The popular view of the newsroom of a national daily newspaper - propagated by other forms of the media, and notably television - is of a loud, chaotic, frenetic place where hacks and editors yell at one another across the floor, screaming: "Hold the Front Page".
It was a bit of a disappointment to find that real life did not quite match up to that image. At the newspaper where I worked the newsroom was more like a library, full of studious bookish types quietly and unfussily getting on with their jobs. At least that was what it looked like to the uninitiated.
In fact that serene facade merely hid all manner of human activity and emotion, such as you would actually find in any workplace, despite it being a relatively civilised place to work: seething resentment, uncontainable ambition, plot and counter-plot, alliance and caucus, friendship and enmity, bullying, depression, various addictions, joy and hope. All human life, in fact. And somehow all that energy was harnessed to good effect to produce a newspaper every single day - to the great surprise of many there.
In his debut novel, David Brewerton, former hack and public relations man, offers a revealing and honest insight into the world of the printed media, as seen from the business desk of a major London-based daily, where an Aussie hack, Cassandra Brown, is handed the story of a lifetime, the sort all journalists dream of: rich, successful advertising mogul disappears in mysterious circumstances while on holiday, leaving behind a wife he may have been cheating on (with a supermodel, naturally), personal financial woes, a hint of boardroom corruption and nakedly ambitious colleagues quite prepared to do the dirty on him dead or alive.
It's a wonderful thing fiction. Take a rumour from the gossip column, a headline from the business page, a racy news item and a travel diary mishap - a combination the average business journalist would probably not even be capable of dreaming up, such is the comparative dryness of their daily diet - mix the ingredients together and you have a convincing potboiler with sufficient intrigue and mystery to make the jump comfortably from the unloved business shelf at Waterstone's to the heavy footfall of the crime table.
And that is what Brewerton has achieved: an investigative thriller with a strong, credible plot, told at a good pace and with a lot of fascinating detail that students of the media will enjoy.
As a former business hack myself, I thought Brewerton's description of the newsroom dynamic was very good: the desperation of the news editor with the empty or weak story list; the anger of the hack whose story is "spiked" either because there's not enough space or someone further up the tree doesn't like it; the pressure of being on deadline with several different stories or of being in a position where you are expected to deliver a new angle on a particular story every day, irrespective of whether there is actually something to write.
The only slight flaw I found in this book was with Cassandra Brown herself. The rest of the cast - from the oleaginous PR man to the harrassed news editor and the former star writer who has gone to seed, all are very recognisable - was excellent. But I never quite got to grips with Brown. She possesses a strange mixture of self-confidence, ambition and a weird reluctance to take the story by the balls. For a supposedly gifted investigative journalist she seemed to require a lot of spoon-feeding from sources and cajoling by editors. A former colleague said to me recently that journalism is a profession stacked with people with "egos the sizes of Zeppelins", and this is true. Brown seemed to have the Zeppelin but not the knowledge of how to drive it. She improved as the story went on, however, and was not unlikable in any way, just not quite convincing. Perhaps readers without an extensive period on a newspaper will not notice; probably not.
But despite that, Brewerton has written a fine novel and one that holds the promise of more good things to come.