Gerald Seymour, the television news reporter turned novelist, never had any illusions about the nature of writing as a career. "As a child I'd had a view of writing in the raw," he explains. "I knew it wasn't something pleasant where you took a notebook down to the bottom of the garden. I knew it was hard work and was full of frustrations and pain and disappointments."
Seymour's father was a self-educated bank manager who wrote poetry; he went on to become chairman of the Poetry Society and a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. His mother, who wrote under her maiden name of Rosalind Wade, was a prolific novelist. "So I was brought up in a house where they both wrote and all their friends were writers, which I suspect contributed to the fact that for most of my life I had no literary ambitions at all."

 

After completing his history degree in 1963, Seymour went straight to ITN as a trainee. He was recently told by a current ITN newscaster that people today would kill for the chance he got. "But at the time it didn't seem very special. I wanted to go into journalism and had already been rejected out of hand by the BBC, even though my referees included Vera Brittain and John Arlott. But ITN took me on a three-month trial, and because I was tall and had a nice speaking voice I was sent off to be a reporter."

 

One of his first assignments was the great train robbery, and he went on to travel the world specialising in terrorism stories. He was the journalist closest to the room where the Israeli athletes were held captive at the 1972 Munich Olympics, and he chronicled the 1970s activities of the PLO, Eta and the Red Army Faction. "Correspondents are like policemen, firemen and soldiers in that we live in a cocooned world where we appear to normal people as cynical and noisy," he says. "Only rarely can I remember anything that really moved me; I'm not ashamed of that, it's just the way it was. The bigger the disaster, the more the airtime. But I found when I left that cocoon that I reverted back to the world of normal people very quickly. Now I'm as soft and easily upset as anyone on the street."

 

His move into fiction came, indirectly, from the phenomenon of journalist Frederick Forsyth's success with The Day of the Jackal. "That really hit the newsrooms. There was a feeling that it should be part of a journalist's knapsack to have a thriller." In the early 1970s Seymour had been covering Northern Ireland, so he began a story set in the Troubles. He wrote in his free time and remembers making particular progress when kicking his heels in Beirut for a couple of weeks waiting for an elusive Yasser Arafat to turn up for an interview.

 

"But then I found myself with 250 pages and I didn't know quite what to do with it," he says. "In the end I asked the newsreader Gordon Honeycombe for some advice - I subsequently found out that this had rather offended my parents, as I hadn't gone to them - and he gave me the name of his agent." Harry's Game, published in 1975, became a bestseller both sides of the Atlantic; it was quickly optioned for a film and subsequently became an acclaimed television series.

 

"At first I tried very hard to convince myself that this wasn't a career; I was still really a journalist," he says. "I struggled for two and a half years to write during the gaps in my life, but - and I really wasn't happy about this - a destructive microbe had got into my journalistic career and in the end I decided to go for it as a novelist."

 

Since then he has written another 20 books, usually set in one or other of the world's hot spots and involving as much leg work as he used to put in as a reporter. When he left ITN he was told that its best-kept secret was the fact that there is a life outside, but he admits to feeling lonely on his first trip to the far side of the Berlin wall without the security of a press card. "But it was also satisfying. My sort of journalism was all about getting a minute and a half of fuzzy pictures on the news that evening. It was obviously extraordinarily superficial, so the ability to learn about a situation in more depth has been very exciting. And people talk to me a lot more freely than they would when I was shoving a microphone up their nostrils."

 

To his credit, Seymour's adventures aren't written to a formula; he doesn't have a pre-publication agreement with publishers who would be only too keen to take more of the same. His most recent paperback, Holding the Zero, was set against a Kurdish uprising in northern Iraq, and his latest novel, The Untouchable, came out of a description he heard of Sarajevo as an El Dorado of organised crime. "I went back in my mind to The Third Man and Vienna - although I'm not comparing myself to Graham Greene - which was a postwar city with an occupying force and rampant crime. And I really wanted to go back to Sarajevo to find out what happened there after the world stopped looking.

 

"The great and the good - the Kate Adies and the Martin Bells - ride into town in the lord mayor's carriage to tell their stories. But now I much prefer being the chap who comes along afterwards with the bucket and shovel."