Top-quality reportage is far more difficult than thriller writing. You can't sit in a tower and write down your imaginings. You have to retrace the steps of complex, unpredictable human beings, travel miles around the world and interview hundreds of people.
That's why it is so irritating when what seems to be a book of fiction is portrayed as a work of serious reportage. Heinemann has published The Sett, a thriller by adventurer Sir Ranulph Fiennes, and has left a deliberate question mark over whether the story it contains really happened or not.
The writer, who says he wrote down a story he was told by a person who said it all really happened to him, claims to be 98-per-cent sure that it is all true. The directors of the publishing firm claim to be even more convinced it is fact.
The Sett tells the story of a mild-mannered accountant whose wife and child are killed by evil-doers, a la Mad Max. These baddies are so nasty that they torture animals for fun - the 'sett' of the title is a hole in which a family of badgers live.
The accountant, driven to the edge of insanity by his physical injuries, grief and anger, pursues the murderers around the world and becomes a killer himself. On the way, he becomes involved with villains at Bank of Credit and Commerce International (the money-laundering bank), drugs cartels from Colombia, the Irish Republican Army, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and so on. All standard players on the international thriller stage.
Of course, it is perfectly allowable for a writer to pretend that a story is real. The Bridges of Madison County, an impossibly idyllic story of tragic love, starts off with the writer claiming that he came across the story by reading old letters and diaries belonging to real people. But that story is obviously made up, and the introduction is seen as all part of an attempt to set the scene for and draw the reader into what follows.
Fiennes may have done the same thing. The difference is that The Sett involves dramatic murders and other spectacular acts of evil-doing, blended in with incidents that unquestionably really happened, leading to confusion and discomfort - especially in the minds of the police forces of the jurisdictions in which the various murders allegedly happened.