Hollywood had come calling early in my career. No sooner had print rights to When the Lion Feeds been sold to Charles Pick at Heinemann, than the screen rights had been optioned. Stanley Baker—best known today for his role in the blockbuster Zulu—was going to play Sean Courtney, with Peter O’Toole as Dufford “Duff” Charleywood, Sean’s best friend and partner in the goldfields. Meanwhile, historian and screenwriter John Prebble had been brought in to work on the script, and I was penciled in to act as a technical adviser. Filming was planned for the southern Transvaal and Natal—but no film ever materialized. The rights to all my other novels had been snapped up, too.
Two years earlier, in 1969, I had met producer Michael Klinger. Acclaimed today as the most successful independent producer in Britain in the 1970s, he was disparaged in some quarters—British critic Sheridan Morley called him “nothing so much as a flamboyant character actor doing impressions of Louis B. Mayer”—but he was no fool, he knew movies, and he loved my work. The son of Jewish Polish immigrants to London, Klinger had entered the movie industry through the two Soho strip clubs he owned. Effectively, he’d started as a producer of soft-core pornography, but he’d struck it rich by producing the cult classic Get Carter, one of the greatest British gangster movies of all time, starring Michael Caine and written and directed by the brilliant Mike Hodges. He purchased the rights to Shout at the Devil, buying Gold Mine before it was even published and securing the options for Eagle in the Sky, The Eye of the Tiger and even The Sunbird. Only the first two ever got filmed, ironically Gold Mine before Shout at the Devil.
It was not until I was handing in my third novel, The Sound of Thunder, to Heinemann, that I received my first original commission in the world of film, when a producer approached me to write the screenplay of Sir Percy Fitzpatrick’s much-loved Jock of the Bushveld. First published in 1907, it was the true story of the author’s travels with Jock, his Staffordshire Bull Terrier cross, in the 1880s as he worked his way across the Bushveld region of the Transvaal (then the South African Republic). It had been a childhood favorite of mine, the memoir recalling my grandfather’s stories of his time as a transport rider, and I leapt at the chance. I spent the next months working on the script with Sir Percy’s daughter, Cecily Niven, while Pretoria-based film impresario Emil Nofal set about auditioning dogs to play Jock. After much hard work, nothing ever came of the project. It was my first taste of the fickle nature of film.
In 1968 an adaptation of one of my novels hit the silver screen. In the summer of that year, The Dark of the Sun was released as The Mercenaries, only retaining its original title in its American release. The book was still banned in South Africa, but the film, directed by Jack Cardiff, made waves immediately for its graphic scenes of violence and torture. Rod Taylor, the gritty Australian actor, played Bruce Curry; the gorgeous Yvette Mimieux was brilliant as Madame Shermaine Cartier, renamed Claire for the film, while NFL legend Jim Brown, fresh from his role in The Dirty Dozen, was an incredibly believable Sergeant Major Ruffo. Though it was set in the Congo, the movie had been filmed in Jamaica, with interiors shot at Borehamwood Studios in London.
It wasn’t just the title that had been changed in the transition from page to screen. The psychopathic Cockney barrow boy Wally Hendry—who kills Ruffo before Curry kills him in the final moment—became a Nazi war criminal named Heinlein, loosely based on the real-life Congo mercenary Siegfried Muller, who was notorious for wearing his Iron Cross, won during the Second World War, on his uniform. In the German-dubbed version of the movie, Curry became a German himself. Rechristened Willy Kruger, he was transformed in the translation into a Wehrmacht officer who had clashed with Heinlein over his fanatical Nazism. The German version also cut the scene where Heinlein murders two Congolese children, on the grounds of decency, which was a surprise given that the character was supposed to be a Nazi.
The film was one of the most violent of its time, but no more violent than the book had been—and neither was any more violent than what had actually gone on in the Congo, probably Africa’s most violent conflict at the time and certainly one of the bloodiest. Even the director would later admit that the violence happening in the Congo was much worse than could ever have been depicted on film. In their research, they had encountered atrocities so appalling that it left them nauseated.
The Mercenaries might have been notorious for its graphic scenes, but it inspired a later generation of filmmakers. Martin Scorsese described the movie as one of his “guilty pleasures,” while Quentin Tarantino used several tracks from the score in his film Inglourious Basterds, and even cast Rod Taylor in a cameo role as Winston Churchill.
