Fourth Estate skulduggery

Tim Waterstone is the man who set up the bookshop chain in 1982, so you might expect him to have read a few books, and be OK at writing them. In fact, he’s more a businessman than a writer. He began life as a broker in Calcutta, before becoming marketing manager for Allied Breweries and W. H. Smith.

But it turns out that Waterstone is rather a skilled thriller writer; his publicity people are doing him a disservice in their promotional literature by comparing him to Jeffrey Archer (the novel’s gallumphing Archeresque title apart).

He has wisely chosen two worlds he knows about to set his thriller in — business and publishing. It’s a thinly disguised milieu he’s dealing with, too. What might the big bookselling chain, Waterwell’s, be based on? Which merchant bank could he be referring to when he talks about Warings — ‘old money, old establishment, shitty old Warings’? And who does Rod Tadlock, the maverick Australian newspaper owner with a taste for corporate takeovers, remind one of?

All these shades of the truth, mixed in with Waterstone’s own experiences of publishing and business, give the thriller a convincing feel. It revolves around the story of a pair of newspapers, the Daily Meteor and the Sunday Correspondent, that have been in the same family for generations, until the internet started affecting sales.

The ageing newspaper patriarch, Lord Kimpton, in desperation to keep the paper in the family, gets a loan from the Rupert Murdoch figure and, fatally, also agrees to a killer clause in the loan contract: should the paper need more money, the contract says, then the Murdoch figure has first call on the paper’s shares.

This, more or less, was the deal that the Berry family, owners of the Daily Telegraph for much of the 20th century, struck with Conrad Black; meaning that Black took control of the paper in 1986, until recent difficulties led him to sell it.