The hack's equivalent to winning the lottery is to produce a smart, best-selling thriller. Many have tried, myself included, but the best most of us can look forward to is the remainder bin or, if lucky, an advance about the equivalent to dentists' - as opposed to journalists' - money. Is it worth it? Of course, because after the ephemera of newsprint, the vanity appeal of hard covers is obvious, remaindered or not. As to why so many journalists write thrillers, the process is not so different from their normal practice: the story leads, characters are made to fit, locations are frequently those perimeter ones of airports and hotels familiar to travelling journalists and, when in doubt, make it up.
Henry Porter is a broadsheet journalist with an ability to write easily about more or less anything. Remembrance Day is a canny, post-surveillance society thriller, written with no sign of strain, and it starts with a bang out of yesterday's headlines when a bus blows up in a London street. The explosion kills several people, including an Irishman with suspected IRA connections and injuring his waiting brother, who in turn is suspected of causing the explosion and heavily sweated by the security forces. Clearing his (somewhat disingenuous) name and exposing the real bomber gives the thrust, with diversions provided by an international cast, several thousand air miles and romantic interest in the shape of a female spy masquerading as a book editor - a ploy that might have worked rather better in mid-period Hitchcock.
One would guess that Porter's impressionable years were spent watching Hitchcock and reading Buchan - certainly the frame on which he hangs his story is as old as The Thirty-Nine Steps. Nevertheless, in other respects he writes a modern thriller whose main components are the result of impressive hi-tech research.
Among the best things are inter-departmental rivalries between the security forces and the soft whisper of cover-up. Porter works hard at the mechanics of plot assembly and it pays off. He is fond of his international locations (tax-deductible author expenses) and has a taste for high adventure, with an interlude set in the Canadian North, an exotic enough destination to recycle for up-market travel mags, should the dreamed-of fortune fail to materialise and the day job have to be kept.
