Doped: The Real Life Story of the 1960s Racehorse Doping Gang - Softcover

""Doped "superbly evokes a lost world of seedy glamour when spivs, racketeers and glamour pusses rubbed shoulders with aristocratic high-rollers. It would make a fantastic film." --"Independent" "Impeccably-researched and furiously-paced . . . unputdownable . . . a breathless story of greed and corruption that shocked the nation." --Sport magazine "Doped superbly evokes a lost world of seedy glamour when spivs, racketeers and glamour pusses rubbed shoulders with aristocratic high-rollers. It would make a fantastic film." --Independent "A marvellous evocation of the period with late night stable visits by dopers, Soho gangsters, milk bars and Ford Zephyrs." --Sunday Times

Doped is the gripping true-story racing thriller set in Britain in the 1950s and early 1960s. Combining a potent mix of horseracing, drugs, sex, class, crime, gambling and the monarchy, it tells the true story of one of the biggest doping scandals in British racing history. In March 1962 an audacious attempt to nobble one of the royal horses alerted police to a well organised band of racecourse criminals, backed by murderous London gangsters. The subsequent Flying Squad pursuit of the gang brought the quaintly deferential world of racing into sharp conflict with the harsher realities of the 'You've Never Had It So Good' era. This also coincided with the birth of the annual Dick Francis novel. The cast of characters is headed by William Roper, a debonair ex RAF Sergeant turned oddsmaker. His team included an ex jockey, numerous underpaid stable lads, an upper class gambling addict and a violent professional gangster who went on to face charges with the Kray twins in 1969. But the most fascinating member of Roper's firm was a beautiful and self-possessed young Swiss woman called Micheline Lugeon who became the bookmaker's lover and mistress. Short-listed for the 2013 William Hill Sports Book of the Year award.