I spent some time there and began to understand the tragedy of Northern Ireland — and of Ireland and Britain as well — in terms of the participants. In particular, I made friends with those who had covered the war for a long time. There were a couple of good and cynical newsmen from The Times in London there who gave me help; and a man from Corriere della Sera in Milan who teamed with me to cover all the sides of the story one man could not do alone. (One day, I remember, I chatted with Rev. Ian Paisley of the Protestants in one parlor of the old Station Hotel while my Milanese friend interviewed one of the IRA Provos in the main dining room of the same hotel. We shared our notes and experiences.)
I was nearly shot once following an explosion on the docks when two B specials (policemen) mistook me for an IRA type — I had red hair, red beard, and a black sweater. Mostly, working in Ireland was a matter of just working and listening and taking notes and trying to understand what it all meant. I do not mean to make the experience more or less than it was.
One night, during the end of my tour, I talked to a couple of fellows from the BBC who had spent a lot of time in Belfast. I opined that the IRA, sooner or later, as a terrorist group, would have to threaten or assassinate someone in the royal family of Britain.
The BBC fellow with the wide face and whisky voice and sure manner was shocked. Truly shocked. “Yanks don’t understand a thing about the Irish,” he said.
“I understand terrorism,” I said. I had seen a few riots in Chicago and covered that strange week of the 1968 Democratic National Convention.
“But you don’t understand,” he said. “Even the IRA has too much respect for the Royal Family to do anything of the sort.”
I thought he was wrong at the time and wrong still years later when I wrote The November Man. Terrorism has no rules except to effect terror. And that is why I wrote the book I did, based on experience and what I thought I understood of the way politics works. And terrorism is politics, no matter how extreme.
My book had been purchased by an English publisher before publication. Unfortunately, when Mountbatten was killed and The November Man achieved a sort of instant celebrity in the press worldwide, the English publisher said it would reek of opportunism to publish the book — even though it had been purchased on its merits before the event of the assassination — and held it off the market for two years. It is still being published in Britain and in a number of other countries.
This is the first American edition in half a decade. There have been six sequels involving November, but this book, written at the beginning of my life as a novelist, has a special life of its own. Readers of the other November Man novels have haunted used book shops to find “the first one” and a dear lady in the Chicago Tribune circulation department once offered twenty-five dollars for a worn paperback copy of the book. I am glad it is back in print for those who asked about it.
I make no apologies about the plot of the book or my attempt to portray Irish society as it really is — with all its beauty, its diversity, and its great potential for good and harm. This book — and the other November Man books — holds a mirror to the face of reality. I try to make the mirror as clear and undistorted as I can.
Bill Granger
Chicago
1986
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
An award-winning novelist and reporter, Bill Granger was raised in a working-class neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago. He began his extraordinary career in 1963 when, while still in college, he joined the staff of United Press International. He later worked for the Chicago Tribune, writing about crime, cops, and politics, and covering such events as the race riots of the late 1960s and the 1968 Democratic Convention. In 1969, he joined the staff of the Chicago Sun-Times, where he won an Associated Press award for his story of a participant in the My Lai Massacre. He also wrote a series of stories on Northern Ireland for Newsday — and unwittingly added to a wealth of information and experiences that would form the foundations of future spy thrillers and mystery novels. By 1978, Bill Granger had contributed articles to Time, the New Republic, and other magazines; and become a daily columnist, television critic, and teacher of journalism at Columbia College in Chicago.
He began his literary career in 1979 with Code Name November (originally published as The November Man,) the book that became an international sensation and introduced the cool American spy who later gave rise to a whole series. His second novel, Public Murders, a Chicago police procedural, won the Edgar® Award from the Mystery Writers of America in 1981.
In all, Bill Granger published thirteen November Man novels, three nonfiction books, and nine novels. In 1980, he began weekly columns in the Chicago Tribune on everyday life (he was voted best Illinois columnist by UPI), which were collected in the book Chicago Pieces. His books have been translated into ten languages.
Bill Granger passed away in 2012.