Events marking publication of James Robertson's Lockerbie novel

The following events have been scheduled to mark the publication in June of James Robertson’s new novel The Professor of Truth:

Boswell Book Festival, Auchinleck: James Robertson in conversation with Tam Dalyell, Sunday 19 May. Link here for more info: http://www.boswellbookfestival.co.uk/index.php/programme/sunday-19-may/item/james-robertson

Hay on Wye: James Robertson, Jim Swire and Philippe Sands, 10am Friday 31 May. Link here for more info: http://www.hayfestival.com/p-6071-jim-swire-and-james-robertson-talk-to-philippe-sands.aspx

London Literature Festival: James Robertson, Jim Swire and Alan Little, 1pm Saturday 1 June. Link here: http://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whatson/james-robertson-73931

Edinburgh: James Robertson book launch 7pm Thursday 6 June. Link here: http://www.waterstones.com/waterstonesweb/displayDetailEvent.do?searchType=1&author=James|Robertson

Kirkcaldy: James Robertson event Saturday 8 June. Link here: http://www.fifedirect.org.uk/whatson/index.cfm?fuseaction=whatson.display&themeid=&id=659C55FD-BFFC-4A34-0A5FE68605CB982E

Dundee: James Robertson event Tuesday 11 June. Link here: http://www.waterstones.com/waterstonesweb/displayDetailEvent.do?searchType=1&author=James|Robertson

Biggar: James Robertson event Thursday 13 June. Link here: http://www.atkinson-pryce.co.uk/index.asp?pageid=28494

Ayr: James Robertson event Wednesday 19 June. Link here: http://www.waterstones.com/waterstonesweb/displayDetailEvent.do?searchType=1&author=James|Robertson

A review of the novel in The List by Kevin Scott can be read here.  Further reviews can be read here and here.]

Fact or fiction?: James Robertson and Lockerbie

[This is the headline over a review in today’s edition of the Scottish Review by Andrew Hook, Bradley Professor of English Literature in the University of Glasgow from 1979 to 1998.  It reads in part:]

James Robertson's bold and extraordinary new novel – The Professor of Truth – has already sparked controversy. Hardly surprising given that its prime subject matter involves the most controversial episode in the modern history of Scottish justice: the conviction and imprisonment of the late Abdelbaset al-Megrahi as the terrorist responsible for the destruction of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie in December, 1988.

Robertson sticks closely to the circumstances and characters involved in the Lockerbie tragedy and its aftermath, but what he has written remains a novel, a work of fiction. The book's central character is closely based on that of Jim Swire, the English doctor who lost his daughter on Flight 103, but who has subsequently become celebrated for his public and outspoken rejection of the validity of the trial and conviction of Megrahi. Dr Swire here becomes Alan Tealing, a lecturer – significantly not a professor – in the Stirling University department of English literature. He has lost his wife as well as his daughter in the disaster. Likewise Megrahi has become Khalil Khazar.

In the first section of the novel, entitled 'Ice', the setting remains a wintry Scotland, and Robertson creates a full and moving imaginative account of Tealing's response to the loss of his family and the existential freezing of his life and experience that follows. But in the book's second and final section – called 'Fire' – the scene shifts to a wholly imaginary experience of Australia where Tealing tracks down a Maltese character called Parroulet, clearly based on the real-life Maltese clothes shop owner, Tony Gauci, whose evidence was crucial in the trial and conviction of Megrahi.

Given this context, the novel inevitably raises a series of familiar quasi-philosophical questions: about the relationship between life as it is lived and how it is depicted in a work of art, about fiction and reality – not to mention others about how far the ideals of truth and justice actually operate in the practice of the law, and the validity of realistic or idealistic visions of human experience. So much so that one reviewer has referred to the Scottish section of the novel as a 'tutorial' on such issues. Perhaps there is a potential problem here for the novelist, but to my mind at least, the particulars of Alan Tealing's predicament, which we never lose sight of, prevent any descent into mere abstraction. Issues surrounding the meaning of truth and justice have come to define Tealing's life.

