His mother's fiancé died at age 20 (though a newspaper report in Come to Grief says he was 19) only three days before the wedding in a fall from a ladder,[2] whilst working overtime as a window cleaner.
Knowing she was dying, she pulled Halley from grammar school and apprenticed him to a Newmarket racing trainer, so that he would have a home and someone to turn to after her death.
Sid was a rising jockey by the time he completed his indentured service, and was reputed to have earned a small fortune on the stock market.
Halley was injured in an accident whilst riding: during a racing fall over a hurdle fence, the hoof of another horse landed directly on his left hand.
No longer able to race, Halley was hired as an operative by a well-known private security/investigative firm called Hunt Radnor Associates, and is working there as Odds Against opens.
Still pitying himself over the loss of the profession he loved, and the loss of a wife he loved but couldn't get along with, he does not work very hard at being a detective, but a case involving unexplained accidents at a venerable racetrack awakens his interest, and, when he brings the case to a successful conclusion, he discovers he might be as good an investigator as he was a jockey.
He and his partner, Chico Barnes, no longer working for Hunt Radnor Associates, have opened their own detective agency, and, in quick succession, are hired to investigate three unrelated cases.
By Come to Grief, Halley's agency has become a sole proprietorship, after Barnes, newly married, leaves the firm at the behest of his bride.
Halley becomes a public pariah when, in the course of an investigation into several shocking cases of animal cruelty, he uncovers evidence that the responsible party is a well-known, and extremely popular, TV sports journalist.
In his autobiography, The Sport of Queens, Dick Francis says he owes the existence of Whip Hand to Mike Gwilym's performance.