depicting journalism PHOTOS 12 / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO


own personal politics, looking for a narrative in reams of data. Still more, like the Marxist writer and journalist Christopher St. John Sprigg, who wrote the superb 1933 thriller Fatality in Fleet Street, want to get their own back on the capitalist newspaper proprietor whose greed and rightwing politics prevent journalists from writing what they really want to say. It’s amazing how many press barons in fiction come to horrible ends: stabbed, vaporised, executed, humiliated or losing their nearest and dearest. Having nothing better to do, I went hunting for novels written by, and about, journalists since 1900 and stopped reading at 160. Nearly two thirds – 98 – were written by former or practising journalists. That’s a lot of professional frustration. What is fascinating is the way portrayals of journalists


fluctuate over time, depending on the state of the news industry. Virtually all the Edwardian novels depict journalists as truth-seeking heroes, holding power to account, giving a voice to the underdog and even, in Guy Thorne’s 1903 Bestseller When it was Dark, saving the Christian world from anarchy and destruction. This was a time when, with an expanding popular press, a new breed of reporter, saved from


the cotton mill or farm because they could now read, took pride in writing news for the newly literate masses. In the interwar period, things are very different: it is hard to find a journalist who isn’t a liar or a scumbag such as Hector Puncheon, the cub reporter in Dorothy L. Sayers’s detective novel Murder Must Advertise. Puncheon, keen to make it on Fleet Street, is particularly proud of the interview he conducted with a cat, who informed him how she saved a night watchman from a warehouse fire. During the post-war period, most of the fictions written by journalists exhibit severe signs of incipient madness, bewilderment and disillusion as the popular press began to march downmarket, asking its reporter-foot-soldiers to fabricate and distort in the hunt for circulation. The best of these is the dark meditation on the trade, Gordon M. Williams’ The Upper Pleasure Garden. The hero, reporter Andrew ‘Ming’ Menzies doorsteps the bereaved, the corrupt and the innocent in equal measure, once wistfully admitting: “I wish I could go back to everybody I ever wrote about and tell them I was sorry.” By the time we get to the twenty first century, “this moment of mind-blowing uncertainty in the evolution of


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