In an interview on Spies, Lies and Foreign correspondents

Your first book is Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop. Could this be the handbook for a budding foreign correspondent?

I think it is the best description of a foreign correspondent’s career, and I doubt it will ever be bettered. It’s still very relevant to this rather ridiculous life. When I was covering the early days of the Congo, a group of us were there, maybe five or six correspondents, and somebody had a battered copy of Scoop that we passed around. It just read straight – the life we were living was hardly exaggerated.

Waugh had a history in journalism, didn’t he?

Yes, although he wasn’t himself a particularly good correspondent. Though his experience is why the book felt so real and believable. He went first to Ethiopia for the coronation of Haile Selassie and was then sent back to cover the Abyssinian war.

Did Waugh model William Boot, aka ‘Boot of the Beast’, on anyone in particular?

My editor at the Telegraph, Bill Deedes, had been a very young correspondent, 22, for The Morning Post. When he was sent out to Abyssinia he arrived at the railway station with an amazing amount of equipment – weighing 600lb. It’s that naivety, this theme of the innocent abroad, in the book. Of course Bill Deedes has always fended off suggestions that he was the inspiration for William Boot, but the ‘Beast’ was the Daily Express.

Is there much contempt from Waugh towards the characters?

I don’t think it’s contempt, but he has this fantastic ability for satire. I don’t think he ever wanted to be a foreign correspondent in particular but somehow he managed to sum up the thing in a brilliant manner.

One rather humorous character, a maverick correspondent called Wenlock Jakes, could write stories without being there. Waugh writes, ‘Jakes went out to cover a revolution in one of the Balkan capitals. He overslept in his carriage, woke up in the wrong station…went straight to a hotel and cabled off a thousand word story about barricades in the streets, flaming churches… They were pretty surprised getting a story like that.’

Was this common practice?

There was a famous occasion when the Dalai Lama was on the run from the Chinese, and a group of journalists, including a Daily Mail correspondent, rented a plane. They flew as far as the Indian Tibetan front and were turned back by the Indian air force. Everybody was very depressed that they couldn’t get a story but this Daily Mail man wasn’t worried. He said, ‘It’s all right I’ve already written mine. I’ve seen the Dalai Lama on horseback, threading through the valleys. In the background you could see the temples ablaze.’ He’d written the whole thing before he’d even taken off!

In an interview on Cosy Mysteries

Tell me why you like Scoop by Evelyn Waugh.

Before I worked for the Daily Express I thought Scoop was a marvellous work of fiction. Then I found it wasn’t that far from the truth. They do make various mistakes like employing the wrong person. It was actually before I moved to Fleet Street, when I was on the Scottish Daily Express. There was this industrial reporter on the Daily Mirror and the Daily Express was desperate to get him. So they took this chap out and they wined and they dined him – and they gave him a good salary and signed his contract to the end of time. But then they looked up one day and he was just sitting at his desk, staring into space. And they said, ‘Come on – give us that great industrial stuff you gave the Mirror!’ And he said, ‘Oh that’s not me, it’s so and so – we just happen to have the same name.’ So the fact that William Boot, the man who writes the nature note, ends up as a war correspondent is very amusing to me.

When I read Evelyn Waugh I end up laughing out loud, which is very rare with books.

Yes, there are odd occasions when one does actually laugh out loud, perhaps at P G Wodehouse in Right-Ho, Jeeves, when Gussie Fink-Nottle gets drunk and does the prize-giving at the boy’s school. I think I love the black humour, the cynicism in Evelyn Waugh.

These five books I picked out are ones that I would read again. I actually have gone back to reading a lot of vintage detective stories – Julian Symons, and Francis Iles, Nicholas Blake, Josephine Tey, Gladys Mitchell. Penguin used to do a series of green and white covers for mysteries, and I started my career as a fiction buyer in a bookshop in Glasgow. That was the time when bookselling was a profession. You were expected to take the booksellers exams, to study English literature, and you weren’t allowed to call each other by your first names – it was always Mr this and Miss that. We were all devoted to books, of course. But they all rather looked down on me. They said, ‘Good God – she reads things like Walter Scott, and John Galsworthy. You must read Proust and Dostoevsky!’ They were all right, but I didn’t like Jean-Paul Sartre, or François Mauriac. Or André Gide. I felt they were terrible bores. I still do.

