AS THE THIRD ANNIVERSARY of the London bombings approaches, the author Stephen
Leather is among those with cause to reflect on the uncomfortable
relationship between the real world and fiction - particularly when the plot
of a thriller becomes horribly true.
In February 2005, five months before the 7/7 suicide attacks on the London
Tube, Leather's thriller Soft Target detailed a plot by four British-born
Muslims to explode bombs on the Underground.
As in real life, one of them went off above ground, albeit at the entrance to
a Tube station rather than on a bus. His hero, an ex-SAS man called Dan
Shepherd, has more luck preventing loss of life than did the real-life
security services.
“It was uncanny really,” Leather says. “I had been been speaking to a lot of
anti-terror people and the emergency services and they all said the same
thing: their worst nightmare would be suicide bombers on the Underground.
“Then five months later it happens. I'm watching TV and there are the same
people I'd been talking to, saying how they'd had to deal with it.”
The detail in Leather's book even had echoes of the subsequent shooting of
Jean Charles de Menezes at Stockwell station: “My hero, Shepherd, has to
shoot one of the bombers, even though he's coming at him from behind and
can't see any indication that he's carrying a bomb, but there's this voice
in his ear telling him that's the man. And he shoots him, and keeps on
shooting him, putting bullets into his head until he stops moving. Because
that's what the men at the Met told me they would have to do to deal with a
suicide bomber.”
I asked Leather, a former Times journalist, if he ever felt that the
resemblance between his plot and what actually happened was so great that he
might bear some responsibility? Doesn't he worry that the terrorists might
have got their ideas from his work? “Never. Not at all. Terrorists don't get
their ideas from fiction. And in any case, I always leave out one essential
detail so that I'm not publishing a blueprint for an attack.”
Nonetheless, he feels that other attacks will come, that it's merely a matter
of when not if, and that key targets remain the big symbolic ones: the
London Eye, Eurostar, Heathrow. His next book Live Fire will feature an
attempt to bring down an airliner: something that the IRA attempted back in
1994, but which nowadays - with more high-tech weaponry - has a higher
probability of success. He insists he's not writing a blueprint, but rather
extrapolating from a reality that already exists.
“There are dozens of rockets out there that the Americans sold to the Afghans
or in former Yugoslavia; lots of Serbs have them. The terrorists only have
to be lucky once, the authorities have to be lucky all the time.”
Perhaps it is when terrorists appear to ape exact techniques that first
appeared in fictional form that the phenomenon is most worrying. In his 1999
novel, Remembrance Day Henry Porter had his villain fix murderous cenotaph
explosives to a mobile phone so that all that was required to detonate them
was a simple call.
The Daily Mail trumpeted: “You can't go wrong with this plot”. It was a line
the paper signally failed to repeat in March 2004, when bombs triggered by
mobile phones exploded on crowded commuter trains in central Madrid, killing
191 people and wounding nearly 2,000 more.
There must have been a moment, somewhere between the first passenger jet
crashing into the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001, and the instant
a few hours later when a third airliner smashed into the Pentagon, when Tom
Clancy put his hand to his mouth and thought: “Oh my God, what have I done?”
It had been all of six years since he had brought his series of novels
featuring the CIA man Jack Ryan to a blockbuster climax with a crazed
anti-American Japanese airline pilot crashing his 747 into the Capitol,
killing the US President and half of Congress.
Of course it is the job of writers such as Clancy to imagine the unthinkable.
No one seriously believes that Osama bin Laden is whiling away the hours in
a cave in the Hindu Kush with a library of the latest shock-horror
paperbacks (although it is an interesting image).
Inevitably, writers who make money from our desire to be scared - albeit only
on paper - are inspired by horrors that take place in the real world. But it
is almost equally inevitable that some impressionable minds might be
corrupted by what they read. Is a “video nasty” worse than a “literary
nasty”?
Maybe we should think ourselves lucky that terrorists do not spend all their
time scanning the fiction shelves for ideas. To date at least, Frederick
Forsyth's nightmare in The Fourth Protocol of an atomic bomb being assembled
on British soil from components smuggled in individually has not been
realised. That one, however, is nowhere near as easy as he described.
Dean Koontz's Odd Thomas envisioned a psycopath wreaking havoc with bombs in
American bowling halls and shopping malls. The IRA did substantial damage
both to Britain's image and economy with a similar campaign but that is
something the US has so far mercifully escaped.
The truth is that thriller writers exist because they exploit the horror that
is out there, and not the other way around. Before we leap onto the current
bandwagon of banning anything that might remotely be considered risky - or
requiring that all thriller writers submit their plots to MI5 for clearance
- it is worth remembering that throughout history, religious texts have
inspired more atrocities than any thriller.
Gerald Seymour, who prides himself on the research that goes into his
thrillers, said: “If you don't understand history, then you have simply no
comprehension of anything at all.” Those people are the most dangerous of
them all.
