The Man Who Knew Everything

by Tom Stacey

  THE MAN WHO KNEW EVERYTHING

  Tom Stacey

  Tom Stacey is the author of seven novels; collections of short stories; three works of remote travel and ethnology including the recently published Tribe: the hidden history of the Mountains of the Moon; three books on current affairs; and (in 2007) The First Dog to be Somebody’s Best Friend, for children. He is a former columnist and chief foreign correspondent of the Sunday Times, and winner of the Foreign Correspondent of the Year award. He won the John Llewllyn Rhys prize for literature, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

  Sir Peregrine Worsthorne, a dominant figure in Fleet Street for several decades, was Editor of the Sunday Telegraph from 1986 to 1991 and is author, most recently, of In Defence of Aristocracy (2004).

  Comments on The Man Who Knew Everything:

  ‘I picked it up yesterday evening,’ wrote Nina Bawden, reviewing the original edition of this short novel (then entitled Deadline), ‘and stayed reading it until I finished, absolutely held. Very good story, just the right length – it’s always difficult to get that right – credible, exciting, sad. I believed in Gran Jones.’

  ‘Tom Stacey writes from the inside,’ wrote James Runcie in the Daily Telegraph, ‘with a tense economy…of the great days of Fleet Street.’

  ‘A wonderful book. I read it and re-read it,’ wrote Sybille Bedford.

  ‘Written by the former chief foreign correspondent of this newspaper,’ Colin Greenland wrote in the Sunday Times, ‘it is a remarkably engaging portrait.’

  ‘Tom Stacey writes with verve and humour about a world he knows inside out,’ Jackie Wullschlager told readers of Residents Abroad. ‘The interweaving of Jones’s past life on the island into the sudden drama of corruption and ambition is beautifully done, moving, intense, profound. Tom Stacey’s prose is so crisp and light that you seem barely to skim along the surface, yet this is one of the most haunting novels I have read for years.’

  ‘With a conciseness that many in Jones’s line of work may envy,’ wrote Amanda Heller of the US edition in the Boston Globe, ‘Tom Stacey creates a drama rich in detail of character and atmosphere, proving that heroic themes can well be served by brevity.’

  In Booklist (US), Thomas Gaughin wrote of The Man Who Knew Everything (then Deadline) as ‘a haunting package of memorable characters, scenes and lines. Gran Jones…is a wonderfully sympathetic character but in no way pathetic, even when he suffers a stroke. It’s no wonder that John Hurt chose to star in the film of this novel.’

  The Man Who Knew Everything

  (first published as Deadline)

  Works by Tom Stacey

  NOVELS

  The Brothers M

  The Living and the Dying

  The Pandemonium

  The Worm in the Rose

  The Man Who Knew Everything (first published as Deadline)

  Decline

  (under the nom de plume Kendal J Peel)

  The Twelfth Night of Ramadhan

  COLLECTED LONG SHORT STORIES

  Bodies and Souls

  INDIVIDUALLY PUBLISHED LONG SHORT STORIES / NOVELLAS

  The Same Old Story/ The Tether of the Flesh/ Golden Rain/

  Grief/ The Swap/ Boredom, Or, The Yellow Trousers/Mary’s Visit

  TRAVEL AND ETHNOLOGY

  The Hostile Sun

  Summons to Ruwenzori

  Peoples of the Earth (20 vols. deviser and supervisory editor)

  Tribe, The Hidden History of the Mountains of the Moon

  BIOGRAPHY

  Thomas Brassey, The Greatest Railway Builder in the World

  CURRENT AFFAIRS

  Today’s World (Editor)

  The Book of the World (deviser and supervisor)

  Immigration and Enoch Powell

  FOR CHILDREN

  The First Dog to be Somebody’s Best Friend

  SCREENPLAY

  Deadline

  The Man Who Knew Everything

  (first published as Deadline)

