As a child Edward Lincoln had had the run of a racing stable, and as a young man he had earned his living riding horses in films. So when a sick friend asked him to investigate the comprehensive failure of a string of racehorses, he knew more or less what to look for. But there were difficulties. For one thing, the horses in question were in South Africa. For another, it was impossible for him to go about the task quietly and unnoticed. He was by that time a world-class star of action films, in which he played the hero. Everywhere he went he was watched and (when he would allow it) interviewed. Away from his own home, the limelight was permanently switched on. Also, although he knew himself to be a quiet ordinary man with a wife and family, everyone he met persisted in believing him to be a superman, like his image. The easy-seeming survey of the string of racehorses blew him through a smokescreen into circumstances where to survive he had to make himself become the man everyone else already thought he was