When he was eight years old, Wilbur Smith saw his father kill three man-eating lions. The animals attacked their safari camp at night and, woken by the screams of a guide, Herbert Smith grabbed a torch and his heavy rifle.
On the way out of his tent, Herbert lunged headfirst into the tent pole and smashed his nose open. Wilbur saw the gush of blood, and at the same moment realised his father was wearing only a pyjama top, and was naked from the waist down.
Then the lion charged. Herbert trained the torch beam on it with his left hand, raised the rifle with his right and shot from the waist, as if he was holding a pistol. He hit the lion in the chest.
Seconds later, he brought down the two lionesses.
Wilbur Smith in his trophy-laden London home
That scene is the essence of every bestseller ever written by Wilbur Smith, who has died aged 88: bloodshed, sexual virility, gunfire and slaughter in Africa.
He sold more than 120 million books worldwide, translated into 30 languages, before signing a deal in 2012 to work with ghostwriters, who produced a shelf-load more novels featuring his characters in plots he helped to invent.
A number of his stories were turned into Hollywood blockbusters, including Gold and Shout At The Devil, both starring Roger Moore, and The Mercenaries with Rod Taylor.
Smith may have inherited his inexhaustible gift for storytelling from his grandfather, Courtney Smith, a Victorian prospector in South Africa’s gold rush who commanded a machine-gun outfit during the Zulu Wars of the 1870s.
Courtney used to tell how, during one safari, he was woken by the frenzied barking of his mastiff, an immense dog called Brainless.
The dog refused to be quiet so, in the dark, he felt around for a whip to beat the animal. The barking changed to a high-pitched growl and then a roar.
A bearer came hurrying with a lamp — and Courtney was confronted with a lion, slavering with blood. It had killed his dog.
The way Courtney told it, he looked at the ‘whip’ in his hand . . . and realised he was thrashing the lion with a black mamba, Africa’s most venemous snake.
Growing up with such macho stories ringing in his ears, it was inevitable that young Wilbur would try to emulate them.
His need to prove himself was made more urgent by the legacy of childhood illnesses, including a cerebral malaria infection as a baby that he was not expected to survive, and a bout of polio in boyhood that left him limping.
Aged 15, he and his friend Barry took a pair of rifles and headed off in a ‘borrowed’ Jeep from the Smith cattle ranch in Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia.
They drove all day, fording the Kafue River before abandoning their vehicle and setting off on foot in search of a big-horned bull antelope called a kudu.
The teenage hunters failed to kill their prey — and as night fell, they realised they had no idea where their Jeep was.
For the next two days, they wandered in circles before Herbert flew over in his Tiger Moth biplane. Back at the ranch, Wilbur’s father silently took off his belt and thrashed the teenager.
Herbert had little regard for his son (‘He called me an idiot a million times’, Wilbur recalled) and scoffed at his ambitions to be a writer. Instead, a job was found for him in the tax office.
Wilbur Smith and wife Niso Smith Crime Thriller Awards in London, pictured in 2013
After a brief marriage to a woman named Anne Rennie ended in divorce, leaving him struggling to pay maintenance for two small children, Wilbur tried to write a novel.
His first attempt, ‘all radical politics and immature philosophy’, was rejected more than 20 times, before an agent told him to ‘write what you know’. The result was When The Lion Feeds, which opens with a boy called Sean Courtney