  Tom Stacey

  FOREWORD BY SIR PEREGRINE WORSTHORNE

  CAPUCHIN CLASSICS

  LONDON

  First published as Deadline by William Heinemann 1988

  This edition published by Capuchin Classics 2008

  Reprinted 2008

  © Capuchin Classics & Tom Stacey 1988 & 2008

  Capuchin Classics

  128 Kensington Church Street, London W8 4BH

  Telephone: +44 (0)20 7221 7166

  Fax: +44 (0)20 7792 9288

  E-mail info@capuchin-classics.co.uk

  www.capuchin-classics.co.uk

  Châtelaine of Capuchin Classics: Emma Howard

  ISBN-13: 978-1-905299-40-9

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

  FOREWORD

  If I was asked by my great-grandchild to name the best book depicting the life in the Cold War years of, in that order, a gentleman-adventurer-foreign correspondent – values, manners, political and social prejudices, not to mention dress, drinks and ways with women – my choice unquestionably would be The Man Who Knew Everything by Tom Stacey who, in order to paint an authentic picture, had only to look into the mirror, or, better still, search his own soul. For Tom Stacey, who has been a friend of mine for sixty or more years, was, and in my memory very much still is, the very embodiment of that genre of wild card journalist – at once anarchic and conventional; subversive and patriotic, seedy and stylish – which he catches so memorably in Granville Jones, the hero, or anti-hero, of this tale, worthy of Conrad and Buchan.

  Such characters are now, sad to say, an extinct species; there is little glamour left in contemporary journalism. Today’s embedded war correspondents are almost as much under military discipline as private soldiers. As for foreign correspondents glued to their laptops, they too tend increasingly to be at the beck and call of corporate managers back in London interested only in the bottom line. Instead, overpaid celebrity TV journalists have taken their place. Alas, nothing chivalric about them.

  Which is precisely why the reappearance of this book, first published (as Deadline) in the 1980s, is so important. For just as John le Carré chronicled for all time the Cold War life of the spy as it really was, so Tom Stacey, in Deadline, does the same, in equally vivid prose, for the foreign correspondent, the only difference being that whereas le Carré, a little uncharitably, highlights the dark side, Stacey very romantically gilds the lily. Only in one respect do I think my old friend goes over the top and this is when he implies that for the journalist, meeting a deadline is somehow or other a sacred duty, on a par with the importance given by Graham Greene in his novels to his hero’s Roman Catholicism. Of course journalists want to be first with the news, just as a jockey wants to be first past the winning post. But there is nothing mystical or mumbo-jumboish about that; just the old Adam of a competitive spirit.

  It is also sad that Stacey should feel the need to introduce a major love interest to the novel. In my recollection femmes fatales, or femmes anything else, played a very minor role in old Fleet Street. Alcohol, not women, the bottle rather than the bed, were what kept us going. Indeed women, in the form of wives and mistresses – not to mention debts, domesticity and every other kind of drudgery – were what most of us were escaping from. I don’t think that my old friend quite does justice to the all-importance of freedom to the old time journalist he so lovingly describes; freedom from roots, freedom from office life, freedom from boredom, freedom from the constraints and conformities of belonging to any one community, and a
bove all, freedom from the scholarly disciplines which require respect for the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

  These small cavils aside, let me wholeheartedly praise this marvellously readable old classic. For my generation it is a heart-warming trip down memory lane, to a period, not so long ago, when English journalists, like English politicians and soldiers, could still make history. For the younger generation, however, it is something even more precious: the best glimpse they are likely to have of an age that has vanished for ever.

  Peregrine Worsthorne

  Hedgerley, March 2008

  AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTION

  The draft of this novella was written over a long weekend in Dirab, near Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in late 1978. The imagined political events it describes on the island state of Khouwair in the Gulf (which had already become the locally acceptable term for what the atlases of the world have persisted in calling the Persian Gulf) may be deemed to be of plausible contemporaneity with the period when I thought the story out. My invented island is an amalgam of various Gulf states of that time. I had some familiarity with all of them, whether as a newspaperman, a novelist or a publisher.

