Scoop! Journalists in Fiction

Interview: Simon Lelic, The Facility

One of the main characters in Simon Lelic's The Facility (2010) is an investigative journalist working for an online newspaper, The Libertarian (see previous post).

Simon was kind enough to answer a few questions about his novel, and about journalism in fiction. 

Here is what he said:   

In a sentence, how would you sum up the England of Unified Security? I am not asking for a date, but...?

The England depicted in The Facility is a country obsessed with security at any cost.

It was never my intention with The Facility to make a prediction; rather, I wanted to convey how easy it might be for a comfortable, politically demotivated society to ‘sleepwalk’ into a state of reality that is antipathetic to every right-minded individual’s moral core. 

The country depicted in The Facility is only a handful of, admittedly fairly major, events from ours. It is these events that give us distance from such a bleak future but there is a real danger, I feel, that we as a citizenry are becoming ever more complacent to ways of thinking and being that should truly appall us – and would, were they ever to impact on us other than through newspaper headlines. 

I'm particularly interested in Tom Clarke, the journalist. How did he come about? Was it plot-driven or character driven?

It probably sounds like something of a cliché but for me it is always, as I write, the characters that drive the story forwards. I don’t plan my novels to any significant degree in advance – I certainly don’t write a chapter plan. I may have a rough idea about what might happen in the next two or three scenes, and maybe at an undefined point in the novel further on (though rarely the denouement!) but I let the characters lead me towards and through these events.

I once heard someone describe it as being like driving at night down a country lane. You know your starting point; you have a rough idea where you are trying to end up. But all you really see as you drive (or let your character’s drive) is the space twenty or thirty feet ahead of you that is illuminated by your headlights.

Talking about the Press, Tom tells Julia: “We insinuate and incriminate and incite and the more we do the better the police look...” Is this true?

It is a point of view. It is probably true some of the time – which is not to say that the press’s complicity in this regard is always deliberate. Often – and this is somehow worse, to my mind – it is unthinking, uncaring; or, caring only about the publication’s most immediate objective: winning, and retaining, readers. The British press is one of the most rigorous and ferocious in the world. On balance this does us, as citizens, more good than harm, I would say, but accountability and responsibility are nevertheless sacrificed on occasion for the sake of a striking headline.

How important was it for you to think through the mechanics of The Libertarian? Long articles and print-outs...

The Libertarian is a publication positioned for the digital age, though not so radically divorced from current digital news offerings that it would seem unrecognisable to present-day readers. The Facility is set in the future but it is not futuristic. I wanted, as I say, events rather than time to mark the delineation between our world and that of the novel. Had The Libertarian been a printed newspaper, it would have felt, in the context of the book, a little staid. But had I pitched the publication as something more revolutionary than an online offering, it might have undermined the reader’s sense that the events that take place in the book might – almost – be happening now.

Do you enjoy virtual interviews and seeing a wide range of reviews and comments about your work?

I genuinely find any and all interest in what I have written to be tremendously flattering. I must admit I rarely followed any literary blogs before my first novel, Rupture, was published but I have since discovered an array of useful, informative and, above all, insightful resources online. The virtual world democratises literary criticism, which to my mind can only be a good thing. At a time when so many publishers seem averse to taking a risk on anything more daring that a B-list celebrity’s memoir, the internet offers emerging writers and books at least a fighting chance of getting noticed.

• Rupture is published by Picador and is available now in paperback. The Facility is out now in Mantle hardback. For more information about Simon Lelic, visit www.simonlelic.com.

The Facility, by Simon Lelic

Julia is disappointed. She has come to journalist Tom Clarke to ask for help in finding her husband who has mysteriously disappeared.

Tom works for the Libertarian, an online political news site, sufficiently successful to get seats at the front of the Home Secretary's press conferences, and to have enough money to pay highly placed sources. He is 28, and had followed Libertarian editor Katherine Fry from the Sunday Times.

Julia produces a clipping - presumably a printout - of one of his stories, headlined "Commons consents to police criminality."

Tom glowers in grey scale at the head of the topmost page, through glasses he borrowed from a colleague and beneath hair that was combed for the occasion and photoshopped at his request - to seem fairer than its usual fawn.

Julia explains the efforts she has made so far to track down missing Arthur. Tom replies that if those people who know the law can't help her, he can't either.

"I'm a journalist. I'm just a journalist.... I just work here."

