The comforts of fiction

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.