As The Mercenaries hit the cinemas, I was putting the finishing touches to my fourth novel, the stand-alone thriller Shout at the Devil. It was loosely based on the sinking of the German Imperial Navy’s SMS Konigsberg in the Rufiji River—an area of present day Tanzania where I had often gone to hunt and where, memorably, I hunted my first elephant. Shout at the Devil was made into a movie released in 1976. Its heroes, the drunkard American elephant hunter, Flynn Patrick O’Flynn, and the languid English remittance man, Sebastian Oldsmith, were played by Hollywood legends Lee Marvin and Roger Moore. What they were after—or at least what Flynn was after—was the ivory of the elephants in the Rufiji Delta. In the story, only one thing stands between Flynn and his prize: the psychotic German commissioner who rules the area with incredible brutality as if it was his own personal fiefdom. Their vendetta must take a back seat as the crippled German warship, Blücher, is moored in the same delta awaiting repair, and Flynn and Sebastian are forced by the British authorities to mount a daring raid to destroy the ship before it gives Germany an unbeatable advantage in the war for East Africa.
Before that, though, came my fifth novel, Gold Mine, and the movie that it spawned—Gold, released in 1974. Gold Mine had conquered the bestseller lists, selling over 100,000 copies in hardback, and Michael Klinger was hard at work raising the capital to produce the movie. MGM bought the rights for more than £30,000 and I was enlisted to write the film script for a further £10,000, plus I was in for a share of the film profits—which all sounded great to me. By the time the novel was published, Klinger had raised much of the £1,000,000 capital he needed from backers in South Africa—but, not for the first time, apartheid raised its ugly head. Roger Moore had agreed to star as Rod Slater—but, before shooting could begin, the head of the Association of Cinematograph, Television and Allied Technicians’ Union (ACTT), Alan Sapper, announced that his union would not allow us to film in South Africa, his principled stand against the evils of apartheid. Roger was a member of that union and, if he went ahead, the union would blacklist all his future films.
Actors union Equity supported Roger, incensed that any other union would threaten the livelihood of one of its members. A standoff ensued, dominating the British newspaper headlines. Michael Klinger looked for a solution, and asked Sapper to suggest an alternative location. “How about Wales?” said Sapper. Michael pointed out that Welsh coalmines were very different from African goldmines, and besides, the landscapes of wet and windy Wales were entirely inappropriate. It looked likely that the film’s financiers would very quickly dump the project.
There was much discussion and further bad press before Sapper finally relented, instructing his union’s members to make the decision themselves on whether to shoot in South Africa. At last, production could begin. A wonderful crew came together, each one of them determined to defy the racist rulings and work in harmony with South Africans, whether black or white. The movie employed many local South Africans, and there was never an apartheid problem on set. Gold Mine was a story without an overt political message, set in an industry that—as my personal research showed—was not divided along racial lines. However, there was a stark reminder of South Africa’s political system that disturbed the cast: at ten o’clock every night, a siren wailed, indicating the beginning of the curfew. No black worker was allowed outside after this time—a situation many in the cast and crew found intolerable, and a reminder that South Africa’s deeply entrenched racism touched every corner of life.
Gold Mine the novel had evaded the South African censors, but Gold the movie did not have so easy a passage. In the film, Roger was to share a romantic scene with Susannah York, who played the character Terry Steyner, in the bathtub. The scene had been part of the original book, with the heroine and hero chatting and having some fun and games in the bath, but it had initially been written out of the film script. The director, Peter Hunt, read the book again and liked the scene so much he worked it back in. What had passed the censors in print incited their anger on screen. They insisted it was removed from the South African version of the movie.
Roger was brilliant as Rod Slater and, like me, he took his research seriously, going deep underground in the mines of Buffelsfontein and Randfontein where the movie was filmed. He was a committed leading man, barely wincing when he contracted arsenic poisoning from the water in the mines—an affliction that turned his nipples green, prompting a rapid visit to a doctor. Roger even worked for free for the final three weeks of the shoot, when poor mine conditions meant shooting would have to relocate to a sound-stage in London.