Not an impressive start by fearless Tom, but he does do some digging. He calls his contacts, an officer in the Met and a Home Office civil servant who, "has got tastes, shall we say, that require investment."

"The fact that they didn't say anything: it tells us something."

Tom is working in a paranoid Britain, under draconian Unified Security legislation brought in after terrorists blow up Drax power station, where the law and order apparatus leaks information for sinister purpose.

"We legitimise their actions, justify the time for which these people (terror suspects) can be held by making them seem more dangerous, sometimes, than they really are....

"We insinuate and incriminate and incite and the more we do the better the police look." 

Eventually the News of the World runs a story about "Guantanamo UK", and a secret government prison, that is The Facility of the title, where a small number of gay men have been brutally incarcerated in a bid to stamp out a disease that explicitly resemble AIDS. One of them is Julia's husband, Arthur...

When the story breaks hardline Home Secretary Margaret Myers holds a news conference.

"There will be questions, I realise, about our decision to impose a media blackout on the story until now but I make no apologies for this. This government believes in governing, not scaremongering."

Trevor, from the Daily Express, asks "Don't you think the public had a right to know?"

The Home Secretary indulges in a show of irritation. "Do you really need me to answer that, Trevor? Do you think if we had told you, you would have confined yourself to reporting the facts? Do you think if we had come to you with our absolute assurance that the disease was under control you would have presented to the public a balanced responsible, reassuring message?"

• The Facility, by Simon Lelic (Mantle, £12.99) is reviewed on To Be Read.    

Annika in the library: The joy of cuttings

"Here you are," (the librarian Blomberg) said a few moments later, triumphantly holding out a brown envelope. "Terrorism a la Ekland. You can sit over there. I'm here till six o'clock."

Annika (Bengtzon) took the envelope, opening it with sweaty fingers as she went over to the desk he had indicated. Cuttings were infinitely superior to computer printouts. on screen all the headings were the same size, every picture just as small. On the page the articles could live and breathe beneath noisy or subtle headlines: the typeface alone could tell her a lot about what the editors were trying to achieve, what signals they wanted to send. The number of pictures, their layout and technical quality told her even more: how important the item was deemed to be, but also how important this picture or article was in the general torrent of news that day. The skills of an entire profession of editors had been wiped out by the electronic archive.  

From Red Wolf, by Liza Marklund (2010) EuroCrime Review here

First impressions of a would-be reporter

My Turn to Make the Tea, by Monica Dickens, is the hugely entertaining tale of a young woman beginning a career in a 1950s provincial newsroom; I am very grateful to my colleague Alistair Robinson for the recommendation.

Here, the narrator (dubbed Poppy by her fellow reporters "for no better reason than that a Sunday paper was running a crude cartoon about a blonde called Poppy Pink") recalls her first visit to the Downingham Post:

I was surprised when I first came to this room for an interview. I had expected the editorial office, even of a provincial weekly, to be more impressive. I had expected Mr Pellet to look like an editor, not like a man who prods pigs with a stick on market day.

.... (Pellet) was the most unliterary man I had ever seen. Journalism is not literature, he was always telling me. I thought it ought to be, although the others downstairs told me that when I had been there as long as they had, I wouldn't waste my time thinking up original adjectives which the old man always replaced with some tired favourites from stock.

I can clearly remember realising my first interview attempt was doomed when I started gushing about the inspiring brilliance of George Orwell's journalism; a pretentious kid just out of university wasn't what this paper wanted.    

Investigative reporter puts the dead into deadlines...

"My name is Jack Parlabane and I'm pan-breid. Aye, that's right, don't kid on you can't understand the rhyming slang."

Perhaps uniquely among fictional journalists, hard-talking Parlabane files his story from beyond the grave.

"Killed in a typically foolhardy endeavour (let's avoid the word undertaking', shall we?), death by defenestration, gravity finally delivering the the ultimate skelp on the arse in revenge for my tears of insolent defiance. A four-storey fall out of my own livingroom window. Ironic? Inevitable? Hilarious? Take your pick... I guess you could call it the ultimate humiliation. ....

"...And yet here I am, still observing and reporting, still self-indulgently ranting and editorialising."

John Lapsley Parlabane - ex-con, killer and one-time cannibal - is one of two journalists who investigate charismatic psychic Gabriel Lafayette in Christopher Brookmyre's Attack of the Unsinkable Rubber Ducks; the other is the despised Jillian Noble, a columnist for what Parlabane dubs "the Daily Hate and Fear (I think we know which paper he means) and who has therefore 'forfeited her right to be called a journalist'.

