You should write a book said the eminent actor,
so I did — and this is No5
HACK LIT: Seed with his latest offering
"Where The Past Lies" is the fifth political thriller from ex-Daily Mail and TV journalist, Geoffrey Seed. Former Mirror executive, the late Revel Barker, published Seed’s debut novel which led an Amazon best-seller list for three months. Geoff’s wife says writing books is just his way of pretending he's no longer on the road. This is his side of the slur.
By GEOFFREY SEED
Not everything in a reporter's notebook makes the paper or, in my case, the screen. Libel lawyers see to that. So what happens to those 'almost stories'?
I shared some of mine with the eminent actor, Patrick Malahide (Singing Detective, Inspector Alleyn, Minder etc), while introducing him to the bumpier bits of Northern Ireland — and to some of those who made it so — for a script he was researching.
'You should write books,' he said.
So began my first effort at hack-lit — fictionalising material leaked to me by a one-time Mossad asset that stood up in my head but wouldn't in a lawyer's.
This book, “A Place of Strangers”, was reviewed by Malahide as "...satisfyingly complex with a whiff of le Carré" and happily washed its face.
Others followed and my last effort, "Death in a Time of Conspiracy", drew heavily on what I'd experienced in Ireland, Latin America, apartheid Africa and — very personally — at somewhat formal meetings with gentlemen from MI5 and Special Branch.
They'd actively investigated me twice under the Official Secrets Act for doing my job and locked me up under the Prevention of Terrorism Act to get my briefcase and doubtless copy all therein.
And now comes "Where The Past Lies", a tale that begins with the suspicious death of a former British spy and builds to a deadly stand-off in the Florida Keys by way of the Hungarian uprising and the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. In reviews, Steve Coogan praises the "...elegant story-telling", and Anglo-American espionage writer, Edward Wilson, describes it as "Superb...a rare combination of thriller and literary novel."
It's a story that would've been great to cover had I not gone and dyed my hair grey. Dammit.
6 December 2025