When Gold was finally released, the critics were divided. The Johannesburg Star thought it was a triumph, predicting the great things it would do for the city on the global stage. The Los Angeles Times said the film “is everything people have in mind when they talk about a movie. Its hero is heroic, its heroine is beautiful and kittenishly sexy, its villains are outrageously villainous, its characters crustily colorful. It has scope, scale, surprise. It has more punch than a 15-round fight and more corn than Kansas. It is a travelogue of South Africa and a fascinating audiovisual essay on gold mining.”
Others were not so enthused. New York Times critic Vincent Canby suggested the opening scene had been shot through a brandy glass because director Peter Hunt was “embarrassed by the content of the film and was trying to hide it,” while the Wall Street Journal was marginally less damning: according to their critic Joy Gold Boyun, the film had failed because “it lingers too long on sentiment, sex and South African scenery and so loses the swift pace so crucial to this type of film.” When it came to be released in the USA, expectations had sunk so low the movie had to become part of a double feature.
I visited the set and enjoyed spending time with Roger Moore and Susannah York. I thought Susannah York was as cute as they came. When she died tragically from bone-marrow cancer in 2011, the London Telegraph remembered her as “the blue-eyed English rose with the China white skin and cupid lips who epitomised the sensuality of the swinging sixties.” We had all got to know one another on set and one night we were out on the town together at a nightclub in Johannesburg and I asked Susannah to dance. We danced for a while, getting progressively closer and closer, and I thought this was going to be my lucky night . . . And then Roger appeared at her shoulder at about half past midnight and said: “Okay, Sue, my girl. Bed time I think, we’ve got to film tomorrow. Come on.” And he took her by the arm and led her away. It was one of the great disappointments of my life. It was as close as I ever came to hating Roger Moore—if it was possible to hate such a sweet guy.
•••
The relative failure of Gold didn’t deter Michael Klinger, and it didn’t put off Roger Moore either. He was to be back, two years later, when the movie version of Shout at the Devil hit the silver screen.
In the meantime, there was the launch of the only original film script I ever wrote that eventually made it to the screen. The Last Lion would later find a second life when I cannibalized its story for my 1989 novel A Time to Die. The movie starred Jack Hawkins, Karen Spies and David van der Walt, and was directed by Elmo Witt, with the story focusing on a terminally ill American millionaire who goes to Africa on a final expedition to fulfill his life’s goal of hunting down a lion.
When the time came for shooting Shout at the Devil, Peter Hunt was back in the director’s chair, and this time, Roger was joined by Hollywood legend Lee Marvin. As a former marine, part of an elite group who were dropped behind Japanese lines in World War Two, Lee was the perfect choice to portray hell raiser Flynn Patrick O’Flynn.
Although I had set the novel in East Africa, the movie would be shot along South Africa’s Transkeian coast. Once again, before production had started, the British film industry was up in arms over what they saw as us condoning South Africa’s apartheid politics by working in the country. The ACTT union had ruled against Klinger and his company for filming Gold, effectively prohibiting their members from working in South Africa. If they wouldn’t budge, he would have to go to Rome to hire technicians.
Eventually production got underway, with the whole crew decamping to Port St. Johns at the mouth of the Umzimvubu River in the Transkei. The crew were bunked in little houses overlooking the sea but the idyllic surroundings did little to mitigate the hostile political situation. The local mayor made it known that, if the production threw a party and invited any “blacks,” then we would be thrown out of town.
I spent a lot of time on the set of Shout at the Devil. Roger had brought along his glamorous Italian wife, Luisa. She was typically Italian: fiery, passionate, and noisy. She terrified me. But it was Lee Marvin with whom I would become fast friends. He was as impressive off screen as he was on, dominating the set with his portrayal of Flynn O’Flynn. His magnetism in front of the cameras was matched by his feral zeal in real life. He was an unpredictable, riotous character, a handful for everybody, his life as colorful as any of the characters he played on screen.
Legend had it that, when Lee had one drink too many, his eyes turned red. Roger almost fell prey to the consequences of Lee’s red-eyed volatility during the centerpiece of the movie: a gloriously brutal and bloody fist fight between Roger’s Sebastian and Lee’s O’Flynn. The fight was intricately plotted, the routine blocked and rehearsed so that every move was nailed down, but as action was called for the first take, Roger saw Lee’s eyes turning red. Whatever he’d been drinking in his dressing room, it had pushed him over the edge—now he was drunk, and clearly thought he was in a real fight. It became one of the most stupendous fight scenes committed to celluloid, Lee’s fists whistling past Roger’s nose as he tries desperately to get out of the way, as authentic a portrayal of one enraged man trying to floor the other as you’ll ever see.