Anyway, Parlabane knows how to succeed in newspapers:

"Garner a reputation as an incredible pain in the arse - sorry tenacious investigative reporter - my fact-finding dubiously enhanced by a facility for and disposition towards... oh, there's no point in sugar-coating this any more: burglary. Lock-picking, scaling buildings, breaking and entering: plain old criminal behaviour necessitated by (and thus, in my driven and simplistic mind, excused by) it frequently being the only way to get the evidence."

It's an entertaining read, and the deceased Parlabane passes on some useful tips from the other side...

"It's been one of my abiding principles that when you wake up each morning, you should welcome the possibility that later the same day your most deeply held belief might be proven utterly wrong: from political convictions to the laws of physics."

And this is certainly true - well, the second part at least:

"...as a journalist I like to think it makes me that bit harder to fool. It's when you think you already know the story that you risk letting the real story pass right under your nose."

A Crooked Sixpence

Roy Greenslade has been running extracts and fascinating background on a Fleet Street novel he rates as good as Scoop! or Towards the End of the Morning. I had never heard of A Crooked Sixpence, by Murray Sayle, but I am now determined to hunt down a copy.

Unquestionably, it's the best novel about popular British journalism. It is a thinly-veiled portrayal of life at The People in the 1950s in which many of the characters were so obviously drawn from real life that even without knowing them I can identify several of them, such as its editor Sam Campbell, deputy editor Nat Rothman, crime reporter Duncan Webb and photographer Stan Jaanus.

The central character, an Australian journalist desperate to break into Fleet Street, is clearly Sayle himself, who worked for a couple of years as Webb's assistant.

A Crooked Sixpence - Day one, the plot

A Crooked Sixpence - Day two, how Sunday pop papers differ from dailies

A Crooked Sixpence - Day three, don't put your daughter on the stage

A Crooked Sixpence - Day four, never deny a story you've paid for

A Crooked Sixpence - Day five, the newspaper is a libel from end to end

Murray Sayle - from The People to Vietnam, Everest, Ireland and Japan

Annika's back: Liza Marklund's Prime Time

"Crime is a blot on society in every democracy," Torstensson replied. "One of the most important obligations of the press is to investigate criminals at all levels of society and expose them."

Oh really, Schyman thought. And I thought that's what the police are supposed to do.

By and large, I agree with Schyman. But the irony is that one of Schyman's reporters, Annika Bengtzon is about to expose a criminal in a most public and spectacular way. Indeed, for English readers, the denouement of Prime Time will be the fourth time in which Liza Marklund's character has solved a crime, as ever one step ahead of the police.

I like Annika and I like Marklund. Prime Time, written in 2002 but only now published in the UK, is in some ways a conventional 'whodunnit', featuring a murder in a stately home that follows a formula that would be familiar to Agatha Christie, but at the same time giving endless insights into journalism (at least as it is practiced in this Swedish fiction).

The central plot concerns the brutal murder of a television show host, Michelle Carson, during the filming of a series rendered in English as Summer Frolic at the Castle (apparently it doesn't sound as dreadful in Swedish). The isolated location means there are 12 suspects, all loosely connected with the show, and all with some motive for doing away with Michelle. To add claustrophobic spice, one is Annika's best friend, two others work for her newspaper, Kvallspressen, another used to share a desk with her; yet another is a Nazi activist from her hometown. 

This is played out against a backdrop of domestic strains in Annika's relationship with her partner, brought about in large part the pressures of being for a journalist, and high level power politics played out at the newspaper.

As in her earlier books, Marklund is keen to locate the action in real places (the murder takes place at Yxtaholm Castle) and it would be quite easy to walk Annika's Stockholm - something I intend to do shortly). But I don't expect to find an 'Annika lived here' plaque in Katrinesholm:

"In her hometown no-one was impressed by her work, her career, and ambitions. They felt sory for her."

As her Aunt Martha asks:

"Writing about violence and crime, is that really a suitable job for a woman?"

Like all good fictional journalists, Annika has an ambivalent view of her job. Looking through her own paper's rather tawdry cuttings on murdered Michelle, she says: "This is insane. Why have we written so much about this girl?"