Another reviewer – Alexander Linklater in The Observer – raises a more central issue. He argues that the book is at its best when it is most fictional: it 'feels most real at the points where it is clearly fictional'. I agree. Again and again James Robertson’s creative imagination provides the tiny, telling detail which confirms the human reality of what is being described. Over the years, Tealing's relations with his wife's family in America slowly deteriorate. They cannot understand his rejection of the court's verdict. Their phone calls become infrequent; they have less and less to say to each other. 'When we spoke', Tealing tells us, 'I pictured the ocean rolling between us, vast and grey and cold'. (...)

For Linklater, the problem stems from Robertson's over-commitment to the truth and accuracy of Swire's rejection of the Scottish court's verdict. In his view the novel would have been more satisfying had Tealing been less sure that, say, Parroulet's withdrawing or qualifying his original evidence would lead to 'Khazar's' acquittal. In fact, Tealing is frequently shown struggling with doubt over the usefulness and value of his total commitment over so many years to the pursuit of the truth behind what he calls 'The Case'. Like the governess in Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, he is even ready to entertain – momentarily – the horror of his being entirely wrong.

What is actually in question here is a larger issue. Linklater's position (or preference) is very much a current, postmodern one. Contemporary art in all its forms prefers the uncertain, the problematic, the unresolved, the fragment. For the majority of today's artists there are no finalities, no absolutes, no firm or unchallengeable truths of any kind. But when in 1898 Emile Zola took on the French legal and political establishment with the publication of J'Accuse, a man – Alfred Dreyfus – was in prison for a crime he did not commit. A great wrong existed which could and should be righted. Eight years later, it was.

Writing The Professor of Truth, even if he chooses not to challenge the Scottish legal establishment head-on, James Robertson is clearly on Zola's side. Will the Lockerbie story be a different one eight years from now? 

[Because of popular demand, a second event involving James Robertson has been arranged at the 2013 Edinburgh International Book Festival. The programme states: "We are delighted to announce that James Robertson, one of Scotland’s foremost literary talents, will appear at a second event at the Book Festival.

"Tickets for his first event on 18 August sold out swiftly so anyone who was unable to secure tickets can now take the opportunity to see the novelist on Friday 23 August at 12 noon. Tickets are on sale now here on the website or you can ring our Box Office on 0845 373 5888."]

Lockerbie is still unfinished business

[A long and perceptive review by Malcolm Forbes of James Robertson’s latest novel has just been published on the website of the Abu Dhabi newspaper The National.  The following are excerpts:]

"Scotland's a wee place," says one of James Robertson's characters in his 2010 magnum opus, And the Land Lay Still. Be that as it may, for each of his four novels Robertson has mined his native land and extracted enough rich and vital ore to do big things. As with Walter Scott, the subject of his doctoral study, Robertson is in many ways a historical writer. The Fanatic (2000) spliced modern-day Edinburgh with tales of 17th-century skulduggery including witchcraft and assassinations. Joseph Knight (2003) chronicled the search for a former slave in 19th-century Scotland. When Robertson doesn't plunge into the past, he allows it to encroach upon the present: from the wondrous, James Hogg-flavoured gothic fable, The Testament of Gideon Mack (2006), the personal account of a "mad minister who met with the devil and lived to tell the tale", to the epic panoramic vision of modern Scotland on show in And the Land Lay Still.

Now, after a three-year hiatus, comes a fifth novel, The Professor of Truth. As it is set in the present but taps into the past - at times feeds hungrily from it - it clearly belongs to that second group of novels. (...)

The Professor of Truth is a scintillating read - part political thriller, part meditation on grief, truth and the internal struggle to speak out, be heard and right wrongs. (...)

The book is energised by tension, charged by Robertson's treatment of a man going it alone, out of his depth, prepared to risk all to obtain a final, critical reckoning. The drama unfolds through Tealing's intense and intimate first-person narration, which pulls the reader further in and places us firmly on Tealing's side. We sympathise with his plight and cheer his defiance. Like the faithless Gideon Mack, he is unable to find succour in God. He has been dismissed as an obstinate fool, a crank in thrall to conspiracy theories, rooting around for a smoking gun and an unpunished murderer, neither of which exists. His wife's parents sever the connection with him when he visits Khalil Khazar in prison, a man Tealing believes innocent of their daughter's murder. His sister urges him to move on. A lawyer mocks his idealism and thinks his perception of truth is naive: "It is not pure and separate. It is dirty and decayed and has frayed edges, and holes and tears in it. The last thing the truth does is gleam." Only his new partner, Carol, spurs him on.

