Truth in fiction

The Sunday Times’s literary editor Andrew Holgate recently tweeted the news that Robert Harris’s latest thriller had entered the bestseller list at No. 2: ‘Pipped to the post by Ken Follett.’ Harris retweeted it: ‘Well done Ken. You bastard.’

Pipped to the post only by Follett. That’s the level Harris is at now. Even before it hit the shops, his novel was being chased for film rights by two studios. Harris is one of that small and enviable group of journalists who became novelists — and made it big instantly. His first book, the alternative history story Fatherland, set in a Germany in which Hitler won the war, was bought on the basis of the idea alone and became a name-establishing bestseller.

With his new novel, Munich — set amid the 1938 appeasement crisis — Harris returns to Nazi Germany for the first time in 25 years. When we sit down together at The Spectator, I go highbrow from the off and quote Indiana Jones at him: ‘Nazis: I hate these guys.’