The Beaten Track

By Paul Gray

HIGH STAKES by DICK FRANCIS 201 pages. Harper & Row. $7.95.

Ross Macdonald has his Southern California, Simenon his Paris. In much the same way, and with comparable surety, Author Dick Francis, 55, has made the turf his own. An ex-jockey and veteran of 2,300 steeplechases, Francis has produced a string of suspense novels (Blood Sport, Odds Against) set in the alternately grand and seedy world of British racing--where society's highest and lowest commingle and it is sometimes hard to tell which is which.

High Stakes, the author's 16th book, is built out of elements by now familiar to Francis addicts--and evidently none the less gripping for wear. This novel of fers a softspoken, faintly eccentric hero and two villains of inexhaustible malignity. The love interest is a well-manicured miss of the type that used to be brought home to mother. There is a large supporting cast of horses.

Horseshoe Hard. Steven Scott, 35, is a wealthy inventor of children's toys who has casually put some of his profits into racing. He discovers that Jody Leeds, his trainer, and Bookmaker Ganser Mays have bilked him out of -L-35,000. Unfortunately, Scott cannot prove to anyone's satisfaction but his own that his horses always lose when he places the largest bets on them, and Leeds threatens to sue for slander if this accusation is ever breathed aloud.

In trying to foil and unmask the scheming bookie and trainer, Scott is convincingly roughed up and nearly loses both his Lamborghini and his life. And he pulls off an elaborately improbable shell game involving not two but three nearly identical black horses.

As is his custom, the author throws in some technical arcana from a field unrelated to racing -- in this case, the design and tooling of toys. If Scott's marvelously complex and intriguing inventions for children do not exist, they ought to. The customary Francis love scene is oddly old-fashioned and straightforwardly sentimental, but about his own chief love the man is hard as a horseshoe. "It's no good expecting fairy-tale endings, in racing," he writes as High Stakes crosses the finish. May be not. But there are those who expect the annual Dick Francis entry as eagerly as they await the Grand National or the call to the post at Churchill Downs. Paul Gray

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