If you read anything this week Icarus by Deon Meyer (Hodder & Stoughton) R280A new Bennie Griessel adventure is always good news - although this time things are not going well for our police captain. After almost two years without alcohol, a gatvol Griessel is back on the sauce after a colleague kills his wife and daughters before turning the gun on himself. Then, outside Cape Town, internet entrepreneur Ernst Richter is discovered murdered after being missing for a month. No one wants the case, despite there being no shortage of those who wanted Richter dead - among his achievements was a service that creates false documents and phone calls to enable people to cheat on their partners. Shades of Ashley Madison, you could say.The issue"Going undercover? Go Wooster." So says Frederick Forsyth, and local spooks and others in the security establishment may heed the advice and brush up on their PG Wodehouse, particularly the Jeeves stories. Forsyth, author of, among others, The Day of the Jackal and The Odessa File, reveals in his coming memoir, The Outsider: My Life in Intrigue (Bantam), that he worked as a secret agent for the British intelligence agency MI6 for more than 20 years.The Wooster code, if I may, was employed on a mission to what was then Rhodesia in the 1970s, when the target was Ian Smith's government. "Once again," Forsyth writes, "my amiable but witless Bertie Wooster pose paid off. The men at the top were white supremacists, which is to say racial bigots. The bigot cannot resist an earnest inquirer who, basically sympathetic and seemingly right-wing, asks that the complexities of the situation be explained to him. I do not think any of them suspected as I listened, nodded and smiled that my views were the reverse of theirs."This approach, however, did not work on then foreign minister Pik Botha when Forsyth was here in the 1990s digging up information on atomic weapons. Forsyth got on well with Botha, whom he described as "the only man among [the Nationalists] that I liked". They were on safari together when, after a braai, late at night, Forsyth asked him: "Pik, when the ANC takes over, what are you going to do with the six atom bombs?" Botha began to chuckle. "Freddie," he eventually spoke, "you can go back home and tell your people we are going to destroy the lot.""So much for an elaborate cover story," Forsyth writes. "The old buzzard knew exactly what I was, who I was asking for and what they wanted to hear ..." The Outsider is released next week.The bottom line"Norman, once again words have failed you." (After being punched in the face by Mailer.) - Every Time a Friend Succeeds Something Inside Me Dies: The Life of Gore Vidal by Jay Parini (Doubleday)..