I’m hoping that when Daniel Craig steps out as Mikael Blomkvist in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, he will do for journalists what he did for Speedos in Casino Royale: make them (almost) fashionable. Blomkvist, Steig Larrson’s crusading reporter, is already a poster boy for old school journalism and may inspire a new generation of wannabee hacks.
When I was an aspiring journalist, Woodward and Bernstein were all the rage. But, enthralling as Watergate was, All the President’s Men ultimately adds up to a lot of phone calls. I craved greater excitement and I drew my inspiration from a reporter who was every bit as driven as Woodstein, but whose pursuit of the truth seemed much more exotic. Peter Miller, a German freelance, followed an ambulance to the apartment of Salomon Tauber, a Jewish Holocaust-survivor who had committed suicide. The next day, Miller was given the dead man’s diary by a friend in the police. After reading Tauber’s life story and learning that Tauber had been in Riga concentration camp, commanded by Eduard Roschmann, “The Butcher of Riga,” Miller resolved to search for Roschmann, which put his life on the line as he went up against an organization dedicated to protecting those high ranking Nazis who had avoided capture at the end of the war. The year was 1972 and Peter Miller was the fictional star of Fredrick Forsyth’s The Odessa File.
Miller’s example propelled me to the dizzying heights of The County Down Spectator. I was a shy seventeen year old, thrust into the far from frenetic world of market town journalism. This was, of course, Northern Ireland and the Troubles had their nerve centre just ten miles up the road in Belfast; but, somehow, they mostly passed Bangor by: a handful of bombs in thirty years was not a lot by Northern Irish standards. It says much about the area that the only militant outfit I ever spoke directly to as a reporter was the Animal Liberation Front. They called once to claim responsibility for some act of vandalism, and legitimized their claim by telling me: “the codeword is Badger”. I suggested, diplomatically, that they ought to have alerted us of the code word in advance, so that we might recognize it. The spokesman for the ALF had not thought of this, and promptly hung up. The reporting wasn’t exactly cutting edge, and neither was the terrorism.
This was not the kind of journalism I wanted to do; I was supposed to be out there discovering my own Odessa File. But I just could not get away and ended up staying on ‘The Speccy’ for fifteen years. Then, in March 1993, I was suddenly thrust into the heart of a major news story. The IRA detonated a massive car bomb that devastated our Main Street, including parts of the newspaper office. I was filling in for the holidaying editor and had to marshal a team of reporters, edit the paper through the dust and glass, and get it out and for sale in a matter of hours.
It was journalism in a war zone — everything I’d ever dreamed of doing. And I hated every minute of it.
A combination of fear and adrenaline got me through, but it was like someone had switched a light on — or more properly, off. I realized that I’d fallen in love with the idea of being a journalist, but I didn’t like the practicalities. I didn’t like pursuing stories. I didn’t like talking to people. I had the kind of phobia of using phones that comes from being shy. I didn’t care enough. I liked writing, I just didn’t especially like facts. Thanks to that bomb, I knew that I would never have had the patience or tenacity or indeed the bravery to be a Woodward or a Bernstein, but I could perhaps have a crack at being a Peter Miller or a Mikael Blomkvist by just making it all up.
Within a year, I had written my first novel, Divorcing Jack, which starred a mouthy journalist called Dan Starkey who went after his story no matter what and took on the terrorists and didn’t give up or back down. That’s my kind of journalism.
Dan Starkey has appeared in seven novels to date, and was played by David Thewlis in the 1998 movie. His latest adventure, Nine Inches, has just been published.
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