Literary lion-hunter a master of the ripping yarn

By MICHELE HEWITSON

Ripping yarn teller Wilbur Smith is telling one of his ripping yarns. That is, he's telling it as he comes up for air between guffaws of laughter.

The object of his amusement is his interviewer. I've just asked him what is obviously the daftest question he's ever encountered about the behaviour of lions. "Will they charge? Oh, my word. Will they charge? Oh, ho, ho."

Smith, the archetypal huntin', shootin', fishin' South African author, no longer shoots elephants. He says it's like shooting a sad, old, man.

But shooting a lion is purely thrilling. And terrifying. "If you don't do it right exactly the first time ... He's so quick, he's just like a yellow blur when he charges you. You know he's coming. He's swerving and his tail is thrashing and he's roaring and the dust is flying in every direction."

It's always a he. "You don't," says Smith filling me in on the lore of lion hunting, "want to go around whacking all the females and young ones. The last thing in the world you want to do is shoot the last lion in the world."

A reputation as a lion hunter can be perilous. When Smith is called on to perform one of the duties of best-selling ripping yarn tellers - the book signing - he straps up his right arm beforehand.

This is not because he suffers, as he so quaintly puts it, from "writer's cramp." It's because in every queue, at every bookshop, in every city, there will be at least one macho bloke who likes to pit his iron handshake against that of the tough guy writer who has killed lions.

"It's just bad manners," Smith complains.

Once he appeared on the dust jackets of his adventure yarns - his latest, Warlock, is number 27 - looking every inch the great white hunter. He often featured in press photographs in his battered hunting hat and open-necked khaki shirts.

At Whitcoulls this week, signing books for the faithful, he looked more like an English squire who had taken to writing blockbusters to pay for the upkeep on some crumbling pile. He's wearing a lightweight tweed jacket, a fine knit polo neck and shoes so buffed they look as though the manservant has been up all night polishing them with silken rags.

He's no squire, of course. He's the self-described patriarch of a 12,000ha ranch in South Africa and a definitely-not-crumbling house in London.

Still, something has happened to Wilbur Smith. Her name is Mokhiniso, his new wife of a year. He met the Tajikistan-born Mokhiniso in a London bookshop. She is 29; he is 68. She looks after him "extremely well."

"She fusses over me and mothers me. Well, I don't mind it. I can get used to it very, very easily." She cuts his hair and plays close attention to his wardrobe. She has even, he says, still sounding faintly incredulous, got him wearing jeans: "Which I would never have thought of doing before." Dinner tonight in Auckland will be sushi, those hand-crushing men in the queues might like to know.

He "can't imagine being happier," despite, or perhaps because of, the age difference.

Smith is telling another story. A longtime friend has just remarried. His wife is 32. "So I phoned him, and said, 'What attracts you about these old women?"'

When I told a friend this story, he said: "I'll bet the wives laughed and laughed."

They probably did too. You wouldn't marry Wilbur Smith if it was a sensitive, new-age man you were seeking. (Mokhiniso is his fourth wife; he was married to Danielle, who succumbed to a brain tumour in 1999, for more than 30 years.)

Smith is, he offers, the product of an upbringing by a father he describes as "Victorian" in his values. And as tough as the hide of a bull elephant. "There was nothing namby-pamby about him. He had his ideas about what a man should be and what a man should do. To a great extent I agree with him entirely."

He was, says Smith with the greatest of admiration, "a very stern figure, with a marshmallow centre." His dad would, "when necessary, and it was usually necessary, take off his belt and give me a few short ones around the backside and the back of the legs." A few days later there would be "a little present or some sort of treat."

The tradition was later reversed. "I bought a Rolls-Royce, drove round and picked Dad up. He'd sit in the front seat there, playing with the controls. 'How much did you pay for this bloody thing. Don't put it all in the shop window,' he used to say."

His father thought writing was "really strange and bizarre behaviour from a son of his." So the Rolls was just showing off, hmm? "Absolutely," he beams.

The highest praise you could offer Smith would probably be that he is like his father. If you asked him to describe himself, you probably wouldn't get too far. Manners, you know.

You don't, though, have to go far in search of the marshmallow centre. His new book, Warlock, is dedicated to Mokhiniso: "For my new love. [The] Spirits of Genghis Khan and Omar Khayyam reincarnated in a moon as lucent as a perfect pearl." Now, there's marshmallow and there's just plain goo. But Smith is that sort of writer - he is apt to go just a tad too far.

As in Warlock: "Her buttocks undulated, round and as lustrous as ostrich eggs, and the shining tresses of her hair swayed."

Does Mokhiniso read him? "Oh, yes. Oh my goodness, does she ever. But she asks: Why didn't I write my books in English?"

Smith is never going to be the writer whose name crops up on, say, the Booker list. He regards the Booker as a public service announcement. It alerts him, he has said, to 10 novels he should never read.

He's an easy target. Too easy to make it worth while. Type his name into the Guardian website and it throws up a story about stupidity. Its introduction is: "Read any book by Wilbur Smith and then try to write an interesting sentence."

You imagine that such things are a matter of supreme indifference to Smith. Not quite.

"What's unfortunate is that there is this distinction between storytellers and literary writers, which I don't think should really come into it at all. It's the difference between a squash player and a tennis player. They're both hitting a ball with a racket, but to different rules and scoring differently. I don't play squash, I play tennis, if you follow me."

Oh yes, I follow him. Tennis players get paid more than squash players. "Well, yes." Is it true that he gets $11 million a book? He's laughing at me again: "I'm not going to tell you that." He will tell me this: "I get paid probably more than I deserve. But not as much as I would like."

Perfectly polite, absolutely amiable, bloody good fun. A session with Mr Smith is a bit like the pay cheque for one of his books: he gave me what I deserved, and not quite as much as I might have liked.