Are there newer authors you like too?

I enjoy a lot of the new ones. There’s a Glasgow writer, Denise Mina, who wrote the Garnethill trilogy. There are an awful lot of very, very good crime writers. I think I like the comfort of the good English, and the well-established plot. I don’t like too much violence. I don’t mind when it’s a cop series, when the violence is part of the story, but when it goes off into these endless autopsies, and almost sado-masochistic torture, I get put off. I suppose I read for escape, which is really my motive in writing. I always wanted to write something that would give someone a few hours’ entertainment on a wet day. I’m fortunate in that I have no literary ambitions. But people forget that just because it is easy to read, it doesn’t mean it’s easy to write. I’m writing as hard as I can. I know it comes out a bit frivolous, but maybe I’ve got a frivolous mind.

I definitely laugh out loud when I’m reading your books, and always read funny bits out to my husband.

Thank you very much for saying that.

He’s quite jealous actually.

Is he a writer?

No, not at all, but at the end of the day I want escapism, I want to curl up with a book, which isn’t always appreciated.

I think you can see from my collection that’s exactly why I read. Also, these are people I might have liked to have met. Well, apart from Evelyn Waugh, who I wouldn’t like to have met, and T S Eliot, who was probably too depressed. But I wouldn’t have minded meeting Robert Louis Stevenson.

Why not Evelyn Waugh?

If you read his Sword of Honour trilogy, you’ll see. He really did want to be an army hero, but he wasn’t. And he was very waspish and generally unpopular. I do think it’s necessary to want to meet people, but they may not be the way they appear in their books.

So do you really live in the Cotswolds, like your heroine?

Yes, I live in a village called Blockley. It’s near Moreton-in-Marsh. I wouldn’t have minded living somewhere nearby, with marvellous names like Lower Slaughter and Upper Slaughter, Lower Swell and Upper Swell, but I’m in Blockley.

You wouldn’t want to live in Scotland again?

No, I’m settled in here now. I recently went back to Glasgow for the first time since the 1960s and I couldn’t believe it, it was so clean. Even the river was clean. I was crime reporting in Glasgow, you know, and I remember ghastly tenements and the worst slums in Western Europe. There were razor gangs and fog and gaslights – and Hogarthian drunkenness. And suddenly I’m in the middle of this cleaned-up city and you could see the sky. It was always polluted when I was there, by blast furnaces and chemical works – heavy industry.

Is Agatha Raisin you?

She says all the things I’d like to say, but I haven’t got the nerve.

Sometimes I resolve to take some pages out of her book and be very direct and rude to people.

There was a couple I knew in Sutherland. It was before the smoking ban, and he went to a restaurant with his wife, and there were glass ashtrays on the table. So they both lit up and people at the table behind him started coughing pointedly and waving their hands. So he summoned the maitre d’ and asked him, ‘Can you move these people, they’re annoying me.’ 

I’d never have the nerve. You know sometimes you get days with irascible thoughts inside… Of course, Agatha is emotionally not very grown up, which I think is a necessary part of a writer’s character.

But you’re happily married.

Yes, very.

So searching for a husband is not part of your real life.

Fortunately not. God, I would hate to go back to that. I once did a programme for the BBC on dating in middle age. I was 57 at the time and I felt quite young. And I found that women, the reason they wanted to marry was to have someone to change the light bulbs. They didn’t like going into pubs and restaurants by themselves. They just desperately needed a man around – not particularly for sex or romance, but to do things in the garden. And they had sort of teed off at the Hammersmith Palais and I sat in the front row as they were setting up the cameras, and all these creaky old men kept advancing on me for a dance. I felt quite terrified. It was like the night of the living dead. But then I shouldn’t say that, that’s the sort of thing Agatha would say – very cruel. 

Where do you live?

I’m in New York.

