Shutterbug

By Michael Demarest

REFLEX by Dick Francis

Putnam; 295 pages; $11.95

Dick Francis, 60, says deadpan that his debut as a professional jockey came at the age of five, when an older brother bet him sixpence that he couldn't take their Welsh pony over a hedge while sitting backward in the saddle. After five falls, daring Dick collected. The steeplechase riders he has written about in 21 novels have a lot in common with the young Francis. They are dogged, not necessarily the best, but decent and vulnerable; they eat a lot of mud and get mauled frequently and badly. But they do collect: the bruises, the booty--and the readers.

Jockey Philip Nore, the narrator and protagonist of Reflex, is the most multi-faceted Franciscan hero to date. Though he is passionately devoted to his way of life, the spills and the thrills, he has become increasingly disillusioned with the cheating and corruption he perceives at all levels of the racing world. Nore is a lonely man, with a badly shriveled ego that even his occasional racetrack triumphs cannot plump out. He appears to have no real sense of his own identity.

Nore spent his childhood years being dumped on a variety of kindly people. He does not know who his father was. His mother died of drugs. For one happy period of his childhood, he lived with a couple of male photographers, and became a lifelong camera buff. At one point, he was also left with a racehorse trainer and learned the steeplechasing dodge. "Things had happened to me all my life," he says.

"I'd never gone out looking. I had learned whatever had come my way, whatever was there."

Nore is now 30 and no longer quite the pliable good chap he grew up to be.

The owner and trainer he works for have made him throw too many races, and he has reached the end of his tether. Either he rides to win, he insists, or he will not ride at all.

The decision is taken out of Nore's hands when his dying grandmother persuades him to search for a long-lost half sister. There is also the matter of a well-known racecourse photographer who is killed in a car accident. Nore becomes involved in the violent aftermath of his death. From scraps of film left by the track photographer, the shutterbug-jockey suspects that the dead man had been blackmailing some of the racing world's leading figures. Between falls on the track and a savage attack by two hit men, Nore suffers even more than the normal ration of violence doled out to Dick Francis' heroes.

Though the author generally writes more feelingly about horses than about women, in Reflex he snaps off a sophisticated lady who is both believable and likable. In Clare, a 22-year-old book editor, Nore finds "a feeling of continuity, of belonging." In addition, Clare helps him realize that he has a way with a shutter that is more distinctive by far than his hand with a whip. Lens sana in corpore sano. This is Francis' most complex novel to date. It proves that writers, unlike jockeys, can get better each time around. --By Michael Demarest

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