Much is made of Tealing's grief. In a less skilled writer's hands we would be plodding through maudlin passages on the heels of a moping protagonist. But Robertson is too good for that, and eschews woe-is-me navel-gazing for heartfelt soul-searching and has his hero retrace his steps in pertinent, life-changing events rather than aimlessly wander down Memory Lane. Tealing's recollections of the crash and his day spent looking for wreckage are superbly managed, swinging powerfully, though unsettlingly, between unsparing recorded detail and creative reconstruction. (...)

Robertson excels as much with what he says as what he withholds. The Professor of Truth, like Robertson's previous novels, delves into Scotland's past, and this time round his source is the 1988 Lockerbie bombing. However, Lockerbie is never mentioned. The bomb begins its journey from an unnamed island in the Mediterranean. Khalil Khazar and another suspect come from an undisclosed "hostile regime", a "rogue state". Even Tealing's university town is anonymous, given only as a place in Scotland that "positively groans under the accumulation of history". A dead body that may or may not be Nilsen is found in the snow. Al Megrahi becomes Khazar; the rest - Lockerbie and Libya, Qaddafi and Pan Am Flight 103 - all go unsaid and perhaps rightly so. Robertson has gone on record as saying that the true story of Lockerbie "is still unfinished business, and for some it always will be". His novel reflects and articulates this reality and, although it exhibits clear parallels, it offers no neat conclusions. Ambiguity reigns. Smoke and mirrors prevail at every turn to conceal that hard-sought-for truth.

Not every literary author is capable of changing gear and successfully pulling off a thriller, not least one that is thought-provoking instead of action-packed. Most end up like John Updike's belly-flop, Terrorist: tendentious efforts that preach, generalise, rationalise and aim to resolve. Robertson does the opposite and beguiles us with broken lives and loose ends. Rather than answer, his novel asks: What, if any, are the limits to the grieving process? How, if at all, do we achieve closure? Is truth everything? And how much of what we do is chance and how much choice?

In Julian Barnes' 2005 novel, Arthur & George, Arthur Conan Doyle is described by his sister, Connie, as "Scottish practicality streaked with sudden fire". The same can be said of James Robertson's incendiary fiction.

He may well have peaked with And the Land Lay Still, but that doesn't mean he can't continue to produce searing, sinuous, first-rate novels like The Professor of Truth. 

[Another serious and thought-provoking review is to be found here on the Scots Whay Hey! blog.]

Storm brews over ‘Lockerbie’ novel

[This is the headline over an article in today’s edition of Scotland on Sunday.  It reads in part:]

Award-winning author James Robertson is courting controversy after basing his next novel on the events ­surrounding the Lockerbie ­terrorist bombing.

Robertson, recently hailed as “Scotland’s greatest living writer” by First Minister Alex Salmond, has been a constant supporter of the campaign to clear the name of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al-Megrahi, the Libyan convicted of the Lockerbie murders, but who was released from jail in ­Scotland on compassionate grounds before his death ­earlier this year. Robertson has also used high-profile lectures to cast doubt on Megrahi’s conviction.

Now his latest novel, The Professor of Truth, due to be published in June and billed as being “inspired by the Lockerbie bombing”, tells the story of a university lecturer whose wife and daughter are killed in the terrorist bombing of a plane over Scotland 21 years earlier.

In an echo of the story of Dr Jim Swire, the Worcestershire GP whose daughter died in the real bombing, the academic is sure that the man convicted of the multiple murders was not ­responsible and that he has been deprived of justice.

The plot may revive accusations that Robertson uses his writing to provide “alternative” versions of history. One critic, Ian Smart, former head of the Law Society in Scotland, wrote that the author’s previous prize-winning novel, And The Land Lay Still, which charted the rise of Scottish nationalism, “was like reading one of those ‘alternative history’ books set in a world where the USA had lost the War of Independence or Hitler had been successful at Stalingrad”.

Robertson has also been criticised by US relatives of Lockerbie victims as being part of a “cottage industry of deniers” and of being a cheerleader for Megrahi. Frank Duggan, president of the US-based support group Victims of Pan Am Flight 103 said: “If the book is inspired by the Lockerbie bombing and the author believes Megrahi was not guilty despite what was found by your courts, I am afraid it will not rise to the top of my reading list.