I was a Brooklyn girl. I lived in Brooklyn for 12 years. Rupert Murdoch started up a tabloid called The Star. It’s moved to Florida now, but the offices were on Third Avenue then. And my husband and I worked on it – and then he got a job on a tabloid up in Connecticut and I was at a loose end so I started writing Regency romances. The Regency period was from 1811-1820. But when I’d written over 100 of them, I was getting a bit weary of 1811-1820. Then I was on a fishing holiday in Sutherland with my husband and the idea dawned on me that it’d be a marvellous setting for a murder story. So that’s how Hamish Macbeth was born.

How do you feel about the i-Pad and the digital age?

My books are in e-books all over the place. But for myself I’m a paper person. Perhaps I like the old-fashioned detective stories because you can get them in your handbag. The fashion now is for such big books.

In an interview on Journalism

And your last book?

Isn’t this the point where I get to plug my own book?

If you insist.

I’m writing a crime thriller about a newspaper obituarist, who kills famous people himself, right on deadline, so that he can scoop the competition.

Does he get caught?

Yes. He overreaches himself. A member of the royal family. Or possibly he doesn’t understand the internet, and one of his obituaries goes online while he’s still out disposing of the subject.

Thank you. And the last book?

I’m afraid it will have to be Scoop, by Evelyn Waugh. It’s mandatory in any list of books about journalism. Keeping it until last was the only way in which I could hope to preserve even the tiniest element of surprise. Journalists – and I’m talking here about British journalists of the Fleet Street era, though maybe it applies more broadly – would pride themselves on their amateurism, and Scoop shoves that back at them in spades. I mean amateurism in the best possible sense – encompassing all sorts of virtues, including courage, grace, learning, ingenuity. But also, not taking yourself too seriously. You would have this huge gulf between Fleet Street journalists and their American counterparts, who had without exception been to journalism school, and had taken higher degrees, and who looked on journalism as an exact science, like brain surgery. If you made a mistake, someone would die. That gap closed in the 1980s, as British broadsheet journalism became more professional and less colourful. Happily, we still have the tabloids to delight our animal spirits.

Any parting advice for young journalists?

The best piece of advice I ever got was from John Bulloch, of The Independent, when I was grousing about some miserable act of sub-editing. ‘Never, ever read the paper, my boy,’ he said. ‘You’ll be much happier that way.’ So I didn’t, and I was. But since nobody reads newspapers any more anyway, this advice may be of limited application.

In an interview on Writers Who Have Inspired Me

Scoop is a book you adapted for the screen, isn’t it?

Yes, I did. I’m almost obsessively interested in Waugh as a writer and I think I’ve read everything he’s written. I think Scoop is his masterpiece. I had fallen upon it before I ever had the chance to adapt it. It’s one of the great comic novels ever written. Waugh’s brilliance was in his comedy. His later novels – Brideshead Revisited, the Sword of Honour trilogy – to me don’t match up to the unique, glittering, malevolent brilliance of the early comedies.

The interesting thing about it is that everybody remembers the first third of the book but forgets that a whole lot of it takes place in Africa. Everybody remembers Fleet Street and journalism and Lord Copper and The Daily Beast but the novel is about a classic, almost Shakespearean, case of mistaken identity. The wrong correspondent is sent to cover a war in Ishmaelia – William Boot the nature correspondent is sent, instead of William Boot the war correspondent – and mayhem occurs. In a funny way the book could also be subtitled “How William Boot Loses his Virginity” because it’s a love story as well.

When we adapted it into a film, we got quite bad reviews although I think we make a good adaptation of the novel. All the journalists who were reviewing it had only read the Fleet Street stuff and had forgotten about the African civil war in it. It’s hilariously funny, but the thing about Waugh – and this is what makes him great I think – is that his comedy is completely ruthless. He completely expunges sentimentality from it, so his comedies are dark and they chime with my own sense of humour. If Waugh interests me in any single way, it’s the unrelenting ruthlessness of his comic point of view. He will not give you any kind of a sop at all. Decline and Fall, Black Mischief and Scoop are brilliant, dark, sprightly works of a young man in full throttle. Then Waugh turns into something different and the books become, from my point of view, less interesting and more striven for. His brilliance was as a comic writer, and in Scoop you get the apotheosis.

