by WILBUR SMITH LEGACY OF WAR

Wilbur Addison Smith (9 January 1933 – 13 November 2021) was a Northern Rhodesian-born British-South African novelist specializing in historical fiction about international involvement in Southern Africa across four centuries.

An accountant by training, he gained a film contract with his first published novel, When the Lion Feeds, which encouraged him to become a full-time writer. After this he developed three long chronicles of the South African experience, which became best-sellers. He acknowledged his publisher Charles Pick's advice to "write about what you know best", and his work takes in much authentic detail of the local hunting and mining way of life, along with the romance and conflict that goes with it.

By the time of his death in 2021, he had published 49 books of which he sold over 140 million copies, 24 million of them in Italy (by 2014).

With spare time in the evening and access to plenty of pens and paper through his job at the Inland Revenue Service, Smith turned back to his love of writing. In April 1963, he sold his first story, "On Flinder’s Face", under the pen name Steven Lawrence to Argosy magazine for £70, twice his monthly salary. After a number of further acceptances, he wrote his first novel, The Gods First Make Mad, but received 20 rejections. Reviewing what he had written, Smith could see that he had a novel of 180,000 words: it was too long, badly written, had too many characters, and tried to express opinions on everything from politics and racial tension to women. Dejected he returned to work as an accountant.

When he was 27 years old he received a telegram from his agent in London, Ursula Winant enquiring as to progress on his new novel. Encouraged by her expectation that he would be writing another novel, the urge to write once again overwhelmed him. He commenced work his next novel:

I wrote about my own father and my darling mother. I wove into the story chunks of early African history. I wrote about black people and white. I wrote about hunting and gold mining and carousing and women. I wrote about love and loving and hating. In short I wrote about all the things I knew well and loved better. I left out all the immature philosophies and radical politics and rebellious posturing that had been the backbone of the first novel. I even came up with a catching title, When the Lion Feeds.

When the Lion Feeds tells the stories of two young men, twins Sean and Garrick Courtney. The characters' surname was a tribute to Smith's grandfather, Courtney Smith, who had been a transport rider during the Witwatersrand gold rush in the late 1880s, had commanded a Maxim gun team during the Zulu Wars. He had also hunted elephant both as sport and to provide meat for his family. Courtney Smith had a magnificent moustache and could tell wonderful stories that had helped inspire his grandson.

After reading the manuscript Smith's agent rang Charles Pick, the deputy managing director of William Heinemann and convinced him to look at the novel. She also asked for an advance of £500, a guaranteed initial print run of 5,000 copies, and that it be published before Christmas. Impressed after just the first chapter, over the weekend Pick gave it to the company’s sales director Tim Manderson, who agreed that it should be published. Pick rang Winant and offered an advance of £1,000, with an initial print run of 10,000 copies. By the publication date Heinemanns had increased the print run to 20,000.

The book went on to sell well around the world (except in South Africa, where it was banned). Charles Pick later became Smith's mentor and agent.

In 2012, Smith said When the Lion Feeds remained his favourite because it was his first to be published. Film rights were bought by Stanley Baker but no movie resulted. However, the money enabled Smith to quit his job in the South African taxation office, calculating he had enough to not have to work for two years.

I hired a caravan, parked it in the mountains, and wrote the second book", he said. "I knew it was sort of a watershed. I was 30 years of age, single again, and I could take the chance."

Smith's second published novel was The Dark of the Sun (1965), a tale about mercenaries during the Congo Crisis. Film rights were sold to George Englund and MGM and it was filmed in 1968 starring Rod Taylor.

Smith did not originally envision the Courtney family from When the Lion Feeds would become a series, but he returned to them for The Sound of Thunder (1966), taking the lead characters up to after the Second Boer War. At the time he was writing The Sound of Thunder in a caravan in the Inyanga mountains in November 1965 Ian Smith unilaterally declared Rhodesian independence. The resulting political violence forced Smith to return to the relative safety of Salisbury where he continued working on the novel during the day, while serving at night as a member of the reserve of the Rhodesian Police. "I would get called out and have to get bodies of children from pit lavatories after they had been killed with pangas (machetes)", he recalled. As Smith didn’t share Ian Smith's views he moved with his now pregnant second wife to Onrus River near Hermanus in South Africa.

Shout at the Devil (1968) was a World War I adventure tale which would be filmed in 1976. It was followed by Gold Mine (1970), an adventure tale about the gold mining industry set in contemporary South Africa, based on a real-life flooding of a gold mine near Johannesburg in 1968.

The Diamond Hunters (1971) was set in contemporary West Africa, later filmed as The Kingfisher Caper (1975). Around this time, Smith also wrote an original screenplay, The Last Lion (1971) which was filmed in South Africa with Jack Hawkins; it was not a success.

Smith died unexpectedly on 13 November 2021 at his Cape Town home; he was 88. His website announced that "He leaves behind him a treasure-trove of novels, as well as completed and yet to be published co-authored books and outlines for future stories.

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