Refer to the City of Joy and there aren't many who won't know what you're talking about: even if you aren't one of the eight million who bought the book or have seen the film, City of Joy has entered the language as ironic shorthand for the slums of Calcutta. Yet the name of the man who coined it remains comparatively unknown outside France.
Dominique Lapierre began life as a journalist working for Paris Match. The in-depth articles run by the magazine involved indepth research. He would spend weeks, even months on one assignment: the last days of Caryl Chessman on death row in San Quentin; a profile of the 1960s bull-fighter phenomenon El Cordobes; the first interview with General von Cholitz, who chose to disobey Hitler's order to raze Paris to the ground at the end of the second World War. Eventually, rather than waste the experience, he began to build these articles into books, usually in tandem with Larry Collins, an American journalist he met in Paris at the end of the war. Their first collaboration was an account of the liberation of Paris, Is Paris Burning. Their last, more than 20 years later, was the story of India's struggle for independence - Freedom At Midnight, for which he spent two years in India.
Appalled at the poverty and destitution there, Lapierre resolved to give a percentage of the eventual royalties to an Indian charity, preferably one involved with lepers. Who else to ask what best to do with his money but Mother Teresa? She introduced him to James Stevens (the man who would eventually be transformed into Patrick Swayze in the movie) whose refuge for leper boys was threatened with closure. Talking to Stevens that afternoon, Lapierre realised the proceeds from Freedom At Midnight would only keep it running for so long. So on an impulse he told Stevens this was just a down-payment and that more would follow. Returning to Paris, he wrote an article about the plight of the children of Calcutta, the result was an onslaught of envelopes containing anything from a child's pocket money to a cheque for £14,000. Then he sold his much-loved house surrounded by vineyards in St Tropez. Two years later the story of one man's crusade in the Calcutta slums became an international bestseller.
Just writing cheques is not enough, Dominique Lapierre insists, when we meet at the offices of his London publishers. "You have to deserve the right to give. You have to work so hard. To think you only have to be generous is absolutely naive. You have to be much more than generous. You have to be really fighting at every stage" - fighting Indian bureaucracy that can leave a truck standing at a dockside for two years on the one hand, and accusations that you're only doing it to avoid tax on the other. Now comes A Thousand Suns, subtitled Witness To History, a leap-frogging autobiography that begins with the youthful Dominique Lapierre's first assignment, covering the hi-jacking in 1960 of a Portuguese cruise ship off the coast of Brazil by radical latterday pirates in an attempt to attract world attention to the dictatorships of Franco in Spain and Salazar in Portugal. It ends with Mother Teresa, who I suggest has also come in for a fair share of criticism. He scoffs.
"It is easy to be destructive. I have known Mother Teresa for many years. I did a film on her with Geraldine Chaplin. I frankly admit that I resented some aspects of her, giving out her medals for this and that, and her language was often boring, but the things she achieved. It's absolutely unbelievable. She could have been president of General Motors, the greatest chief executive of the biggest corporation in the world and it would have worked. And most important she showed that we don't have to go to Calcutta; we can do that here. We can all make a better world."
The world is in need now of heroes, he believes, which he says was the impetus behind the book. "Real heroes, not celebrities. Heroes whose stories I have been lucky enough to tell over the years. It's marvellous at some point of one's life to be able to share with your readers your great emotions, things that you have not been able to write about at the time. In those days you would report in a much drier manner, but the magnitude of history I was witnessing submerged me. I really felt I was with those who made history. We all need beacons and those people have in a sense been my beacons, my point of reference through my life."
One of these is Caryl Chessman whom Lapierre interviewed in 1960 on San Quentin's notorious death row. A bright man (and certainly innocent of the rape he was accused of - in California then a capital offence) Chessman had fought his way into US history via eight reprieves over the 12 years since his arrest in 1948. Lapierre had six interviews with Chessman, each of them several hours long. The 23-year-old reporter became fascinated by the small-time gangster who would quote Francois Villon, Albert Camus and Swinburne. He was entirely self-taught, yet not allowed to write. "Can you imagine," Lapierre says, "how much this meeting can shape one's sensitivity for life?" Less than a week after their last meeting, Chessman went to the gas chamber while Lapierre witnessed the scenes outside. It was, he says, "something unbearable".
"The man was perfectly sane, great looking, cultured, smiling. It's one thing to interview someone with cancer who is going to die. But this man was full of his health and in great spirits, he was 39 and he still believed he was going to be spared. I was in front of the biggest possible injustice. What was terrible was that it was a ritual thing. There are injustices that happen by mistake. But this was no mistake. And what was so extraordinary to me as a young Frenchman was the manners of the prison staff. `Mr Chessman will be happy to see you' and so on. It was all just public relations. Beside the fact that it made of me a big opponent of the death penalty, it was really one of those touching points that one can have in one's life."
THE stories Dominque Lapierre recounts in A Thousand Suns still bear the stamp of his alma mater, Paris Match: human interest stories, racy and direct, more tabloid than broadsheet. Yet there is no denying their force. He believes the role of a journalist is not to make judgements but to bear witness. It is important, he says, that we don't forget. Who now remembers the Red Army Faction, the Japanese terrorists who in 1972 massacred 32 passengers at Lod airport in Israel? The story of the mass exodus of the French from Algeria has also been forgotten, but it continues to inform what is happening there now.
And as for Caryl Chessman, Lapierre reminds me that 38 states in the US still have the death penalty. But it's not all downbeat. We meet El Cordobes, the illiterate bullfighter who became a global megastar in the 1960s and whose cult status in his home country could be said to have paved the way for the extraordinary changes in Spain on the death of Franco.
We meet Dominique Pierre himself, a 12-year-old in occupied Paris, then an evacuated schoolboy in Louisiana trying to fit in - and there we first meet the great love of his life, classic cars. His first was a 1923 Nash Convertible which he restored himself, aged 14. Back in France at the end of the war, he drove from Paris to Istanbul in a 1927 Amilcar. For his honeymoon he drove across America in a 1938 Chrysler convertible; in 1956, shortly before the Hungarian uprising he drove across Russia in a Simca (unheard of); and what he calls "the climax of his road adventures", a 6,364-mile drive from Bombay back home to the south of France (via Afghanistan) in an old Rolls Royce Silver Cloud.
A story that doesn't make it to the book is how Dominique Pierre was the last person to see "Lucky" Luciano alive. He had bumped into him in Naples. As they said goodbye Lapierre asked the world's most notorious gangster what he would say to a young man who wanted to follow in his footsteps. "He looked and me, put his arm on my shoulder and said. `Well, I would guess I would tell him it is much more difficult to earn a dishonest dollar than earn an honest one.' Four hours later he died of a massive heart attack." And was "Lucky" Luciano one of his heroes, I ask? Dominique Lapierre smiles and gently rebukes me in his charming, fractured French. "You have forgotten," he says. "He is not in the book."
A Thousand Suns - Witness to History is published by Simon & Schuster, price £20 in the UK