Can you ever trust a writer?
And are journalists immoral?
Soap, grit and dirt
It was my birthday the other week and my friend Steve bought me an expensive bar of soap and two books as gifts: True Grit (yes, that True Grit) and Janet Malcolm: the Last Interview and Other Conversations. One of these gifts was timely – and it wasn’t the soap.
Here's why. A fortnight ago Tortoise Media released a podcast series entitled Into the Dirt presented by Ceri Thomas, one of the journalists in this country that I most admire. Thomas was the editor of the BBC’s Panorama and the man who, in 2015, commissioned and broadcast an investigation into the claims made by an anonymous “victim” of historic abuse - a man who became known as “Nick”. Thomas and his team showed that the claims deemed “credible and true” by the officer in charge of Operation Midland were actually incredible and therefore confected. Thomas received a lot of criticism, not least from in-house BBC people who had invested in Nick, and from former BBC producer Meirion Jones, who many will remember. Nick’s actual name, of course, was Karl Beech.
On the face of it Into the Dirt is the story of a British man – Rob Moore - who for several years earned his money by spying on anti-asbestos campaigners at the ultimate behest of the asbestos producers of Kazakhstan, but who then subsequently attempted to turn double agent and help the people he had been spying on. This attempt fell apart in 2018 when the campaigners – unimpressed by Moore’s contrition - took the agency that employed Moore and Moore himself to court and won substantial damages.
But actually Into the Dirt is about something else. As it unfolds it becomes the story of how Moore expects to tell his version of his actions and his intentions to Thomas and consequently be understood by listeners to have acted honourably. When he realises that this is isn’t going to happen because Thomas is sceptical about Moore’s intentions, Moore is furious and distraught. A fascinating encounter which takes place over two days in a country garden (Moore is now a gardener) is recorded and forms the dénouement of the series. Moore then withdraws his co-operation from Tortoise, but the series goes ahead anyway.
I don’t want to give too much away because the series is well worth listening to and is beautifully and scrupulously told. It is ultimately a saga of self-delusion worthy of any psychotherapist’s attention. I’ll say a bit more about Moore and Thomas a bit later.
True crime, false crime writer?
But where does the late Janet Malcolm fit into this? Malcolm, who died in Manhattan in June 2021 aged 86, was a writer for the New Yorker magazine and an essayist. All her books are worth reading I think (I spent almost an entire two week holiday in Sicily discussing her kind-of biography of Sylvia Plath with my wife. Seriously.). But the one that became most famous among writers was The Journalist and the Murderer which was first published in two parts in the New Yorker magazine in March 1989.