It is a theme picked up by the chairman of the Kvallspressen board:

"What about the rest of you (journalists), like this Annika Bengtzon - what kind of person is she? How can she write garbage like this?" 

As so often, Annika can write it because it happens to be true; it only became garbage because it involved a member of the chairman's family. As before, Marklund puts journalistic ethics to the forefront, and although (certainly in translation) she can be rather heavy handed in the dialogue she uses to frame them, the issues she raises are compelling, not least for an English reader fascinated by the different perspectives of Swedish practice.

Here's an exchange that is worth pondering...

"You don't always put everything in the paper," Annika explained in a serious voice.

"Why not if it's the truth?"

"Well, there's personal integrity to consider."

Many an editor would claim that the decision on what to publish lay with them, and not with the personal scruples of a reporter whose job is to report.

Likewise, at one point Annika is asked to use her journalistic talents to uncover information that may not be relevant to her job.

She wasn't here as a journalist - she was a snoop, a secret agent, possibly even a traitor.

This begs the question, is there something about being a journalist that transports the individual into a different moral sphere? Are some actions that might seem ethical if carried out by a journalist unethical if carried out by the rest of us?         

Certainly Annika feels the need to adopt two separate personas, one for work, one for home. Right at the beginning, her plans for an important family trip are thrown into turmoil by the newsdesk wanting her to report on Michelle's murder. Her partner is not impressed: "Are you serious? Are you really going to work?"

And then, "A fine mother you are."

There can be few journalists - male or female - who have not felt this pain. And then walked out of the door. However much you dislike some aspects of it, the job comes first.

Annika blinked, at one level stung by his words, at another, untouched. The armour that prtected her working persona had kicked into place and made her impervious.    

Thinkers, scribblers and cattle

...Let me tell you something. There are three sorts of people - thinkers, scribblers and cattle. It is true I secretly count almost all who are called thinkers and poets among the scribblers, and most of the scribblers belong among the cattle. But that's not the point. The business of thinkers is to search out the truth. There is, however, a secret about truth which, oddly enough, is but little known, although I should have thought it as clear as daylight - and it is this: truth is like the sun, its value depends wholly upon being at a correct distance away from it. If the thinkers were allowed to have everything their own way they would steer our globe straight into the sun and burn us all to ashes. Small wonder, then, their activity sometimes causes the cattle to become restive and bellow: Put out the sun, in the name of Satan, put it out! It's the business of us scribblers to preserve a correct and satisfactory distance from the truth. A really good scribbler - and there aren't many! - understands the thinker and feels with the cattle. It's our job to protect the thinkers from the rage of the cattle and the cattle from too hefty doses of truth. But I admit the latter is the easier of the two and the one we make the best job of in the ordinary way of things.

• Doctor Glas, Hjalmar Soderberg   

The art of sub-editing

"There’s nothing to it, really,” said Bob modestly. “It’s just a matter of checking the facts and the spelling, crossing out the first sentence and removing any attempts at jokes.”

• Towards the End of the Morning, Michael Frayn

Folly, fear and mistrust

"In matters of economic science," Julian would say, "the layman knows nothing, assumes much and fears more. All the press ever does is compound that ignorance, folly and fear; deliberately it fosters mistrust of change. Therefore, Eleanor, when faced with the ladies, gentlemen and guttersnipes of the media, let it be our policy to remain silent."

Unfortunately Eleanor/ Ellen/ Apricot (it's complicated) goes on to forget this rule when talking to Freddie Howard of the Daily Mail.

"Do you have a pet name for him?" asked Freddie.

"I call him Rasputin," said Eleanor.

Bad move.

• Darcy's Utopia, by Fay Weldon

Boris beckons...

Several journalists appear as minor characters in Boris Johnson's Seventy Two Virgins (2004). Sam Smith alerted me to Baghdad veteran and Daily Mirror hack Barry White, but here's a bit about the MP Roger Barlow discovering quite what another Mirror journalist, Debbie Gujaratne, has in store for him.

"Well of course, it's very embarrassing for me to talk to you like this," she said, and then recited what purported to be a recent series events in Barlow's life.

It was not the truth. It was an abstract impressionist representation: crude, impasto blotches that might or might not stand for an object in the 'real world.'  But she knew she had enough to go on, and Barlow knew it too.

At length he said: "It's all rubbish, and besides, it was ages ago."

The reporter went for the crack. "It is either all bollocks or happened ages ago. It can't be both.

