Just to illustrate the point about Shibumi, as fascinating and intermittently thrilling as it is, not being meant to be taken entirely seriously, here's a footnote which appears at the bottom of page 179 of my Headline paperback edition:
A couple of things to unpick here: firstly the reference to "Naked/Kill" is to a sort of unarmed combat technique, possibly of Hel's own devising (I can't remember), which allows you to kill people by sticking a styrofoam coffee cup up their nose, and the like. The later reference to "certain advanced sexual techniques" reflects some of the (fairly coy) descriptions of what Hel and Hana get up to in the evenings and inevitably prompts thoughts of Sting's infamous claims of seven-hour tantric sex sessions with the missus, poor woman. As this Guardian article says, that claim mainly derives from a drunken interview Sting and Bob Geldof did for Q magazine back in the 1990s.
As for the other claims, the first relates to the filming of The Eiger Sanction and describes a real-life incident, the death of British climber David Knowles during filming in 1974. The claim about the Milan art theft relates to The Loo Sanction, which is a loose sequel to The Eiger Sanction and features the same protagonist, Jonathan Hemlock. I have no idea whether the claim has any basis in truth, and I certainly can't find any citation apart from articles specifically relating to this footnote.
And the choice of name for one of the fictitious terrorist organisations in Shibumi invites two responses: firstly the bit of rudimentary childish image-editing below to clip out a couple of letters, and secondly: Asian Dawn?
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