British journalist Robert Fisk was more amused than anything else when he discovered that a biography of Saddam Hussein had been published in Cairo under his name. The book was selling quite well, he was told, but its purple prose and rather forgiving treatment of Hussein’s crimes made him quite uncomfortable with the notion of taking credit for it. And so Mr. Fisk, who has written five books and reports on the Middle East for The Independent, got on a plane and headed for Cairo, intent on tracking down the impostor.

His detective work took him from the offices of the publisher whose name appeared in the front of the book to the Egyptian Ministry of Culture, an underground mosque, and a local bookshop. No need to reveal here whether Mr. Fisk succeeded in cracking the mystery; suffice it to say that his marvelous account of the adventure, published in Friday's Indepedent, is well worth reading.