Barlow decides to speak his mind - at length.

Poor chap, thought Debbie, as he ranted on. She could picture it all. The basically happy family life... She pitied him, although she had no family herself (she was of course sleeping with her married news editor). And yet even as she pitied him, she knew she would have no mercy. It would be more than her job was worth.

A perversion of normal existence

It is hard to conceive of a bleaker portrayal of journalism than that offered by Gordon Burn in Fullalove (1995), a forensic and pitiless examination of the demons of self-loathing that shape Norman Miller, 'a hack, a scribbler' at the 'wall-shinning, nose-poking, leg-in-the-door, end of the trade.'

Reporting is a perversion of normal existence. Even (ex-wife) was forever telling me, "You get to know them so that they feel relaxed with you, ask them the questions you have no natural right to expect answers to, ask to see things you weren't meant to see, they open a window on the most intimate parts of their lives, and then you walk away."

Font of all knowledge

Veteran hack Walter Brand is in the pub, reminiscing over fonts:

"Degenerate, Manson, Exocet, Dead History Bold, Skelter, Arbitrary..."

• Brilliant, from Gordon Burn's Fullalove (1995)

The Inky Path 4

Newsworthiness does not depend on an absolute standard of what is or is not news.

• Quoted from The Inky Path, in Martyn Bedford's Exit: Orange and Red

"Well, it (Molecross's Miscellany of the Mysterious and Misunderstood) doesn't have a large audience. It's esoteric."

• Molecross, in Dr Who: The Algebra of Ice, by Lloyd Rose

Who is Doctoring the truth?

After Fred Cree it is heartwarming to meet Adrian Molecross, 'plumpish and bearded', 'scrupulously neat and clean', 'spotless and tidy', 'a scrupulous researcher'...

After all, he was a journalist, one of the world's highest callings. He pursued truth. Not just transcendent truth, but the ordinary, small earthly sort, too. Such as: what exactly happened last night?

Never fear, Molecross is a resourceful investigator and is particularly committed to uncovering Government cover-ups. As he remarks...

Someone from a marginal publication was more likely to find out about this crop pattern than any mainstream reporter, because mainstream reporters had to have their imaginations surgically removed before they were allowed to apply for their jobs.

As Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart says, Molecross is...

"A journalist. More or less. Writes one of those nonsene web magazines. Complete idiot."

Idiot or not Molecross's Miscellany of the Mysterious and Misunderstood

...had an impressive number of subscribers. This was because he could be counted on to get his details right

Molecross never leapt to conclusions... he stuck strictly to what he had seen and heard. No speculation. Well, except for saying the military were obviously covering something up and you couldn't really classify that as speculation, could you.   

• Adrian Molecross appears in Dr Who: The Algebra of Ice, by Lloyd Rose. Thanks to Neil Perryman of Tachyon TV for the tip.

Fred Cree, reptile

In Fred Cree, Michael Shea presents a particularly unattractive journalist. And every time Spin Doctor (1995) reveals more of Cree's character ("vicious, friend to no one, enemy to all") the reader remembers that Shea spent a decade as Press Secretary to the Queen.

Cree's motivation in life was envy; envy of those richer, better placed, better looking, more successful than himself. Like some Victorian beggar, he had his nose pressed enviously against the windows of society and privilege. He felt he was always missing out on life, constantly haunted by a regret for things never done, places never visited, people never known. Affectionate relationships were strangers. Bitterness or spite defeated ambition in the confines of his mind. It was inevitable he should have chosen journalism as his career.

His 'deeply unattractive' appearance, his 'red and watery little eyes,' are a metaphor for his life:

Fred Cree was a born misfit. He had a complexion of unappealling texture, the victim of a pockmarking impetigo of childhood, further harmed by heavy beard growth which gave him a permanently scarred and unshaven appearance. He was a hairy man all over; fringes of coarse black pile sprouted from the cuffs and collars of his shirts.Those who had the misfortune to see more discovered a matted torso, back and front, which accounted for noticeable probems he had with body odour.

... Had he ended up in prison, well meaning social workers would doubtless point to his appearance as a mitigating factor in any wrongdoing.

None of which, of course, influences Cree's writing which is 'intelligent and farseeing':

He composed well with a verve and style which few could match. He was, thus, always in demand in a media that was not always choosy about the lifestyle of its journalists.

The world's best - or worst - newspaper?

