Wilbur Smith
Bestselling author of blockbusting adventure novels, many of them set in Africa, whose personal life was as colourful as his fiction
WILBUR SMITH, who has died aged 88, was a blockbusting novelist behind epic tales of adventure, lust and intrigue, usually set in Africa, that sold more than 140 million copies worldwide and made him a fortune.
It was not always possible to say that he “wrote” his books. In a muchpublicised deal in 2012, Smith announced his defection to Harpercollins from his publisher of almost half a century, Panmacmillan, in a deal worth £15 million. The twist was that Smith was to provide plot lines but “co-writers” would carry out most of the drudge work of actually putting one word in front of another.
To be fair, Smith had never recoiled from the business of churning out the words. After striking success in 1964 with his second novel When The Lion Feeds (his first, unpublished, effort, The Gods First Make Mad was, by his own admission, “junk”), he produced almost a book a year, so that by the time of his Harpercollins bonanza he had racked up 33 titles, many of doorstopping dimensions.
The Smith formula was about as politically correct as the Black and White Minstrels. Generally set in the colonial era in which Smith himself was born and raised, they typically featured virile, lantern-jawed hunks, delicate English roses who might be ravished by pirates or find themselves enslaved in Arab harems, and a cast of Johnny Foreigners who generally take a thrashing. These ranged from black Africans (noble but childlike) and Arabs (prone to lopping off limbs) to dastardly Frenchmen with curly moustaches who shout insults such as “I stamp on your father’s testicles”.
Smith’s novels invariably featured copious lashings of gore – human and animal (any bull elephant that wandered on to the page could expect to be swiftly dispatched) – and sex.
Smith made an estimated four million pounds a book and his most popular Courtney and Ballantyne series (including A Falcon Flies (1980) and The Triumph Of The Sun (2005)) were translated into 26 languages.
Seven of his books were made into films. Though generally derided by critics (one described his Those in Peril (2011) as “the most awful book I have ever read”), many were prepared to acknowledge his unrivalled gifts as a storyteller and master of suspense. Of Smith’s Sunbird (1972), Miles Donald admitted: “I wanted to know what happened next even when I didn’t care.”
The writer with whom he was most frequently associated was H Rider Haggard, whose Victorian tales of adventure in Africa created the mould from which Smith cast new works.
He liked to claim that his readers were “real men”, though, according to his publishers, his masterful heroes and virginal heroines held more appeal to women readers – and hormonal schoolboys. Boris Johnson fondly recalled dog-eared Wilbur Smiths being passed round his Eton chums late at night, their spines conveniently broken at the pages most relevant to adolescent boys. Smith acknowledged charges of racism and sexism, his excuse being that his characters had to be true to the attitudes of their time. “The British Empire wasn’t actually built up by being kind to the black peoples of the world,” he pointed out. “They went and whacked them on the heads and said ‘Okay, chaps, we’re now in control’.”
In fact Smith always opposed apartheid, yet there seems little doubt that many of the attitudes of his more unregenerate characters were ones the novelist himself shared. He took particular delight in riling female interviewers, claiming to one that he was a feminist in that “I love to see a woman with a cute bottom walking past”. Though he maintained that the women in his books were “not just for the hero to boff ”, he admitted to another interviewer that “I’m attracted to women who behave in a sexually modest and ladylike way – until they get their knickers off.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, his own track record when it came to personal relationships was not a good one. Indeed Smith’s real life was, if anything, more colourful than the plots he created.
An only son, Wilbur Addison Smith was born on January 9 1933 in Broken Hill, Northern Rhodesia (now Kabwe, Zambia) to parents born in England. Wilbur’s father, Herbert, at the time of his son’s birth, was running a company manufacturing sheet metal to create pipes for ventilation systems in the Copperbelt mines. When the mines closed in the 1930s, he sustained the family by hunting and selling the meat, before buying a 25,000 acre cattle ranch.
Wilbur was a sickly child, contracting cerebral malaria aged 18 months, followed, later, by polio, which caused him to limp in later life. None the less he recalled his life on the African savannah as idyllic: “My companions were the sons of the ranch workers, small black boys with the same interests and preoccupations as myself... Armed with our slingshots and accompanied by a pack of mongrels we ranged at large through the bush, hunting and trapping birds and small mammals.”
However he lived in dread of his father’s beatings, recalling that when, aged 13, he shot his first lion, Herbert Smith did not know whether to be furious or proud: “He belted me but then went out and bought me a new Triumph Thunderbird.”
It was his mother who encouraged him, against her husband’s wishes, to love books. Through her influence he became an early reader, starting with Biggles and Just William before moving on to C S Forester, Rider Haggard and John Buchan. But, after attending Rhodes University in South Africa, Smith reluctantly took his father’s advice and trained as a tax accountant.
