Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, it's a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that at some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right?

It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music

when it's out of ice cream.

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James Salter expected to die suddenly, half a century ago, and in the air. He didn't. Instead, he became the only fighter pilot of the Korean War to have written his way onto the Penguin Modern Classics list.

Open a copy of one of those silver and white books.

Light Years, perhaps, his account of the slow collapse of an American marriage,

or solo faces, his novel about mountain climbers, or the hunters, his fictionalisation of his Air Force years.

And you'll see an odd line in his biography,

less known than his contemporaries, but always noted for the brilliance of his style.

The novel hasn't been his only theatre of operations.

He spent more than a decade in the movie business, writing scripts for the Robert Redford's

skiing drama Downhill Racer, for Sydney Lumet's The Appointment,

and turning director himself for a film called Three. It's become a commonplace to describe Salter

as a writer's writer, but that phrase and the dead air of connoisseurship that surrounds it

doesn't do justice to the vigorous and exhilarating business

of reading one of his books, or to his own personal vigour. Late last year, Philip Roth announced

his retirement from fiction. This week, James Salter, who entered this world seven years before his

fellow novelist, is publishing a new novel, his first in 34 years. It's called

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