The only trouble with the story is that it probably wasn’t true. Turow père did serve in Bastogne but there’s nothing in his wartime papers about a parachute jump. “It’s certainly clear in retrospect that he believed it,” his son says. “But I think what actually happened is that my dad was asked to volunteer for a glider mission and wasn’t selected.” His “psychological involvement” with that episode was enough to rewire his recollection of it to dramatic effect.

It also gave the younger Turow the pivotal action sequence for his new book. Ordinary Heroes is what publishers call a risk, because it strays from the author’s familiar territory of the American courtroom. But it’s a canny risk. Its protagonist is an army lawyer, so loyal Turow readers are drawn into it thinking that only the context has changed. Then they get socked in the gut with a blood-curdling howl of anguish for what war does — to soldiers’ bodies and minds, and to the truth, which is not just the first casualty, but gets tossed around like the bewildering rival versions of reality in The Magus.

You probably wouldn’t drop in John Fowles references if writing about John Grisham, that other titan of the legal suspense thriller. In the same way, Turow probably wouldn’t appreciate being bracketed with Grisham (though that’s just a hunch). Turow is a writer and a person of substance. These words might be construed as mocking, especially from one of those Brits who don’t know how to acknowledge others’ success, but it isn’t meant to be. Turow is adventurous with form and passionate about his subject matter, whether the beauty and corruptibility of the American legal system or the war that cauterised the souls of his father’s generation and shamed and fascinated his own.

He is what you might call an active, public conscience. He even uses the word “crusader”. This is chiefly because, even though he was a millionaire before his first published book (Presumed Innocent) hit the streets, he has continued to practise law, and in that capacity has had a significant role in ending America’s love affair with the death penalty.

From the dust jacket picture, I had expected a lookalike of the creepily handsome pharmacist in Desperate Housewives. I was also ready for autobabble. After all, this was the chief executive of Scott Turow Inc. His books routinely sell by the million to readers and for millions to Hollywood, and we were meeting at his request at the Savoy. But instead of a TV-ready writer-celebrity I met a slight, besuited, slow-spoken intellectual bruiser.

Towards the end of Ordinary Heroes, after several harrowing months in combat, the character based on Turow’s father writes to his parents that he came to Europe “thinking that freedom has no price”. Then he adds: “But now I know that it is only life about which this may truly be said.”

So in this man’s reeling mind, life is priceless but freedom isn’t. A powerful argument for isolationism? Yes indeed, Turow says. “Europe has always been, in American mythology, this old messed-up place. They have kings over there. Kings and can-can girls. It’s sort of fancy and decrepit and screwed up and we went over there in 1918. We got them straightened out. Now, come the Second World War, it’s 25 years later and the sonsofbitches are in trouble again, and they want us to help ’em out again. And it’s like, ‘screw them. Let them clean up their own mess’." That’s what Roosevelt faced, but it would be very wrong to infer that Turow agrees. The war was “the greatest calamity in human history”, taking 60 million lives and making of Turow Sr a remote and troubled father, but “it had to happen”, his son says. The death camps that so many US soldiers made a point of seeing before shipping out were the proof of it.

This is why the postwar generation reveres the previous one for its heroism, even though most of the heroes hated talking about it. It is also why Turow, for one, “felt inadequate because I wasn’t willing to do the same when it came to Vietnam”.

This was a visceral shame, entirely separate from his own and his parents’ vehement opposition in principle to the Vietnam War, he says. “This still goes on in the US. You’re not a real guy because you haven’t been out and fought for your country. Of course, 9/11 turned all this round again. It was the first time in my lifetime that I felt the impulse to enlist and fight and defend the country actually made sense.”

So where does he stand on Iraq? “As far away as possible.”

He laughs, bleakly. However strong his patriotic impulse had been in the aftermath of 9/11, it turns out that Turow was an ardent public opponent of the Iraq War from Day 1, and there’s a sense of a record being put straight for the benefit of indignant Europeans when he notes that a solid majority of Americans have now lined up against it.

He’s especially incensed by what he sees as the soft ride that the East Coast media gave the Bush Administration, but he thinks he knows why.

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