Frederick Forsyth, author of squillion-selling thrillers, is popping into town for lunch. He’ll be speaking at St Andrews on the Terrace in Wellington, on 6 September.

Tickets cost from $7 to $12 and you can get them from the Book Council on (04) 499 1569. As they say, ‘a service fee may apply’.

PS: Most folks know that Freddie wrote The Day of the Jackal, The Odessa File, Avenger and Veteran, and is generally assumed to have reached his creative peak about 25 years ago. But did you know:

• He attended Granada University in Spain.

• At 19 years old, he was one of the youngest pilots ever in the Royal Air Force.

• In 1965 he joined the BBC as a correspondent and later covered the Biafran War.

• In The Day of the Jackal, the would-be assassin gets a fake identity card by visiting a church, and looking for a tombstone of a baby. He then obtains a birth certificate, and uses that to get the identity card. In real life at that time, the government didn't check requests with the death registry - and Forsyth revealed this in his writings.

• In Deceiver, a British agent bugs the corpse of an IRA member, so that the British secret service could monitor mourners’ conversations. The British government was asked if this had ever been done in real life, and the government was forced to admit that it had.
  

• Forsyth frequently criticises the European Union and joined the Tory party in 1997, saying 'I have a pathological desire to help lame dogs over stiles.'

• Rather bizarrely, our homegrown Kiwi gardening guru, Maggie Barry, will chair the noon-till-one Wellington event.