AustLit

Editor's preface: 'Nat Gould was the Dick Francis of his time. From 1890 until his death in 1919, he produced 150 novels which sold in excess of 30 million copies. Every one featured racing in some form or another - although not all were thrillers - and Gould was widely referred to as the 'Prince of Sporting Novelists'. The Times called him 'the most successful writer of best-sellers' and said that any newspaper serialising one of his stories 'could promise itself an increased circulation of 100,000 copies a day'.

By a curious twist of fate, Gould took the opposite route to success from his contemporary, Guy Boothby, publishing his first book, A Double Event, in Australia in 1890. He had begun his career as a reporter on a small English newspaper, but after six unspectacular years sailed for Australia, where he joined the Brisbane Daily Telegraph and became a racing journalist. The excitement and intrigue of horse racing at once caught his imagination, and the raw material which he collected from the Australian courses became the basis for one best-seller after another. Before the end of the century, however, he returned home to England and, switching to tales of the English Turf, continued to enjoy a huge success right up to his death and for some years thereafter, thanks to the twenty-odd unpublished manuscripts that he left among his papers. He earned a fortune from his books, but left little more than £7,000 in his will.

Although Nat Gould's name is still familiar today, his books are now more collected than read. Curiously, he wrote very few short stories and finding one for this collection has been no easy task. In the end I have plumped for one of the series he wrote for the Daily Graphic around the turn of the century, about Valentine Martyn, the Race-Course Detective. Martyn is noteworthy as being the first Turf sleuth in literature.'