Whilst on Aldous Huxley's Island, journalist and special agent Will Farnaby asks how many papers Pala supports. He is surprised to learn that there was only one.

"Who enjoys the monopoly?" Dr Robert assured him, "There's a panel of editors representing the half a dozen different parties and interests. Each of them gets his allotted space for comment and criticism. The reader's in a position to compare their arguments and make up his own mind. I remember how shocked I was the first time I read one of your big-circulation newspapers. The bias of the headlines, the systematic one-sidedness of the reporting and the commentaries, the catchwords and slogans instead of argument. No serious appeal to reason. Instead, a systematic effort to install conditioned reflexes in the minds of the voters - and for the rest, crime, divorce, anecdotes, twaddle, anything to keep them distracted, anything to prevent them from thinking."   

An artist humiliated

Will(iam Asquith) Farnaby (Island, Aldous Huxley) is another of those 'artistes' who feel 'humiliated' by having stooped to earn money through mere journalism.

"And all the time I had been wanting to be a poet and finding I simply don't have what it takes. And then, after the War, I had to go into journalism to make money. What I wanted was to go hungry, if necessary, but to try to write something decent - good prose at least, seeing that it couldn't be good poetry."

...

"Wouldn't you be humiliated if you found yourself making money by turning out the cheapest, flashiest kind of literary forgery. I was a success because I was so irredemiably second rate."

Island was first published in 1962, and social class is clearly a factor in Farnaby's framing of his trade. Dr McPhail diagnoses: "Upper class.. but not a member of the military or county sub species."

"Correct. My father was a barrister and political journalist. That is, when he wasn't too busy being an alcoholic."

Bloomsbury-born Farnaby is beginning life from rather a different perspective than Constance Amory, Gary Pymore or Joe Donovan. It's as Dawn Stone remarks in Fragrant Harbour:

I daresay if I'd gone to Oxbridge I would have had at least half a dozen chums who fell out of bed into useful, networkable positions on the kind of paper I wanted to work for.   

• Thanks to Jack Yan for suggesting Island

The editor

In its loftiest form an editorship invites the journalist to perform a role of influence on the national stage, to engage in powerful and influential debate on matters of public interest, to challenge and shape governments (Ian McEwan's Amsterdam). Even at local level, the editor is well-placed, even obliged to become a pillar of the community.

Like Septimus Henry Kew, editor of the Crow (The Water Clock, Jim Kelly), and otherwise known as Woggle. Henry is tall and dessicated like a human praying mantis, with a small, stick insect body.

(His) thin frame, like a vision in a fairground mirror, enabled him to project his head around corners without revealing any other part of his body.

He has a tendency to 'extend his neck obscenely from his collar', allowing Philip Dryden to imagine his head turning through 360 degrees.

(Henry's) sex life appeared to be confined to the plain brown envelopes (which contain videotapes) and lifetime membership of the Boy Scout movement.

A poor manager, Henry lives above the Crow's High Street office, and occasionally appears in full scout unform, hence the nickname.

Henry was a stickler for the correct channels - one reason why was a lousy journalist.

The Crucible's editor (Exit, Bedford), Dougal Aitken-Aitken is of a different cut. No Scout uniform but his attire is just as telling - blue and white striped shirt with a white collar, pale green tie and red braces. He is the youngest editor in the group, his rise explained by the nickname Frugal Dougal.

The era of the high story count at the Crucible had dawned with daa appointment, an early memo setting out story quotas and word ceilings required by the redesign from broadsheet to tabloid. If it can't be told in ten pars, it ain't worth telling.

Loving the news editor

News editor is one of the toughest jobs on a paper, located bang on the fault line between management and workforce. It is a high pressure position that requires a sharp news sense, quick reflexes and ordered mind, complemented by well-developed diplomatic, motivational and social skills. As very few people have this mix it usually means the encumbent is unpopular with almost everyone; as ideal candidates are hard to come by many editors resort to appointing a self-centred, slightly paranoid bully.

Not so, the editor of the Crow (The Water Clock, Jim Kelly). who has appoint the ineffectual Bill Bracken.

... a striking illustration of the editor's ability to award jobs on the basis of inverse qualification ... in line with this innovaticve policy of positive discimination (Bracken) had got the news editor's job on the grounds that he was unable to deal with stress.

More typical is Lisa Marklund's Ingvar Johansson (Bomber) who can just about bring himself to briefly compliment Annika on a story.