“I know there is now a cottage industry of deniers, from books to films to stage productions, shilling [working on behalf of] for Megrahi. I guess James Robertson takes the position that it was not Megrahi, but it was some other Libyans who were guilty of these unspeakable murders. [RB: I suspect that Mr Duggan’s guess is as misconceived as most of his Lockerbie statements.] It is disheartening that Mr Robertson can give speeches to sold out audiences based on his version of the facts.” (...)

Robertson could not be contacted about his novel, but he has spoken several times previously about his belief that Megrahi was the victim of a miscarriage of justice.

In 2010, he said he was taking a stand on the issue because he feared that when Megrahi died, the truth would never be told.

“It is crucial for the relatives because they feel, 22 years after the event, that they still don’t know what happened and who was responsible,” he said.

“There is also a stain on the Scottish justice system, as this does not look or feel right. As long as the answers are not addressed this stain will not be removed.”

Then in 2011, addressing the Edinburgh Book Festival in a speech entitled “The Lockerbie Affair and Scottish Society”, he outlined six key reasons that pointed to Megrahi’s innocence saying: “The more I look, the more I am forced to the conclusion that if there is a conspiracy around Lockerbie, it is not one concocted by those who doubt the guilt of Mr Megrahi, but a conspiracy of silence in which the US, UK and Scottish governments are all, though not from shared motives, implicated.”

He also wrote to Salmond to express support for the calls of the UK relatives for a full and independent inquiry. He said he was disappointed to receive the standard response that the Scottish Government had no reason to doubt the safety of Megrahi’s conviction.

Swire, whose 23-year-old daughter Flora was killed on Pan Am Flight 103, is also ­convinced that Megrahi was innocent of the murders. Last January, he travelled to Tripoli to meet and say goodbye to Megrahi, and was “entirely ­satisfied” he was not to blame for the bombing.

Swire said he had already read Robertson’s latest work. “I think the book is, as is usual with James Robertson’s work, an excellent read, and I have absolutely no problem with it whatsoever and I’ve told him that. I feel entirely comfortable with the book.”

He added that parts of Robertson’s novel reminded him of the immediate aftermath of the bombing. “The first half was so close to the events that followed the Lockerbie disaster,” he said. “The second part is pure fiction, but perfectly ­interesting fiction to read.”

Professor of Truth will be published by Penguin and the promotional material reads: “Twenty-one years after his wife and daughter were murdered in the bombing of a plane over Scotland, Alan Tealing, a university lecturer, still does not know the truth of what really happened on that terrible night. Obsessed by the details of what he has come to call ‘The Case’, he is sure that the man convicted of the atrocity was not responsible, and that he himself has thus been deprived not only of justice but also of any chance of escape from his enduring grief.

“When an American intelligence officer, apparently terminally ill and determined to settle his own accounts before death, arrives on his doorstep with information about a key witness in the trial, a fateful sequence of events is set in motion.

“Alan decides that he must travel to Australia to confront this witness, whose evidence he has always disbelieved, in the hope that this might at last be the breakthrough for which he has waited so long.”

[Peter Biddulph has emailed me the following comment:]

I guess it is the fate of every questioning writer to be accused of siding with the enemy, and James Robertson (The Professor of Truth) is no exception.

John Le Carré's The Tailor of Panama exposed American brutality and state corruption and terrorism in Central America. As a former MI6 officer Le Carre knew well the inner workings of the Transatlantic relationship. He deserves respect for his eventual honesty.

Arther Miller's The Crucible resulted in accusations of being a Communist and blacklisting by Hollywood and several publishers.

John Steinbeck was accused of being a Communist sympathiser following the publication of The Grapes of Wrath during a phase of history when the word Communist equated to the leper's cry of "Unclean".

James is indeed in good company and should take courage from this traditional badge of honour.

A big stain on Scottish justice

[The Scotsman today features a long profile by David Robinson of James Robertson on the occasion of the publication of his novel The Professor of Truth.  The following are excerpts:]

James Robertson has a problem. No matter how often he tells people that his latest novel, The Professor of Truth, isn’t a retelling of the Lockerbie disaster, he realises that people won’t believe him.

