On IMDb, it says he was a ranch kid. “The son of cattle ranchers Bud and Ruth, Reno had been riding horses since he could walk. This experience qualified him for his role…, which he tried out for when his mother learned of the open audition.”
He definitely could ride… I can honestly say I’ve never ridden that fast on any horse.
I think they had to use a younger (smaller) Alec because the Black Stallion was supposed to be HUGE. And Cass Ole was definitely not huge.
As an aside I got to clean his stall once at the Washington International. It’s a long story but I was 18 and thrilled at the time. 
That seems like sort of flawed logic if that was the reason, given the relatively small percentage of people who would have known from the books that the horse was supposed to be huge.
Even if they hadn’t read the books and known The Black was huge an older (and presumably taller) Alec would
have looked a bit ridiculous on Cass Ole.
I quite like my logic, thanks.
IIRC it was at least implied Alec was high school age. Which fits with my (vague) recollection he was starting college in Son of the Black Stallion. Now you all have done. I’m going to have start rereading them.
Side note, while my paperback childhood BS books fell apart long ago with re-reading. I still have a few of my moms BS childhood hard copies and treasure them.
I read every one of the Black Stallion books (from the public library) until the Everglades one. That one was so over-the-top out-there, in no way consistent with the previous Black Stallion books, that I was out on it after that.
I looked up some wiki on the series and Farley. Had not realized that the first Black Stallion was published in 1941. It would have been written before the U.S. entered WWII, especially with the long publishing cycle in those days.
The entire series, as it is offered to the public, is not the consistent storyline as we know series today. Some of the books aren’t about The Black at all, even though they are included in the series. “The Horse Tamer” was a life-changing book for me.
And there are definitely some continuity issues with some of the books. But they were published years apart, so perhaps expectations were different at the time.
Farley (1915-1989) was writing the series for 42 years, from the time he was in high school, publishing the first book while he was still in college, until 7 years before his death in 1989 aged 74. Most of the early books, through the 50’s and early 60’s, were immersed in the racing industry as it was then.
During the second half of the 60’s, when Farley was in his late 40’s and older, the series began to drift seriously, to my reading. The whole series is considered “Young Adult”. Publishing was even more rigid then than it is now. I’ll hazard a guess that Farley had pressure from publishers to update his plots and themes to the rapidly changing youth culture of the time.
But I’ll further guess that an older man like Farley (49 and counting when book #17 was published in 1964), obviously deep into a racing culture that didn’t permit women in the barn area at all, and didn’t allow female jockeys until 1969 (and not much then), was maybe not the best able to keep up with it.
The 1971 book is when Alec’s love interest was actually in the barns as a groom and a rider. And so forth. It read to me like a writer who is trying to keep up with things that aren’t really in his wheelhouse. Even though I was young myself at the time.
From there, as far as I was concerned, book #18 (1969) set in the Florida Everglades with the shaman and the ghost horse is when the whole thing slid off a cliff in terms of quality. To me, that book was like reading about a bad LSD trip. Other than the character names, in no way did it track with the series to that point. As far as I was concerned.
1971 was The Black Stallion and The Girl, published when Farley was 64. It was 11 years before the next one was published, the one where Alec flees to the west with The Black (The Black being about 45 yo by then, by my calculation, unless the book was set at an earlier period in the series). One more book co-authored by Farley’s son Steven in 1983 (as a prequel), and that was the end of it.
Farley died at 74 in 1989. Overall he was in his element with the racing culture of the book through the 40’s, 50’s, and first few years of the 60’s. After that, it seems to me that the giant cultural changes of the youth throughout the late 60’s and 70’s seemed to have overwhelmed him as an older man writing YA books. But that’s just my opinion.
you know, this sort of reminds me of another of my favorite books, Smoke Rings by Dorothy Lyons. I read most of her books and I loved them all, but this was my favorite. The plot was about a girl that wanted to ride in the Olympics I think as an eventer, but the rules said girls couldn’t ride in the Olympics, so she switched to show jumping!
I read all those Dick Francis books over the years. I definitely enjoyed the earlier ones the most, when he was mostly sticking around the track.
When he went off on tangents in the later ones about wine or art or whatever, those did not hold my interest as much.
I think that was another case where his son took over the books after the original author passed away, but I don’t know if I ever read any of those.
I have all of them until his son took over. It was interesting to watch him develop as a writer and move from the track to tangential mentions of racing.
As I understand it, Dick Francis retired to Florida and continued writing his series. The series definitely followed him to new lifestyles and outlooks! Once Francis was free of his standard routes in England, he seemed interested in exploring many new things. All reflected in his books. I still enjoyed the books as they drifted, but they became like a different series to the originals that stuck closer to racing.
Excellent post, @OverandOnward. I read the early books, then sort of grew out of them. What you wrote makes sense to me.
I have all Dick Francis books too, and while I prefer the early ones, The later ones were interesting, but a few were hardly horsey at all.
Yes the earlier DF are better. The early DF/FF were blah, but Felix has hit stride in the last few IMO. (While still not vintage DF)
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