A BOOST TO THE EGO.

​One of the banes of life when you have gone out on a limb and independently published a book, especially one with a niche market, is the time, trouble and expense you have to commit to in getting it known by the public. If you are famous, infamous or wealthy enough to have staff do the job for you, it is an easier exercise. If you have an agent and a publisher it is easier still. If you are a nobody crying in the wilderness for attention the task becomes more like a quest, similar to ones the knight’s made to the Holy Land to convert people content with their own religion to a religion that made no sense to them. It is a fair, if facetious, analogy, as I can talk up my collection of horse racing short stories but if my audience have no fascination for the subject matter, or a relative with an interest in racing and an upcoming birthday, they will see no sense in buying the book.
A recent reviewer – hence the title of this piece – expressed the quibble that I should have more belief in my writing ability as on the cover I admit that the book is ‘a foolhardy attempt to reflect the beautiful truth of a remarkable sport’. Although it was kind of Peter Magee to argue my case for me I stand by the assertion that it is almost impossible through the medium of fiction to portray an accurate reflection of the sport. The book was described as ‘anything but foolhardy’, which is kind, yet my aim when I began writing the stories – over twenty years ago – was not to reach the core audience for racing based fiction but to be published in magazines read by people outside of the sport so that in a small way I would be promoting horse racing by displaying to readers that the day-to-day of racing is unrelated to what they might find on the pages of a Dick Francis novel or, God forbid, one of the lesser creations penned by people who really should know better. They know who they are.
If I was not foolhardy, I was naïve in thinking I could invent, or reconfigure, a new literary genre – sporting fiction. Dick Francis and others write thrillers, the horse racing aspect is merely the backdrop for plots that I maintain bring no credit to the sport. I wanted to demonstrate to a sceptical reading public that horse racing is not inherently crooked and that its characters are in the main honest, hard-working and very much like most of us in so much that they have the same worries and aspirations. For most jockeys, and no doubt trainers, life is all about feeding the family and maintaining the mortgage. My hope was that the readership would see racing’s foot soldiers as human beings with a great love of the horse. If I am read by those already involved in the day-to-day care and riding of racehorses I will be preaching to the converted.
But as a writer my greatest want is to be read, which is why I have donated copies to libraries where there are vibrant racing communities. As someone who has followed the sport with the devotion of an aesthetic for over fifty years my real desire would be to help in some small way to promote the sport to a wider audience.
The aspect of Peter Magee’s review that I found most interesting was that out of the twenty-five stories that comprise ‘Going To The Last’ his favourite was ‘The Story of H’ a story I wrote as a children’s story for a competition that emphasised it wanted entries that could be described as ‘unusual from the normal child’s reading’. Peter Magee knew I was writing about Foinavon, the children would not. Perhaps that was my mistake. Suffice to say, Peter’s favourite story is not mine. Though I suspect that is always the way of it, even for the great and the good of literature. In fact along with the two stories that are parodies of the racing novels I so detest, ‘The Story of H’ falls a long way short of my more favoured stories in the collection. The stories I am proudest of writing are ‘Yes I Fear He Is. I Fear He Is.’ And ‘Sentiment of Fools’. The former is a pulling together of stories about Arkle, the latter, well it’s based on a true story that perhaps few will remember.
To be truthful the ego boost came not from the review itself but the summary: Twenty-five well-written stories about the glorious sport from an author who knows what he’s talking about.
The collection comprises twenty-five stories. Horse racing is glorious. I am described as an author, and glory be! I know what I am talking about.
What’s not to like?