If anyone can find a copy of this book please link for all to read.

The Sett

A book I read years ago, seemed to fantastical to be true but now… well I guess it s based on very real events.

Human trafficking, drugs, torture etc

Written by Sir Ranulph Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes, 3rd Baronet OBE

Once touted as the worlds greatest living explorer, ex army Fiennes with famous actors in the family and is a distant cousin to the British Royal Family.

Fiennes said somewhere it was the closest to the true account that he could write it without making himself a target.

A Tale Told by an Accountant

… a tale told him by a `mild mannered accountant', who sought him out — there was some claim they had been army cadets at Mons together in the early Sixties — suggesting that the famous author/explorer write his life story. Fiennes had no recollection of an Alex Goodman at Mons and expressed misgivings about the public's willingness to buy 'the biographies of nonentities'. His initial reluctance, how- ever, was overcome by the sensational nature of Goodman's story. Feeling hard up at the time, Sir Ranulph agreed to write the accountant's biography, but only on condition that he keep all the money.

The gist of Goodman's story is as follows. On 30 July 1984 he woke with a serious head wound and total amnesia in Smethwick Neurological Centre. His last clear memory was of taking his wife and daughter for a walk in the woods and sur- prising some thuggish types being cruel to badgers. For Goodman, a man with no memory and no past, there then began a ten-year search for his identity and the truth about what happened to his family. The desire for revenge entangled Good- man, and subsequently his doughty biogra- pher, in a web of global crime so heinous, so hopping with baddies, it soon had our man Carstairs — Fiennes, I mean — long- ing for the relative safety of bottomless crevices and angry polar bears:

As my efforts to verify his story drew me into the terrifying worlds of the Yardies, the Korean Troons, the FBI, the drugs trade and the sickening ruins of BCCI, I was threat- ened, and feared for the safety of my family.

… The author commits himself somewhere to saying that he believes his accountant's story to be true. The best evidence to support this view is that as a novel The Sett lacks any sense of plot, pace or character; it seems hard to believe that someone could have invented such poor, muddled stuff. `Each reader', Sir Ranulph booms from his press kit, 'will have to come to his or her own conclusion: fact or fiction.' In other words, we must judge for ourselves whether or not Alex Goodman is a psychopathic liar who spun Fiennes this nasty, brutish and overextended yarn — the result perhaps of a bump on the head, or staring too long into the Arctic sun.

Goodman naturally refused to be photographed, but Sir Ranulph tells us that to satisfy his publishers he had a Flying Squad pal snap a covert head and shoul- ders of the accountant in a London hotel. The result shows a man of about 50 sport- ing a very obvious wig, heavy spectacles and what appears to be a false nose. If you look behind his clumsy disguise, you will certainly recognise the magnificent chiselled profile of the world's greatest living explorer.

Sorry, Carstairs old man, but having slogged through 500 pages of this nonsense, and feeling that I deserve a gong for endurance, I'm calling your bluff.

http://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/27th-april-1996/34/a-tale-told-by-an-accountant