A sparrow falls. The death of Wilbur Smith at the weekend deprives the world of one of the great luminaries of popular fiction of the second half of the last century. He joins Jameses Michener and Clavell, Hammond Innes and Harold Robbins in the great 1970s dad bookshelf in the sky. Kids of today will say: ‘Wilbur who?’ But I owe that man a debt of gratitude. He was one of the first ‘grown-up’ novelists I really got stuck into; along, of course, with Stephen King. Like Stephen King, he was grown-up in just the right way to appeal to children — really, a hop and a skip from Willard Price’s Adventure series, except with some real history in them and lashings of rumpty-pumpty. And the titles! The Sound of Thunder. The Angels Weep. Men of Men. The Burning Shore. Nothing ironic or elliptical there.
He belonged to the first age of giant fat paperbacks with embossed covers and the author’s name twice the size of the title.
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