time again to hide myself away for the next six months.

People ask me if I enjoy writing. I suppose I do, but I enjoy having finished a novel far more. It’s a very happy day for me when I finally press ‘send’ to email the finished manuscript to my publisher.