"It's not bad," Ingvar Johansson said, turning around. "But that's all history. Tomorrow's paper is all that matters now."

Like all news editors is Johansson is driven by the constant fear that however well his team performs a rival might still get a better line (Studio 69).

"How the hell could we miss that angle? Maybe you could tell me that?"

Ink's news editor is Battersby

Battersby wore his hair brushed forward in a Nero style that made him look as if he were backing into a breeze. A jagged fringe hung down over his forehead. He had an abrupt manner and was apt to shut at people without warning. It wasn't clear if this was a way of trying impose his authority, or some neurological complaint he was unable to control.

Exit's news editor, Gary, is always up against deadlines, always fearful of the next yawningly empty newslist. Hence this exchange, when Constance is interviewing the manger of a shop called Fruits of the Churn. The phone rings...

"You've to return to base immediately," said the shop manager, smiling, as he replaced the receiver.

"Did they give a name?"

"Gary someone or other on newsdesk. Nice chap. He said 'Tell her fuck the cheese feature and get her arse back to the office'."

Quite.

 

A Metronome with Acne

Experience counts for a lot in journalism. Partly, it gives an awareness of what needs to be done in a sometimes bewildering range of situations; partly, it gives the deeper world view needed to put what is happening to real people, living real lives, into a human context.

Which means that the stumblings of junior reporters provide a rich vein of comedy.

In The Water Clock, Jim Kelly has fun with the Crow's acne-ridden junior reporter Gary Pymore:

Criminal over confidence was his fatal flaw, compounded by the illusions that it was his spots.

Gary has tombstone teeth, an 'ever-present full-length coat' (for Kelly, a coat defines a man) and smokes inexpertly. He had meningitis as a youth, and lost a good part of his ability to balance.

This had been treated by fitting his shoes with blakeys - small metal plates once designed to preserve shoe leather. The treatment involved smacking his shoes against the ground as he walked and using the sound as a kind of sonic stabilizer. As a result he was, in motion, a human metronome. A metronome with acne.

Gary's real flaw is, of course, enthusiasm - both a great virtue and a heavy burden for a journalist. As Liza Marklund says of a bright young reporter:

His only flaw was his undisguised delight in accidents, murders, and various other tragedies.

And, as Kelly's central character Philip Dryden observes:

... despite some serious handicaps, including phoentic spelling and Olympic stupidity, Gary was probably a born reporter.   

The dividing line

Using a journalist as the central character in a crime novel (or, more accurately, a narrative driven by crime) is that they can get too close to the action.

Dryden recognised he had arrived at the dividing line between being a reporter and a detective. He was reluctant to cross it due to a combination of iinate cowardice and the lack of a blue uniform covered in comforting buttons and insignia (The Water Clock, Jim Kelly)

And here's DCI Pink to Constance Amory in Exit:

"This is not a story; it's a crime. And you aren't a detective, you are a reporter."

Later, in The Water Clock:

(DCI) Stubbs turned on him. "You've got no right shadowing a police office investigation like this. Or for that matter, witholding vital evidence."

Similar to Kurt Wallander in Firewall:

"You and your newspaper are not the ones in charge of this investigation. We are. If you wish to draw your own judgment, we can't stop you. But the truth is going to turn out quite different. Not that you and your editor will give it much space."

The Scoop! meme nudges on

One of the purposes of Scoop! was to invite others to do my work for me by highlighting characters I'd either never heard of - or had forgotten. Partly to that purpose, and partly to see how ideas travel through the blogoshere (the day job intrudes) I set in train the Scoop! meme.

Here are some of the recommendations:

• De komst van Joachim Stiller/The coming of Joachim Stiller by Hubert Lampo  (Serge Cornelus)
• New Grub Street, by George Gissing (Andrea Weckerle)
• Will Farnaby in Aldous Huxley's Island (Jack Yan)
• Derkhan Blueday, art-critic for the Beacon and secret correspondent for the illegal Runagate Rampant in China Mieville's Perdido Street Station (Elizabeth Albrycht)
• Millon De Floss, the journalist/stalker in Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next novels The Eyre Affair and Lost in a Good Book (Charles Arthur)
• Barry White, literary hack in 72 Virgins, by Boris Johnson (Sam Smith)
• The Honourable Schoolboy, by John le Carre (Simon Collister)

Thanks to everyone... More please - and you dopn't have to be invited to join the meme.

