How good joss and fireworks helped Clavell book a date with destiny

FOR a novelist whose wordy bestsellers run to about 1,000 pages, James Clavell was being distinctly taciturn in replying to the photographer's questions.

''Why are you here in Hongkong?'' ''To make money.'' ''Those are helicopters on your tie; do you fly them?'' ''Yes.'' Not having been told beforehand he was to be photographed, and clearly irritated by a request to pose with his legs dangling in the Mandarin Oriental's swimming pool, the author of King Rat, Whirlwind, Taipan, Noble House and Gai-Jin, remarked sourly: ''I don't like to be thrown.'' ''Bad joss taipan,'' I mumbled to myself as the 70-year-old author grumpily swivelled in a chair in his suite to face the camera lens and remarked: ''I take the Chinese line that taking my picture steals part of my soul.'' Clavell visibly relaxed once the portrait session had finished.

Given his self-confessed enthusiasm and love for Hongkong, a city he has visited regularly since 1963 when he lived in the territory for a year, it was unlikely he could have kept up his sense of pique for long.

''I would like to lead four concurrent lifetimes, and if I could I would like to spend one of them here . . . there is no other place like it [Hongkong] in the world, although I am not sure that it exists while I am not here.

''Within two or three days I am bitten by the Hongkong bug, which is the business of making things, doing things, trying to get stories, interviewing people; it is a great place.'' His visit last week was part of a stopover on his way home after a tour of Australia promoting his latest epic, Gai-Jin. At the same time he was having a series of meetings with the American producer and script writer Eric Bercovici, who had also worked on the television versions of Shogun and Noble House with him.

Gai-Jin, published in the spring, is the latest in his series of novels about the intermingling of the West and East and is to be made into an eight-hour mini-series to be shown on the US NBC network in 1995.