My dad was 1 of UK's most famous authors - this is why I use his name for my own books

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 best-selling 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.

"I remember one when he had been hunting, in a top hat, and he wrote that he had waded his horse into a river and didn't realise how deep it was so he disappeared completely under the water, and while he went along under the water to the other side, the top hat floated across and as he came up the other side the hat came back onto his head.

"Crazy, but they were written in fun for schoolboys and my saddest thing is that I don't have any of those letters left."

Felix, now 72, adds: "He was absolutely full of wonderful stories. He was a great man and it gives me great joy now writing the 'Dick Francis novels'. It's my choice to write them as such, not the publishers' insistence. He is still as much a part of my books as I still feel a part of the previous ones."

Indeed, his father's voice echoes from the latest novel as its protagonist, a female jockey, is walked around the Aintree racecourse and her trainer boss tells her how to approach the daunting Chair fence.

"Don't hesitate. Chuck your heart over and catch it on the other side," the trainer says.

Felix explains: "That was something I heard my father say to Tommy Stack (twice National Hunt champion jockey and rider for Red Rum's third Grand National win) while we were walking the course at Aintree many years ago."

Felix, who had been an A-level physics teacher and then deputy chairman of a global expedition firm, joined his father in writing after the death of his mother Mary in 2000, and collaborated on four novels before his dad's death in 2010.

But then it had always been, as his mother said, "the family business".

Felix says he grew up in a house where talk at the dinner table would be about the damage a bullet might do to a man's guts rather than the more mundane topics of everyday life.

"I was nine when the first book was published and I just grew up with them, in one of the great fiction factories of the 20th century, and it was great fun," he says.

"Every member of the family's occupation seems to have been included in a book somewhere. I was a physics teacher in Twice Shy; my uncle was a wine importer and that was the basis of Proof; my cousin was an architect and stars in Decider; and my brother was the basis for (ex-jockey and horse transport businessman) Freddie Croft in Driving Force."

Felix was a 17-year-old A-level physics student when he designed the bomb that blew up a plane in Rat Race and his mother Mary, a theatre stage manager, took up flying as research for the same book.

"She only went along for a few lessons," he says. "They told Dad he should come along but he said, 'No'. He had done enough flying in the war. He had flown Spitfires, Wellingtons and Lancasters. People used to ask him if it was dangerous riding over the Grand National fences and he would say, 'At least no one is shooting at you.'

He adds: "Mum took up photography as research for Reflex and became very good. She was very good at everything she took up...with the exception of painting. She wasn't too good at that!

"Stories used to pour out of my father like water off a waterfall and my mother had a great belief in the rhythm of sentences so she would polish the prose. He was Richard, she was Mary. Together they were Dick Francis.

"Dad often said he wanted to have her name on the front covers as well but she wouldn't hear of it. It was a partnership."

As Felix talks in a video call from the family's modern house in a Northamptonshire village, his mother is very much on his mind, having died exactly 25 years before.

"Mum had polio when she was 26, when she was pregnant with my brother, and it left her breathing not great," he says. "That's why they went to live first in Florida and then in the Caribbean.

"My father always said he only ever got drunk twice in his life: Once when the doctors told him his wife was going to die and she was in an iron lung at Neasden isolation hospital, and the other time was six weeks later when they told him that she wasn't. She was a lovely woman."

Richard and Mary published a new book every year from 1962. They would research the next book together as soon as the previous one was published in September before he started to write in January and handed the manuscript to the publishers in May.

Felix now follows a similar process which means he started work this month on the plot for his next book - a daunting process.

"The pressure comes on and at Christmas I am like a tiger with toothache because that is always panic time. There is nothing better than having the idea for the next book before you have finished the previous one."

That's what happened for his 2021 book Iced, he says, after he and wife Debbie were invited to the White Turf frozen lake track at St Moritz in February 2019 while he was still writing Guilty, Not Guilty and they ended up watching the "Grand National" toboggan race at the nearby Cresta Run ice track.

He recalls: "My wife and I went to have a coffee, sitting all wrapped up in the sunshine but freezing cold and I said, 'How about a jockey who is forced to retire because of his problem with weight and drinking, but he misses the adrenalin rush so he starts to race the Cresta Run - and then racing comes tofollow him because there is racing on thefrozen lake and he gets drawn into a world he's been trying to leave?'

With 57 Dick Francis novels already in print, the challenge always for Felix is to come up with plots not used before.

His latest is the seventh involving investigator Sid Halley and only the second to be written from the viewpoint of a femaleprotagonist - Irish jockey Imogen Duffy who is being stalked by her abusive ex-partner.

"All too often on the news we hear of people being murdered by coercive and controlling partners," says Felix. "On average, two women a week are murdered by an ex or current intimate partner and the number climbs to 30 a week in America so it seemed to be something I should look at."

Felix, of course, no longer has his father's knowledge of racing to fall back on as the backdrop to the stories, though he can and does consult with his horse trainer brother. He also doesn't ride himself.

His ambition as a boy to join the RAF was thwarted by hip problems that put him in hospital for many months and which have left him with one leg shorter than the other and restricted movement in his left hip.

"The truth is I cannot spread my knees wide enough to sit astride a horse and even though I did once ride side saddle I decided that that was a mug's game," he says. He also never saw his father ride as a professional jockey, since he retired when Felix was four.

"The only film I have got of him is that ill-fated 1956 Grand National when Devon Loch collapses," he says.

But Felix obviously spent his childhood around jockeys, and watched his father ride out for trainer neighbour Frank Cundell. What he did inherit from his father was a great imagination.

He says: "I used to teach A-level physics and I used to say to my students when they started the course, 'Whereas geography is the study of the seen world, physics is the study of the unseen world. It is the study of the great invisibilities of life.'

"We can't see all sorts of things but we know they exist and so I always feel physicists need to have a great imagination."

With that in mind, he believes he still has plenty of plot ideas left in him

So what about one where the nation's favourite royal horse owner is about to win her first ever Grand National with her horse in an unbeatable position, but it suddenly jumps a non-existent fence and collapses in a heap?

Felix smiles again. "I have included a few strange coincidences in my books," he says, "but I think a plot where something like that happens would be pushing the boundaries of fiction just too far."

Dark Horse: A Dick Francis Novel, by Felix Francis (Zaffre Books, £20) is out now; An evening with Felix Francis takes place this Thursday at The Mad Hatters Bookshop in Burford, tickets available from madhatterbookshop.co.uk