Inspired by Maclean's Eastern Approaches he began to think about the Far East. He sought a life in dangerous situations as a journalist, being sent to Algeria to cover the revolutionary crisis in the French colonial administration. Hopkirk travelled widely over many years in the regions where his six books are set – Russia, Central Asia, the Caucasus, China, India, Pakistan, Iran, and eastern Turkey. Before entering Fleet Street, he served as a subaltern in the King's African Rifles in 1949 – in the same battalion as Lance-Corporal Idi Amin, later to emerge as a Ugandan tyrant. In the 1950s, he edited the West African news magazine Drum, sister paper to the South African Drum. At the Dragon he played rugby, and shot at Bisley.īefore turning full-time author, he was an ITN reporter and newscaster for two years, the New York City correspondent of Lord Beaverbrook's The Sunday Express, and then worked for nearly twenty years on The Times five as its chief reporter, and latterly as a Middle East and Far East specialist. From an early age he was interested in spy novels carrying around Buchan's Greenmantle and Kipling's Kim stories about India. It must have resonated with his writings in the history of the lawless frontiers of the British Empire. The family hailed originally from the borders of Scotland in Roxburghshire where there was a rich history of barbaric raids and reivers hanging justice.
Hopkirk was educated at the Dragon School in Oxford. He grew up at Danbury, Essex, notable for the historic palace of the Bishop of Rochester. Peter Hopkirk was born in Nottingham, the son of Frank Stewart Hopkirk, a prison chaplain, and Mary Perkins.
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