Waugh said Scoop was “light and excellent”, but described Brideshead Revisited, which was published seven years later, as his first novel.

The thing about Waugh is that he reinvented himself. The young writer was true to his nature. The various masks that he tried on as he got older affected the way he wrote and saw the world. My theory about Waugh is that this grotesque country squire that he tried to turn himself into was a mask. But he was too intelligent not to realise that, and a kind of self-loathing began to infect him as a man. To me, the later work has brilliance in it but is not as perfectly achieved as those early comedies. Even Vile Bodies, which is a bit of a botch job, is in some ways more original than Brideshead Revisited. I have always championed the earlier novels over the later, more ponderous ones, because I think that’s where his genius lay.

In an interview on Journalism

Tell us why you chose Scoop as your first book.

Others have tried to write comic novels about journalism – Towards the End of the Morning by Michael Frayn, for instance – but Scoop has yet to be bettered and I doubt it ever will be. I re-read it recently and was struck by how unchanged Fleet Street is, 80 years after it was written. One of my best friends is a foreign correspondent and he’s reported on several shooting wars from the saloon bar of the InterContinental Hotel. In my mind’s eye, I can picture Evelyn Waugh giving evidence to the Leveson Inquiry.

It’s clearly intended to be a vituperative satire, but it’s hard not to detect some affection for the loathesome hacks that appear in its pages, partly because they’re so accurately drawn. Could someone capable of describing them so perfectly not harbour any warm feelings towards them? Let’s not forget that Waugh himself was one of them for a considerable period of time, and never turned his back on the Streets of Shame.

In an interview on Reportage and War

Is there any war correspondent who wouldn’t have this in their top five?

I don’t think so. The older I got and the more wars I covered – I have done about 18 – the more true it became. It’s just a snapshot of what things were like in what was then called Abyssinia [in the 1930s]. But everything is there. It was before television, but they had the cinema newsreels with their boxes of stuff. They have this grandee correspondent, I suppose he’s the Max Hastings type, and the news agency guys and our innocent William Boot who of course was [based on the journalist] Bill Deedes, though he denied it. It was the world I found myself in when I started reporting from Vietnam, Nigeria, Angola and everywhere else.

Can you give us a brief summary of the book’s plot?

This harmless nature correspondent called William Boot is plucked out of obscurity because he is mistaken for somebody else with a similar name and he’s sent off as a war correspondent to what was then Abyssinia in Africa where there is a revolution and all kinds of shenanigans.  He has to learn the basic craft [of journalism], which he learns from two news agency men. And of course he stumbles quite by chance upon a scoop. It’s a great satire of the ways of foreign reporting and we all love it.

Does any of it still ring true for war reporters today?

This books belongs to a more innocent age when you took your chance and the worst thing that could happen to you is to be caught in the crossfire. The world of Marie Colvin and Homs is a world away from William Boot and Evelyn Waugh. But some of the people and adventures are similar, and there’s the competitiveness and the romances in the field happen as well. And it’s the togetherness of the press corp, the way the press hunts in a pack.  

In an interview on Comic Writing

Evelyn Waugh’s 1938 novel Scoop ranks in several surveys as one of the 20th century’s top novels. Please give us a précis of the plot and tell us why Scoop ranks so high with you.

Scoop starts with a case of mistaken identity – a naive nature writer whose last name happens to be Boot is sent to cover a war zone instead of a novelist named Boot, whom the newspaper meant to send. Through no effort of his own, he winds up scooping all the seasoned reporters covering the same events. Everything about this book is perfect, from the prose to the characters to the Swiss-clock workings of the plot.

In introducing one edition, Christopher Hitchens wrote: “Scoop endures because it is a novel of pitiless realism; the mirror of satire held up to catch the Caliban of the press corps.” What subjects of satire do you find equally evergreen?

Hypocrisy, laziness, mendacity and arrogance are always good for starters. They’ve been around for a long time and always will be – not so good for humanity, but excellent for satirists.