  I had, just then, recently revisited Bahrain, renewing my friendship with one of the doyens of Fleet Street’s roving correspondents of the older generation, Ralph Izzard. Ralph had chosen to settle on the island, in virtual retirement. It was to him I dedicated the book when it came out in the original version, from Heinemann, in 1988, under the title of Deadline. This and that in the story had been drawn from Ralph – Gran Jones’s home, the quartier of the Arab town of Manama in which he lived, the car (Ralph’s was an Oldsmobile of the late 1940s), and the hotel whose bar he frequented and which became his point of contact with the rest of mankind. Likewise, I borrowed from Bahrain for aspects of my island – long before anyone in Bahrain or Saudi Arabia ever dreamt of a Causeway linking the two countries.

  I had known the waters of the Gulf since 1956. I clambered ashore on its main island surreptitiously, under cover of night, collected my mail from the Poste Restante, and re-embarked privily on the boum on which I had lived for the previous ten days. Sailing down the Gulf east-south-east from Kuwait, I slept on deck. My Arab craft was to take me on first to Qatar and thence to the little mud-built town of Dubai, where once again I slipped ashore and into the interior unobserved by authority. My assignment on that occasion was to trace the traffic of (more or less consenting) domestic slaves into Arabia: from, as I was to learn, Baluchistan, via the Omani port of Gwadur to Ras al Khaima and thence to al Ain and into Saudia Arabia. Having got my story, I was courteously arrested and deported from the Trucial States by the British Political Agent in Dubai on the weekly milk-round there-and-back Dakota flight to Sharja from Bahrain. There I picked up a whiff of the political tensions of the time which had been generated by the rise of Arab nationalism.

  Britain held the ring along the length of the Gulf: its proconsular personage in Bahrain, where Britain had had a presence since 1900 (and a treaty since 1820), was still the pivotal figure in the theatre of that entire waterway. In the second half of the 1950s, when my Gran Jones first turned up there, the black gold of oil had yet to overwhelm the region. Jordan and Syria had had their convulsions. President Nasser had inherited King Farouk’s power in Egypt; Cairo’s Voice of the Arabs radio station was capturing every indigenous ear from Morocco to the Gulf; Britain and France, in collusion with Israel (where I had been assigned to cover the scene), had been humiliated at the 1956 fiasco of Suez. Iraq’s monarchy was soon to be toppled. Hereditary Emirs and Sultans, however, were surviving from Kuwait to the straits of Hormuz, and Britain remained in Aden.

  By the later 1970s, when the main action of this story takes place, Britain had tossed aside its formal authority. The West’s dependence on Gulf oil had become a factor, not to say a spectre, of intense concern. Amid the throes of the Cold War, new modes of republicanism and international bargaining or blackmail were in the air. Just across the Gulf, bearded men fronting an old God were soon to have the Shah of Iran, who had simultaneously overplayed and underplayed his hand, fleeing his Peacock Throne in ignominy.

  I give this new edition of the story its first draft title, The Man Who Knew Everything, to distance it from the film Deadline made by the BBC and others from my own screenplay out of the Heinemann and Mandarin novella published in 1988/9 as Deadline. Here I ask the reader to condone my getting something off my chest. The movie starred John Hurt and Imogen Stubbs. As is said on the cover of both this and of the original edition, this story is ‘not a tragedy: though it contains pain and tragedy, it tells of a life redeemed by the commitment of the protagonist to his métier.’ Such was the story, and my screenplay, to which Hurt and his co-star gave their considerable gifts. After the shooting (mostly in Morocco), director and editor went to ground for three months to emerge inexplicably with an edited version, not readily intelligible, which re-shaped the story as a tragedy of love. I attempted to block its screening by law. The droit morale of writers was weaker in those days than today. I cut my own version, frame by frame, from 14 hours of video-taped rushes, and added my own music, bar by bar: I had a little masterpiece of a film. I and the BBC’s producer, Innes Lloyd, who backed my version, were overruled by the BBC hierarchy and the lesser financial partner in the enterprise. The bastardised version was seen, on an ugly night for me, by seven million viewers of whom some may still recall the film. It has not – thankfully, and understandably – been seen again in Britain, although every year it gets a showing or two abroad, and a video of it circulates in the US without my name anywhere attached to it.