A great distraction

"News was a great distraction if you didn't want to think about your own life."

A splendid observation from Jim Kelly's The Water Clock; many more to follow, and thanks to Roger Hermiston for the recommendation.

Faking it

In Self's Punishment, Bernhard 'The Reader' Schlink's detective Gerhard Self suggests another category for Scoop! - fake journalists.

"Herr Mischkey, you've been a great help. In case I think of anything else may I give you a call? Here's my card." I felt around in my wallet for the business card with my private address and telephone number in which I pose as freelance journalist Gerhard Selk.

Earlier in the book, the narrator Self remarks

Tietzke, one of the last honest journalists. When the Heidelberger Tageblatt folded he'd got a job with the Rhine Neckar Chronicle by the skin of his teeth, but his status there was tricky.

There seems to be no narrative purpose for the opinion that Tietzke was an exception - a claim reinforced by the suggestion honesty threatened his job security.

An inky cowboy...

Although Joe Donovan's work as a reporter is significant to the plot of The Mercy Seat, Martyn Waites has little say about journalism. What Donovan provides is a character rugged, Northern and, at the time of the action, a loner.

In one of the weaker exchanges in a novel of uneven dialogue, Donovan is talking to Maria Bennett, an old friend and the editor of his former paper The Herald about the fact that she isn't married - "I am a successful independent woman... not wife and mother material."

Not unless you marry another journalist, says Donovan.

"I know what you inky cowboys are like," replies Maria. Improbably, Donovan suggests she has not lost her facility for an apt phrase.

Although I am struggling to hear any editor referring to a fellow journalist as an 'inky cowboy', it does have a resonance for Donovan. We know he is cool enough to wear a CBGB's t-shirt - and identifies with the Johnny Cash's version of Mercy Seat rather than Nick Cave's...

Peta describes him as...

Tall, long hair. Mid-thirties. Leather jacket and boots. Bit like that old cowboy actor from the 1970s. Sam Ellliott? Yeah. But without the moustache.

We learn ... his usual type of story... involved cover-ups, corruptions or social injustice. One he did on care homes led to a change in the law.

(Maria) named a prominent Conservative politician who had been jailed on perjury and corruption charges.

"Remember him? Joe was on that team, his first assignment." 

An inky cowboy anyone?

Tougher than the rest

Donovan brought his hands up, pushed back into Mark's twisted face. He forced the heel of his left hand on to his top lip, pushing lip and nose back as far and as hard as he could.   

Clearly this reporter is cut from a different cloth than Hughie. The back cover blurb for Martyn Waites' The Mercy Seat, begins:

Once a renowned investigative journalist, Joe Donavan's life fell apart when his six-year-old son disappeared without trace. Now a virtual recluse, Donovan is abruptly thrust back into the limelight when a teenage boy makes contact in desparet need of his help.

Donovan is a tough Geordie who can handle himself in the (several) fights that come his way in a rather violent novel.

It's hard to imagine Hugh, Annika or Constance in this scene, right at the start...

Joe Donovan picked up the revolver from the table, felt the heft of it in his left hand, weighed the options.

Not that Waites can allow Donovan much in the way of social niceties. He is stuck in a Northumberland cottage which 'looked like a building site during lunchbreak.'

He hadn't just let himself go, he'd become abandoned.... Stale booze breath and unwashed skin.

The Scoop! meme

Thanks for your help....

Ambition(2)

More from Ink. Hugh and Julian are in the pub, sitting near a noisy fruit machine.

"How about you, Hughie? Any secret ambition?"

"I once thought I'd like to be a ----" he said.

The machine nearest them gave a loud, trilling squawk.

"A waiter, Hughie?" said Julian. He sounded surprised. "I would have thought you would have set your sights a bit higher than that."

"No," said Hugh, "a writer."

"Ah."

Julian's reaction suggested this was an equally unusual ambition.

"I suppose I'd like to do at least one thing I can be proud of," said Hugh.

Julian laughed, "Hardly in the right profession for that, are we?"

"No," Hugh agreed.

Writer's block

Battersby stared at (Hugh). "You can't have writer's block," he said. "You're not a writer. This is journalism. It doesn't matter if a few words are the wrong way round."

"You don't think so?"

"Of course not. You can't go worrying about things like that. As long as they're roughly in the right order that's as much as anyone can hope for."

• Ink, John Preston. See He's a reporter, she's a writer.