In 1957 he married Anne Rennie, and had a son and daughter, but the marriage soon ended and the divorce led to alimony and child support payments that left him penniless.
To make ends meet Smith turned to writing, selling his first story to a magazine for twice his monthly salary. His first novel, The Gods First Make Mad, was rejected by publishers, so for a time he returned to work as a tax accountant with the Salisbury Inland Revenue.
His breakthrough came with the publication in 1964 of When the Lion Feeds, the first in his Courtney series, in which he drew on his own background to tell the story of Sean Courtney and his brother Garrick growing up on an African cattle ranch. The name Courtney was a tribute to his grandfather, Courtney James Smith, who had commanded a machine gun team during the Zulu wars. The book gained Smith a film deal and its success encouraged him to become a full-time writer.
By the time it was published his second marriage, to Jewel Slabbart, with whom he had another son, was breaking down and in 1971 he married, thirdly, Danielle Thomas, a divorcee with a young son whom he adopted.
But Smith’s growing success as a writer was accompanied by a series of ructions in his personal relationships. He fell out publicly with his two grown-up children, Shaun and Christian, from his first marriage, refusing to see them and turning down all requests for help.
His daughter Christian told the Daily Mail that her father had not paid child support and claimed that when she was 16 she hitchhiked 700 miles to ask him for help, only to have the door slammed in her face. At one point Smith even claimed in an interview to have forgotten their mother’s name and dismissed them as “biological freaks”, prompting them to threaten legal proceedings. Meanwhile, he refused even to discuss his second wife or acknowledge their son, Laurence. “I am not a caretaker of problem children,” he explained.
His third wife, Danielle, had been his mistress for four years before he divorced Jewel in 1966, and her son Dieter would benefit from his stepfather’s largesse while Wilbur’s own children were disinherited. Danielle and Wilbur were married for 37 years and for most of that time, judging by enthusiastic dedications to her in his books, it was a happy relationship. “She used to help with some of my research,” Smith recalled.
He expanded his popular Courtney Series, and in the 1980s began his Ballantyne series, chronicling the lives of the Ballantyne family of Rhodesia from the 1860s to the 1980s. Then in the 1990s he embarked on a cycle of novels set in Ancient Egypt, including the popular River God (1993).
However his happy family life did not last, Smith complaining that in the last 10 years of their marriage Danielle “decided she wanted to be a writer. She gave up on any research.”
She also developed a brain tumour of which she would die in 1999, and after her death Wilbur and his stepson had an angry falling-out. Dieter had outraged his stepfather by allegedly stealing private papers and claiming Wilbur was a swindler who had operated under a false name in an attempt to hide his money from his former wives and children.
Smith countered that he travelled under an alias “due to his celebrity status”. Their dispute reached the courts and was eventually settled for an undisclosed sum.
Certainly some of Dieter’s claims about the treatment of his mother seem to be borne out by the evidence. In 1998 a £300-an-hour call girl sold her story, recalling how Smith liked to dress up as a pirate to ravish her “South Pacific virgin”. She went public after failing to extort £10,000 from him. The story broke as Danielle lay dying, but Smith was delighted by the publicity: “Yes, she tried to blackmail me but in the process she said I was one hell of a lover. All my mates were terribly impressed.”
A few months after Danielle’s death Smith got married, for a fourth time, to Mokhiniso “Niso” Rakhimova, a student from Tajikistan 38 years his junior whom he had spotting browsing the shelves in WH Smiths in Sloane Square. “It was a whirlwind romance with Niso,” he explained, “but my previous wife had been comatose for the last six years, so I’d been an enforced bachelor for all that time.”
Smith was delighted with his new wife, observing that not only was she beautiful, she was also “quiet and extremely well-behaved” at dinner parties, allowing him to “talk without being interrupted”. Also, unlike Danielle, she had no literary ambitions.
In 2015 the couple established a charitable foundation dedicated to promoting adventure fiction and reading and writing among young people.
Although Smith was probably irked by the lack of critical acclaim for his books, he lived the life of a self-styled “tax refugee”, at various times owning lavish properties in London, the Cape and the Seychelles, Switzerland, Malta and Moscow, along with assorted yachts, limousines and Rolex watches. He combined writing with jet-setting hobbies such as fly fishing, big game angling, hunting, skiing and scuba diving.
In 2017 Smith joined Bonnier Books UK and the following year published his memoirs, On Leopard Rock, in which he admitted having had “tough times, bad marriages”, but expressed a desire to be remembered “as somebody who gave pleasure to millions”.
His last novel, The New Kingdom, part of his Egyptian series, was published in September.
Wilbur Smith is survived by his wife Niso and by his children.
Wilbur Smith, born January 9 1933, died November 13 2021