Lee’s love of vodka during filming led to all sorts of unexpectedly entertaining incidents. On one occasion, Lee was carrying the baby playing Roger’s daughter, and almost dropped her. In fact, the baby wasn’t a girl—we couldn’t find one in Port St. Johns, so we had to make do with a little boy instead. In the scene, O’Flynn was supposed to gently pick up the baby for the first time, cooing over it, but Lee forgot to support his head and he nearly ended up in the mud. And then the boy, who had been squalling like a force-ten gale, suddenly went limp and silent as if he’d fallen asleep. At first, everybody was amazed that Lee had this magical, calming effect on the child, but the reason was simple: Lee had breathed vodka fumes all over the boy, stupefying him instantly.
At other times, spurred on by the alcohol flooding his system, Lee’s courage bordered on the dangerous. In a scene shot in Kruger National Park, where we went to film O’Flynn as an ivory poacher, an elephant had been shot by a tranquilizer dart so that, on waking, we could film Lee and Roger pretending to shoot at him. As the elephant woke, disoriented and filled with rage as they sometimes are, Roger and the rest of the cast—including Ian Holm, who was playing O’Flynn’s mute servant and gun-bearer, Mohammed—turned tail and ran straight for the car before they could be trampled by this indignant and very large elephant. Wild with drink, Lee stood his ground. Oblivious to the fact that his gun was loaded with blanks for the movie, he thought of himself as the Great White Hunter, and wanted to face the elephant down single-handed. The elephant eventually walked away as they do when they see a rifle.
On another occasion, again having enjoyed a drink, Lee deprived a hard-working stuntman of his daily fee by performing a risky stunt himself. According to locals, the Umzimvubu River was infested with sharks and the script called for Lee’s character to swim across the river to the wreck of the Blücher on the opposite riverbank. The plan was for Larry Taylor, an accomplished stuntman, to double for Lee, and the only shots we would need of Lee in the water were of him jumping in and starting to swim. Larry would then take over and continue the rest of the scene. Yet, no sooner was Lee in the water than his old marine training kicked in. Ignoring the cries of the director and crew, he surged unstoppably onward, powering his way through the river until he had made it to the wreck on the farthest side. Incensed, Larry Taylor put his shirt back on and stormed off. He was perhaps the only man in history who lost out on a day’s wages to the drink-fueled bravado of the legend that was Lee Marvin.
With shooting complete, the cast and crew went their separate ways. There was one last hurrah for Lee when, changing planes at Rome’s Fiumincino airport on the way home, he was beset by fanatical Japanese tourists who wanted his autograph and, again with drink pumping through his veins, he somehow lapsed into a post-traumatic-stress episode, brought on by memories of his wartime service in Japan, and ran like hell out of the air terminal, screaming like a banshee.
About eight years later, when the movie had been and gone, I was able to catch up with Lee in Australia. I had come fishing for giant marlin along the Great Barrier Reef, and chance had it that Lee was there too. It was an unforgettable experience. We would spot the enormous sickle-shaped fins of the marlin from half a mile away. Then we would move in. The bait we used was a five-pound bonito. I would watch in awe as the marlin saw the bait, then attacked it with a savage swing of its great bill. As soon as the fish felt the hook, it would go berserk, the rod arching over and the huge reel screeching. Braced on the boat, I would take the full force of the fish’s rage on my legs, while the marlin erupted from the surface of the sea like a missile launched from a submarine, dancing and tail-walking across the swells.
Lee and I spent our days on the Reef, and then the evenings carousing in port when we returned. On the final day, I landed a black marlin weighing 1012 pounds and measuring fourteen feet long. They hung it up at the harbor and I was bursting with pride. I’d just won membership of the legendary “International Game Fishing Association Thousand Pounder Club” because of it. Lee returned to shore about an hour later. He had heard about my catch, and he sauntered over to the jetty to have a look.
“Not bad for a novice,” he drawled. “Now, come and see a real fish . . .” We went to where his boat was tied up and there was an absolute monster specimen of a marlin lying on the deck—weighing 1200 lbs.
“Never mind, sonny,” said Lee. “Let me buy you a drink and you can cry into your glass.”
That evening I learned not to try to drink level with Lee Marvin. It was another game that I was a real novice at too.
