It’s the birthday of Dick Francis (1920-2010, #nicelonglife), who not only wrote 42 bestselling crime novels but is the only author I can think of who had a successful career as a steeplechase jockey. (Besides Jane Austen.)

Francis was born in the village of Lawrenny, Wales, and grew to the robust size of five foot eight and 140 pounds, evidently ideal for a jump jockey. His father was a steeplechase rider as well, and Francis followed in his father’s hoof prints and went professional at age 28. He rode the Queen’s horses trained by Peter Cazalet, the royal trainer, from 1953-1957. In 1956, he had a disastrous incident while riding the Queen Mother’s horse: the horse mysteriously collapsed fifty yards from the finish line. To this day no one knows why the horse collapsed, though one theory, I am sorry to report, involves the horse farting. (That doesn’t seem like something the Queen Mother’s horse should do.) The next year, Francis, who’d suffered many jockey-related injuries, was let go at the age of 36.

Fortunately, Francis had married Mary Brenchley, an extremely bright and well educated woman, in 1947. (Francis himself had been a lackluster student with extremely poor attendance and dropped out at 15.) With Mary’s help—though no one knows to what exact degree—Francis began writing mysteries, though first he wrote The Sport of Queens: The Autobiography of Dick Francis (1957). His first novel was Dead Cert (1962) and featured Alan York, an amateur jockey. Most of his mysteries that followed also featured jockeys, horse trainers, breeders, and like that. His main characters were usually men of great character and secret torment. The Queen Mother herself was a huge fan.

Francis and his wife were married for 53 years and collaborated closely on all his books until her death in 2000; Francis eventually teamed up with one of his sons to write several more. The sons said that Francis and his wife worked together like “Siamese twins conjoined at the pencil.” Francis died at 89 in the Cayman Islands, where he and his wife had often gone.

Have a drippy, spooky, chocolate-filled Halloween and stay scrupulously honest to the data.