Wilbur Smith still looks a bit dazed when we meet him, a day after his evening book reading and signing session at Ambience Mall, Vasant Kunj in Delhi. A session that has gone on past 10 p.m.

“There were over 300 people, including children,” says the 78-year-old bestselling author, sounding incredulous. He is particularly moved by his meeting with a paraplegic fan. “He told me he was a pistol champion, and had been reading my books all his life. It was an edifying session,” he says.

For someone whose books have sold steadily in India, Smith says that it was only very recently he realised there were so many people who knew English here. He is on a six-city tour of the country to promote his latest book, Those in Peril , at the invitation of Landmark, the bookstore chain of the Tatas.

“My publishers told me there are more English speakers here than in North America,” he says with a slightly sheepish laugh. Well, as they say in Urdu: Der se aaye, durust aaye (You arrived late but in good health).

Not that this is his first visit to India, a country brought alive to him, he says by authors like M.M. Kaye and Kipling. “I have been coming here for more than 20 years.”

And, the only mystery the British African (that's how he defines his nationality) novelist has not been able to crack is why Indians shake their heads when they want to say yes.

“It's the doosra ,” we tell him, “you know, the one that goes the other way.”

Although he likes cricket — “I used to be a very poor off-spinner. If I had a cent for every time I got hit for a six, I would have been very rich quickly”— the allusion beats his bat. The Rhodesia-born author, who has homes in South Africa and England (although he only set foot on British soil when he was 30), supports both teams. “It is great for me because I love it when either team wins.”

But unlike Jeffery Archer, another best-selling author widely read in India, Smith appears to have only a passing acquaintance with cricket. He has written 33 books after publishing his first successful novel, When the Lion Feeds in 1964. This is an epic tale in which the Courtney family was introduced to the book-reading world.

After Sean and his twin, Garrick, many generations of Courtneys have brought mesmerising Africa closer to readers in spellbinding stories of love, hatred, vengeance, greed and lust.

How tough is it to write a series? (Apart from the Courtney Series, he's written the Ballantyne Series and the Egyptian Series.) More than half of his books have been written as a series; “I actually wrote When the Lion Feeds as a one-off book. It started as a short story, but it just grew and grew into a full length novel and then into a series,” he says.

“The characters appealed to me a lot. They were there in situ, so I didn't have to start building new characters again. And then I discovered that writing a series is easier, it's a logical continuation of a story.” He also feels that writing in series form has enlarged his readership base.

Pen to the paper

What about his technique? Is it something like Graham Greene writing 500 finished words a day?

Smith says his method is to complete whichever section he is writing, no matter how long or short it is. He gets up at 6.30 a.m. (“an earlier hour than when I am loafing between books”), has a shower, looks into the mirror, speaks out dialogues he wants to put in the book, has a light breakfast and then gets on with the writing. Then a light lunch, a cup of tea with his wife, and more writing. “It works out to between 6-8 hours of work,” he says. Usually, a book is done in about eight months.

After about five months, he starts having doubts, he says, and stops work. “I stand back for a while, and then come back and start from the beginning, read through and make changes. A book is a bit like a naughty baby, constantly needing attention,” he says.

And what has been the worst experience while writing?

“When I lost my manuscript. Before I had the PC, I was writing in long hand, and there was only one copy of this manuscript. I lost 150 pages,” he says. The book, Gold Mine , was literally lost somewhere in a gold mine when Smith travelled from Cape town to Johannesburg to research a mine. Ouch!

Smith tells not only riveting tales in his novels; he also has a fund of fascinating yarns about wild animals, mostly heard from his granddad. Complete with sound effects, he enthrals us with the story of a man-eating lion that his granddad had to shoot.

He entertains us describing his encounters with Frieda Pinto, the star of Slumdog Millionaire . “My wife and I were at the Taj Lake Palace Hotel Udaipur last year, when we first saw Frieda and my wife rushes over to her and gets introduced. Three months later in Rome, we are at the Savoy Hotel and there is this raucous party going on next door, where there is much giggling and laughing. I tell my wife to go and tell them to pipe down. She goes, the door opens and there's Frieda again. They go hug-hug, and then my wife too joins in the giggling and laughing, while I am left all by myself in my room,” he says.

The Wide screen experience

A movie buff who is hooked to Turner Classic Movies when at home, Smith says he is not attracted to the medium as a writer — although many of his books have been made into Hollywood movies.

“It is very different,” he says and recounts with a straight face how after he wrote a film script, “which was a work of sheer genius”, he was summoned to a film conference by a Hollywood producer. “He drew out the huge cigar from his mouth and says, ‘Right, fellas, now how do we fix this crap?'”

Smith says he goes “Cringe Cringe” when he sees a film based on his book. “But the money is good,” he admits.

It must be — he has a house in London, a holiday chalet in the Swiss alps and an ancestral home in Cape Town that stares out at the Table Mountain, which he gazes at as he has dinner in the evenings. “It's pretty splendid,” he says.

He also has the use of a house in the English countryside where he goes fishing. “I am like a swallow. In the summers you will find me in England and in winters in Cape Town. “But I feel most at home in Africa, I know the birds and nature,” he says.

The Age of Internet and writing

With eBooks we clearly touch a raw nerve. “Do you know that Google and the people who own technology empires, their net worth exceeds those of many countries, and their arrogance exceeds that of Russia? Negotiating with them is like dealing with Julius Caesar,” he rants.

Elaborating on the “negotiation” bit, he scowls: “Well, the rights to Kindle. They pay in cents.” “I am okay, as I was lucky to be writing at a time when authors were well rewarded. And I had the best of it. But are young authors going to be able to live on what Google pays them. I don't think so,” he worries. “That's why J.K. Rowling is in such a powerful position — she controls all of that. She's probably the only author who is able to do that,” he says approvingly.

You simply have to ask what makes a bestseller to an author who sells so much and has been translated in 26 languages. “The reader makes a bestseller,” is the endearing reply.

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