Shout at the Devil was far better received by the critics than Gold. Lee Marvin received rave reviews for his performance as the drunkard O’Flynn while Roger was praised for displaying the same debonair tongue-in-cheek wit as he did in the James Bond films. Yet Shout at the Devil was to be the last big film to be made of one of my books. I had been involved in scripting from the start of my career and, even as Shout at the Devil was released, I was being paid to write the screenplay for Eagle in the Sky. But I was growing increasingly uncomfortable in the world of film. On one occasion I was summoned to a script conference, a new experience for me, who had always thought of writing as a solitary, single-minded endeavor. Here I was in a room of a dozen people all casting their opinions, struggling to make their voices heard, each one of them trying to pull the story in a different direction. At the head of the room, the producer had called for silence when he opened the meeting.
“Gentlemen,” he began, addressing the script editors, “we’ve got our work cut out to make sense of this codswallop . . .”
I was sat in the corner of the room and I looked up, considering him carefully. In that moment, I had learned a very important lesson. In the world of film, the writer does not stand on the top of Olympus as he does in the world of novels, he’s right at the bottom amongst the invertebrates, the very last in the food chain. It was the beginning of the end of my relationship with Hollywood.
The time had come to take stock. I was enjoying the riches and the attention that came with making a devil’s pact with Hollywood, but I hadn’t always enjoyed watching movies being made from my books. I liked some of the characters in the movies, but not one of them was who I’d imagined when I was writing. The characters in my novels felt like real people to me. I always lived with them for such long, intense periods of my life. I had developed them and their families, I knew what they looked like, how they spoke, how they would react in every possible circumstance. There is a straightforward, unobstructed relationship between a writer of novels and his readers, an honesty if you like. When a viewer watches a movie, they are seeing the product of many peoples’ work, a collaboration between the actors and the director, countless producers, cinematographers, make-up artists, set-designers, lighting guys and many more. But when a reader sits down with a book, it’s just me telling a story and the reader recreating it in their imaginations. Something important, some sort of trust, will always be lost in the transition from page to screen. It had been fun while it lasted, but this was not the world for me.
After Shout at the Devil, it was fifteen years before any of my works returned to the screen. In the intervening years, my novels would be optioned and reoptioned, but it wasn’t until 1991 that The Burning Shore, one of my later Courtney novels, came to the screen as the television film Mountain of Diamonds. Later still, Wild Justice, The Seventh Scroll and The Diamond Hunters would all find new life as TV mini-series, but I had long ago stopped having any active involvement in the productions. To this day, I still don’t. I never have a problem selling the rights to my books to other people—I’ve sold some of the rights several times over—but, from a writer’s perspective, the best option is to sell the rights, take the money, and hope and pray no film gets made that might ruin your work.
•••
One of the lessons my publisher Charles Pick had taught me was that I should write from the heart, only ever writing what I truly wanted to write. In the past years, it seemed I had stepped away from that ideal. The temptations of Hollywood, of seeing my characters up on the silver screen played by the idols of the age—Roger Moore, Lee Marvin, Michael Caine and others—had been corrupting me. Proud as I was of Gold Mine, Shout at the Devil, and The Diamond Hunters, I was aware they were the product of a young writer too deeply in love with the screen. Unconsciously, I had been chasing the dream of Hollywood adulation, and I felt that I was starting to write film-scripts rather than novels. It was the thin end of the wedge because then I would become a writer for hire, someone who was told by a director and producer what to write. Hollywood is a turbo-powered machine that only occasionally functions. It could be exciting when all the components came together, but often your work got torn apart, your credit taken away, the project stalled in development hell—and you were left with a bucketful of regret and a bruised ego. On top of that, I had been around enough film sets to discover the truth about the so-called “romance” of movie making—they’re usually deadly boring. There’s not much going on and unless you are one of the main movers and shakers, there is nothing to do except a lot of sitting around and talking nonsense.
