It was just another literary luncheon in Hampstead. Martin Amis and Melvyn Bragg were sipping Pouilly Fumé and discussing the Booker shortlist when suddenly there was a loud explosion and the french windows were smashed in.
Smoke bombs and stun grenades rolled across the floor as three figures in black balaclavas abseiled in through the window. And John Mortimer looked up from his canapés and said: "I think it's rather spoiled the atmosphere since all these SAS writers started coming along."
The SAS kill-and-tell book is now established as one of the most successful literary genres of the last decade. Magical realism is all very well, but frankly the airport bookshops are hoping that Zadie Smith's next novel will feature a few more gory gun battles with Iraqi commandos. Earlier this year I found myself at a booksellers dinner alongside Chris Ryan.
"You'd never guess he'd been in the SAS," I thought, as he tucked into his slap-up meal of two earwigs and a bit of moss, and then sent back his glass of water because it wasn't dirty enough. He shook my hand at the end of the evening and I still have the bruises on my fingers to prove it. There were plenty of other authors at the event but they never stood a chance; all the literary middle-class liberals who work in the bookshops were queuing up to ask Ryan what sort of gun he used when he killed all those Iraqis.
But at the SAS training camp they've stopped bothering with rifles and grenades. The new recruits stand to attention and give their name, rank and ISBN number. Then they demonstrate how to strip down a fountain pen and load a new ink cartridge in 30 seconds flat. Squaddies leap out of the armoured troop carrier at the top of Charing Cross Road, and have to sign at every bookshop in time to make their author talk at Waterstone's Piccadilly.
In fact, the market for SAS books actually peaked a couple of years ago, so now is the time that the Ministry of Defence have chosen to take some legal action and give the genre the shot in the arm that it needs. With all the foresight that the MoD showed when it dropped the Bravo Two Zero team behind Iraqi lines equipped with only a cheese grater and a 1960s street map of Kettering, they have tried to prevent the publication of the latest account of that mission, giving the book far more publicity than the publishers could have dreamed of. Now the British public will be denied the chance to buy it on Amazon.co.uk and will have to suffer the huge inconvenience of going all the way to Amazon.com instead.
The upper reaches of the British military disapprove of these books because they claim that they create a security risk. In fact what is really at the root of their irritation is something far more deeply rooted than their concern for national security, and that is good old-fashioned class prejudice.
It's always been all right for the officer class to write worthy hardbacks to give to each other at Christmas. Ever since the second world war officers have been writing books about the SAS; there is even a biography of the regiment's founder by General Sir Peter de la Billière. He decided to write a 100,000 words, put his name at the top of the page and then found he was half way there already.
What rankles with the army high command is that these new chaps who are selling millions of copies - why, they're just ordinary soldiers. "So leaving the armed services and ending up sleeping on the streets like all the others isn't good enough for them I suppose?" If the new breed of SAS writers were not so successful, their superiors wouldn't bother doing anything about them.
Andy McNab's Bravo Two Zero is the bestselling war book of all time, and apart from anything else he has saved the army recruiting office a small fortune in advertising. Though these books may not be to the taste of most Guardian readers they are reaching an audience which includes many people who might otherwise never think of going into a bookshop.
Admittedly an 18-year-old squaddie is not going to put down Immediate Action and think, "Blimey I quite enjoyed reading a book, I think I'll try that Vikram Seth bloke next." But he might read the next Andy McNab and then he'll find he has moved effortlessly from non-fiction to fiction and then the idea of regularly reading novels is not such an impossibility.
This, of course, is to be welcomed. Not just because we want a more literate society, not just because it will help make him a fuller person. But because this squaddie is going to need all the literary skills he can get in the future. The moment he's out of the army, a dozen publishers will be waiting for him.
"Right!" they'll say. "All set to write us a book about it?"
