My father is still very much a part of these books

As bestselling crime author Felix Francis publishes his brilliant new racing thriller, Dark Horse, he reveals the continued inspiration of late novelist and champion jockey Dick Francis, who reserved his very best stories for his young sons

- By Martin Phillips

CHAMPION JOCKEY: Dick rides late Queen Mother's M'as-Tu-Vu

FELIX Francis fixes me with a broad smile. "I always say fact is stranger than fiction," he says. It's quite an admission from one of the most successful crime fiction writers of the 21st century.

But when you consider his father was bestselling novelist “Dick” Francis, the late Queen Mother’s former jockey whose horse Devon Loch inexplicably belly-flopped when leading by five lengths in the run-in for the 1956 Grand National, he surely has a point.

It’s just a shame some of his father’s strangest fiction never survived in print to challenge the theory.

With the release of the 57th Dick Francis novel, Dark Horse — the 19th of the canon written by Felix — the author reveals to the Daily Express how his father’s most imaginative stories were reserved for his young sons.

Felix explains how his dad, then a Sunday Express columnist after retiring as a National Hunt Jockey, and with his first successful novel Dead Cert and more than four others already under his belt, would regularly write flights of fancy to him and his older brother Merrick while they were at boarding school.

Every Sunday one would receive a typed letter, and the other the carbon copy, with their name handwritten at the top and signed “Love Pop”. And every week their father would alternate who got the typed original.

“He never forgot which of us was due the carbon copy,” says Felix, who will be speaking about his new novel and his memories of his father at The Mad Hatters Bookshop in Burford, Oxfordshire, on Thursday.

“They used to start with the things he had been doing in the week and then they would go into the craziest stories.