It had been a good ride, but I thought I was worth more than that. I was a novelist, not a screenwriter. I’d loved the cinema as a child—there had been a cinema up on the Copperbelt, and a Saturday Night Cinema club when I boarded at Michaelhouse—but they had never eclipsed books in my life. Novels were my craft. I belonged to extended narrative, pace, character, atmosphere, twists, drama, location, description, denouement. These were the components that made me the happiest. I was beginning to feel trapped, constricted in a way I had never been before. Since When the Lion Feeds had been accepted for publication, the work load was relentless. My publishers expected me to write a book a year, as they should have because it was the only way to build a strong reputation, by feeding your audience with regular, quality work. I wanted to approach writing as a professional, forging a relationship of trust between me and my readers. But I had been seduced by the lure of Hollywood, its glittering Faustian pact, and I was perilously close to being trapped in a writing treadmill. I was at the point where writing—which had been a passion of mine for so long, my first and only real love—was in danger of becoming a chore.
However, I had an idea for a new novel that would change all that, and which would be my passage out of the Hollywood factory. Writing it would mean going back to one of the most haunting memories of my childhood.
•••
In the gathering dusk, the car came to a stuttering halt and, in the front seat, my father turned around. “We’re here,” he said. “Wilbur, up and out.” It was 1941, and I was eight years old.
Outside, the oncoming night was silent and still. I helped my five-year-old sister out of the car and looked up at the succession of stone monoliths standing like giant sentries.
The overgrown ruins looked monstrous and menacing as the twilight shadows groped toward us, wearing the visages of men. The wind tumbling over the tallest towers seemed to be the whispering of ghosts from centuries past. I wondered what secrets lay hidden in the darkness. My sister crouched behind me, as if she would rather not see.
We had come to the ruins of Great Zimbabwe, once a city in the southeastern hills of Zimbabwe near Lake Mutirikwe and the town of Masvingo. It was the capital of the Kingdom of Zimbabwe during the country’s late Iron Age, the largest of many hundreds of smaller ruins now known as “zimbabwes” spread across what was then Rhodesia’s Highveld. We had arrived as the sun was setting because my mother was fascinated by the ancient world.
Today Great Zimbabwe draws tourists from all over the globe, but in 1941 the place was just another corner of overlooked Africa, left to be reclaimed by the wild. Europeans discovered this lost world in the late 1800s, but in my youth, there was no official acknowledgment that there had once been a thriving city here. The Rhodesian government, keen to protect Rhodesia as a European enclave at all costs, was putting pressure on academics and archaeologists to deny the great city had been built by African natives. But any schoolboy could see that this had been the heart of a kingdom with warlords and counselors, merchants and soldiers, and possibly slavers and slaves. Dig into the history of Africa, my mother had taught me, and what you will find will be more fantastic than any fiction.
My father led the way. The ruins stretched for miles, the hills crowned by what had once been small towers—but here, in the heart of the ancient city, there was only one great edifice, a fortress built from stones of magnificent size. We passed along overgrown passages between tumbledown walls, through a great enclosure where the air was curiously still.
I sensed a communion with the past, with history’s intangible myths. Every rustling in the night became the footsteps of some malevolent spirit, every shadow cast by the light of the scudding moon became the approach of a phantom who meant us harm. Soon, my sister started to cry. I tried to console her but the longer it went on, the more my reserves of strength began to crumble. I was not afraid of any material thing. Perhaps my mind was too full of H. Rider Haggard and his doomed sorceress, She Who Must Not Be Named, but it was the unearthly, the unreal, that petrified me tonight.
Archaeologists and anthropologists would spend their careers debating what kind of civilization had been centered on these ruins. They would argue whether it was the seat of the Gokomere people, the ancestors of Zimbabwe’s Shona, or whether it belonged to the tribes who would one day call themselves the Lemba or Venda. Some reckoned the city was between five hundred and a thousand years old, and that war, famine, pestilence or natural disaster had befallen its people and laid the city to waste. Nothing was certain.
•••
Thirty years later, it was 1971 and I was sitting in my caravan in the Bvumba, the Mountains of Mist (Bvumba is the Shona word for “mist”), which are situated on the border between Rhodesia on the west and Mozambique to the east. It’s a beautiful place, often shrouded in early morning mist that clears during the day to reveal blue-green mountains with spectacular views, the abundant forests resonating with birdsong. Mist wreathed the headlands and thick miombo woodland flourished on the escarpments, half-masking the scent of the small coffee plantations in the valleys below. I had come here for the solitude I needed to write. I had also come to take back my independence, to recover my soul. The past decade had been immensely busy, so full of obligations, demands and my own ambitions that I was close to losing my way. The manuscript in front of me was half-complete, but already much bigger than the thrillers that had consumed each of my last few years. Shout at the Devil, Gold Mine, and The Diamond Hunters had all been blistering reads, highly charged, with adrenaline-driven plots like the best adventure stories, and they had been written with the expenditure of enormous emotional energy. I loved writing them, I was swept away by the drama and tension of their worlds—but I was determined that this new novel, The Sunbird, was to be something different. The challenge was daunting, but there was no room in my life for artistic ennui, indulgences like writer’s block or appealing to the elusive Muse of Inspiration. My muse was my father’s voice in my ear saying, “Get on with it Wilbur, you lazy son of a bitch, there’s work to be done.”