  Granville Jones was one of that small band of Fleet Street newspapermen belonging to the old school of by-lined newsprint stars: a breed which has largely been displaced in Britain during the past half century by television newsmen. It was the school of my journalistic apprenticeship, when we were writing for a British readership of the early 1950s where most households had no television. For some months in 1954 I wrote the main by-lined leaderpage piece more or less once a week for a broadsheet Daily Express of six or eight pages in all (newsprint was still rationed), bought by close on four-and-a-half million people daily and read at least in part by three times that number, all without other source of news except BBC radio’s Home Service. It made a young aspirant like me, treading in the footsteps of Sefton (Tom) Delmer, René McColl, James Cameron and the like, a nationally known figure. But by the end of that decade, television journalists were homing in on every major focal point of news, and beginning to eclipse or at least dim the writing men’s glory.

  We newspapermen of that time carried a certain scorn for the television interlopers. By that time I was working for the Sunday Times as their star man-on-the-spot. Writing for newsprint, we did not have to unbalance or distort our coverage to suit whatever was obtainable on camera. We knew that in a well researched and well written piece of 1400 words we could tell more of the reality of a situation than could a full 20 minutes of television coverage, even for an intelligently edited programme like ‘Panorama’. Theirs was a brash and facile medium in the field of news, and remains so. As a rule, our editors kept us off television: there was always the fear of a newspaperman being interviewed on camera scooping his own written despatch. We newspapermen knew we were better informed than the television reporters since our readers required us to be. The television front-men picked our brains at the hotel’s bar: we very seldom picked theirs.

  After a while, newspapers were to become less possessive of their big names. Today’s enduring stars in the tradition of that old school with prior newspaper allegiances – like Max Hastings or Anne Leslie – will readily lend their talents to television, if not for news at least for comment or analysis; and their newspapers benefit from the further exposure. Likewise, television personalities such as John Simpson will be borrowed to commentate in print, even if (in my view) such a cross-over seldom much rewards the reader.

  Many a detail ma
rks the period in which The Man Who Knew Everything is set. Gran Jones needed a 3p stamp to send his wife a searing letter. The forgotten journal Reveille carried the best nudes. The adjective ‘gay’ was allowed to mean nothing more than blithe and insouciant. Then as now the newspaperman’s task was threefold: to get the news, write it, and move it. Yet that last task is significantly lighter in today’s world of sophisticated global communications.

  Up to the 1970s, filing copy or moving an image could often demand formidable ingenuity. It still can be so, of course, under bullying regimes with police quick to seize tapes, cameras or notebooks – or, of course, arrest you, as happens not all that infrequently, especially in the Third World with excitability in the air. As to the methodology, people today have all but forgotten the rattling telex machine, by which most of any newspaperman’s despatches from far abroad were moved from distant places between the later 1950s and the 1970s. One needed a circuit. Sunspots were a recurring hazard. Transmitting a visual image could be a lot trickier still. Until well into the 1980s, international links from Third World countries were erratic, or technically impossible or, occasionally in crisis, shut down. Gran Jones’s story – no less than the fate of the Emir of Khouwair – hangs upon these realities.

  Tom Stacey

  March 2008

  DEDICATION

  My Dear Ralph

  By asking leave to dedicate this story to you, I am acknowledging what it owes to you: it would not come to have been written had you not been living where you were when you were. Gran Jones is of course not Ralph Izzard. You did not go to live in your Gulf island because of any distant love affair; you were never neglected by yourself or forgotten by your friends; your house was invariably a welcoming place, and a famous haven for those of us to whom you would surrender your spare bedroom; you have always been treasured by your family; you were never crusty or curmudgeonly. And far from resenting the younger bloods of your vocation, you were a source of affection and inspiration.