The Second String

The Second String is a horse racing novel by Nat Gould, the English born Australian writer Nathaniel Gould who lived from 1857 to 1919. Gould was the most prolific and commercially successful writer of horse racing fiction in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods, producing more than one hundred novels across his career, all of them set within the substantial English and Australian horse racing world that Gould knew at first hand as a journalist, racing writer, and serious enthusiast.

The second string of the title is a racing term referring to a stable's secondary horse entered in a race alongside its principal entrant, often as a tactical measure to influence the running of the race or as insurance against the failure of the main horse. The novel uses the secondary horse and its connections as the central organizing concept for a plot involving the various intrigues, romantic complications, and dramatic situations that the racing world produced for the substantial English audience interested in horse racing fiction during the period.

Gould had spent substantial years in Australia working as a racing journalist for various Australian newspapers and had returned to England in the 1890s with a substantial reputation as a racing writer. His novels drew on his personal knowledge of the racing world on both sides of the world and presented to his English readers a detailed and largely accurate picture of how the racing industry actually worked at various levels from the major training establishments and racing meetings down to the smaller country gallops and provincial racecourses.

The novel follows the typical Gould conventions. There are characters drawn from the various social levels involved in the racing world, including owners, trainers, jockeys, betting men, racing journalists, and the various other figures who populated the racing scene. There are romantic plots involving young women whose connections to the racing world give them substantial roles in the dramatic situations. There are villainous figures whose various schemes against the more honourable central characters provide the dramatic conflict. And there are detailed accounts of specific races and racing meetings that gave Gould's readers the substantial racing content they were paying for.

The novel runs about three hundred pages and reads quickly as commercial racing fiction. For readers interested in the substantial horse racing subgenre of late Victorian and Edwardian English popular fiction, this is a representative example by the leading practitioner of the form. It pairs naturally with Gould's other racing novels.