The Sunbird was going to be my most ambitious, richly imagined—and unfilmable—work to date. The germ of the idea had come from my experience as a boy during that night in Great Zimbabwe, and what the ghosts were telling me as they drifted through the ruin. I was developing my own theories about the history of the place and imagining my own lost city of Ophet, founded by castaway Carthaginians who had traveled south after suffering the depredations of the Romans in North Africa. They would come through Gibraltar, down an ancient river system now dried up, until they reached the mighty Nile, the birthplace of civilization. I imagined they had crossed the Namib, as I would one day, and in Botswana found a fantastic civilization, all of it to be undone by a villainous king, and rediscovered millennia later. The novel would be a two-part story set millennia apart and it would be much more ambitious and richer than anything I had written before.
•••
Handing The Sunbird to my publishers, I had felt considerable trepidation. It was unlike anything I’d ever written, an epic in scope and length. I’d forced my imagination into territory I’d never visited before. My previous novels were slender in comparison—The Sunbird was almost longer than the previous two novels combined. However, it exceeded all my expectations. Even before the publication date preorders were four times higher than for any other of my books. I was so grateful and relieved at the respect my publishers had shown for the book. When my editors first read it, they were overjoyed.
The Sunbird is the story of Dr. Benjamin Kazin, a hunchback academic, and it chronicles Ben and his assistant Sally’s search for proof of a lost civilization in the heart of untamed Botswana. Ridiculed by others in his profession, Ben is convinced that there was once a Phoenician settlement in Botswana and, spurred on by aerial photographs that he believes confirm his theory, he sets out to discover this lost city and eventually stumbles upon the archaeological discovery of a lifetime. Along the way, as he battles with unfriendly natives and murderous terrorists, spectacular cave paintings point toward the existence of a civilization that was destroyed in a violent cataclysm many centuries ago. Only then does the novel reveal its true heart—no sooner is the reader swept up in Ben’s quest, than the story spirals backward in time to an imagined land of two thousand years before.
Since I was a boy, the phenomenon of civilizations rising and falling had been an obsession of mine: the Egyptians, the Romans, the Greeks, even the triumph and decline of the colonial powers in Africa. The Sunbird was an attempt to capture the sheer drama of these tumultuous events. The brutality and mysticism of the story were straight out of my memories of H. Rider Haggard; the doomed city of Ophet was a recreation of those terrified moments I had spent in the gathering dark of Great Zimbabwe, my sister and I cowering in the midst of the enveloping night. I had taken the name of The Sunbird itself from my love of nature and the wild. I have always adored wild birds. The sunbird is my favorite of them all. There are 132 different species inhabiting the Africas, across Asia and even extending into northern Australasia. Like hummingbirds, they are tiny, brightly-colored creatures. My garden in Cape Town is full of them, with a treasured nest of double-collared sunbirds next to the veranda. Spiritually minded people believe that they are the harbingers of harmony, that they can open hearts, bringing out the best in everybody. They believe the sunbird hates ugliness and discord and will always fly off to areas where there is happiness and beauty. There is a magic in those little birds, and they have been my good luck charms across the years.
The Sunbird gave me the confidence to create vast new worlds on the page. The irony was that, as with many of my other works, the screen rights were indeed snapped up by Michael Klinger. He would never be able to film it, though.
In the years to come, I would look back on The Sunbird as a watershed in my career. It even led to a little tradition. From that point on, every hardback first edition of my books would have an embossed sunbird on the front cover, in the lower right hand corner. I called my home in Cape Town, on the foothills of Table Mountain, Sunbird Hill.
That is the strange thing about a novel—you spend long months willing it into existence, but then it develops a life of its own. What starts as imaginary can sometimes become very real.