Dick Francis: Blood Sport

The character of David Cleveland wasn't in Blood Sport - he was in Slay-Ride.

In the book of Blood Sport, David Cleveland is called Gene Hawkins.

I've never seen this production, so I can't say how faithful the story of the series was to Dick Francis's book - but I can tell you that they have put the wrong lead character in the story.

I'm not a fan of racing - but Dick Francis did write some good books on the subject - mostly about various racing scams.

Some seemed to have little to do with racing on the surface - the majority of the characters through whose eyes the stories are told are jockeys or trainers - somebody dies and the jockey or trainer turns detective to get to the bottom - putting their own life in danger.

It seems like producers once envisioned a longer series of movies sourced from Dick Francis novels, since they called this part of "The Dick Francis Mysteries", but in the end they only made three.

They made the decision to use only one character as the hero for all three books, allowing them to stick with the wonderful Ian McShane, at that time lately of his popular Lovejoy shows ... which were themselves based on a series of novels about an antiques "divvy".

This book replaces a government agent with a Jockey Club investigator, and generally follows the course of the book, although they never explain the objective of the criminal conspiracy as well as the book did. While many details are changed, there are quite a few characters and scenes that at least remind you of the book. Ian McShane is good, as always.

As a fan of the Dick Francis novels, I was pleased to see that the film version of one of them was to be shown on Cable TV. Unfortunately, the locations had been changed and although the story was vaguely recognisable, the excitement and suspense of the novel was completely missing. Even Ian McShane, who I like as the character Lovejoy, was not at his best and the rest of the cast were unknown to me. A very disappointing experience.

I love Dick Francis novels, so I was glad to see them coming out in movies, until I saw the movies. (I've seen Blood Sport and In the Frame) I think the movies have lost the depth and uniqueness of the novels. Part of the problem is that they wanted to keep the same character in multiple stories, so they needed a more generic character. I think also, they were trying to make something that would fit into the television time frame, so they had to simplify. Unfortunately, when they simplified, they tossed out important characters that helped make the stories great. And changing the location of In the Frame from Australia to Germany didn't help either. I would not recommend the movies. Read the books instead.