Look, he’ll point out, the name of the Scottish town where the blown-apart airliner crashed isn’t even mentioned. Nor are the names of any of the most prominent figures in both the atrocity itself and the subsequent trial. The country thought to be responsible for the plot isn’t named: there are no dates, no real names, only the sketchiest bit of geography. So it’s not Lockerbie.

On the other hand, it is about a bereaved man trying to find out who really was responsible for blowing up an airliner above the Scottish Borders a couple of decades ago. And how many other times has that ever happened apart from the tragedy that befell Pan Am Flight 103?

“It’s not a roman à clef,” Robertson insists. “It’s not thinly disguised history. But it is my attempt through fiction to investigate and explore some of the issues that come out of an event like that.”

“Inevitably, people are going to read it as being about Lockerbie. I don’t blame them for that and I don’t expect anything else.” (...)

I meet Robertson in his Edinburgh flat. Beyond the kitchen window, the clouds are grey and heavy, pushing slowly south over Arthur’s Seat. To me, and I suspect to millions of others, the Lockerbie affair was like those heavy clouds: it passed over us in endless headlines and stories while we remained unquestioning below. We read about the plots, the official one and the rival one. We became used to seeing the footage, the wreckage of Pan Am 103 incongruously gouged into a Dumfriesshire hillside. For years and years, the story rumbled on, and those of us lucky enough not to be directly affected felt a fading sadness for those who were. After decades, though, that sadness turned to boredom, that initial newsflash shock to apathy. Weren’t there 15,000 witness statements? Weren’t there experts to sift through them and put the truth together? Couldn’t we trust them, the way we trust meteorologists to tell us in what direction the clouds are going?

What I really wanted to know from Robertson is why his reaction was so different to mine, why he cared so much about the Lockerbie affair. At what moment did he begin to think justice wasn’t being done? What was it that seeded it in his mind as a subject for a novel?

I suspect I half know the answer to the first question. Allan Massie has noted that there is a “sort of Orwellian decency” about Robertson’s writing, and that’s true about the man too. It isn’t just Dr Alan Tealing – his fictional hero in the novel and the man who gives it its title – who is searching for truth and justice. So is Robertson. Because if Abdelbaset Ali Al-Megrahi was innocent, the people who really planted the Lockerbie bomb are still out there.

And if that’s the case, Robertson believes, the Scottish judicial system is seriously flawed. As this newspaper pointed out six months ago, in an article looking ahead to the books that would be published this year, the subject matter of Robertson’s new novel – “the most eagerly anticipated one of the year from a Scottish author” – could hardly be more ambitious or demanding. (...)

Robertson started writing The Professor of Truth in 2011, a year after finishing his novel And the Land Lay Still, a hugely ambitious (and at 688 pages also just huge) portrait of the changes in Scottish life since the Second World War. He had always followed the Lockerbie case and by this time had long doubted the official version of events. “I can’t tell you the precise moment,” he says, “but I remember reading reports of the Camp Zeist trial and thinking there was something not quite right even though I couldn’t pin down what it was”.

He had also started writing a story about someone who had lost family in a Lockerbie-like atrocity. “I wanted to put myself in that person’s shoes and think how it would have affected them – not just the terrible loss of losing your family in such a horrible way, but the fact that the ramifications from that event go on and on for a quarter of a century. I wondered how all of that would affect the individual’s life.”

As this had actually happened to Jim Swire. Did Robertson have him in mind while writing the novel? “I did my best not to. I was actually quite clear in my head that I shouldn’t compromise myself by worrying about that side of things. If I worried about whether anyone was going to be upset, I wouldn’t write the book I wanted to. I showed the book to him after I had finished it as a courtesy because inevitably people were going to make assumptions and draw parallels. His response was very encouraging, which was a great relief.”

Two years ago, Robertson began to realise that his growing belief that there had been a miscarriage of justice in the Lockerbie trial and his planned story about someone who had lost loved ones in a similar disaster weren’t separate issues. Instead, he could bring them together in a novel.

Already, he knew the case backwards. He’d trawled everything he could find about the lengthy legal proceedings. “People don’t do that unless they are absolutely obsessed by the case, but I have. I don’t expect other people to get into the case at that level. But a novel is a way in which people can have their interest triggered and maybe even though this is fiction, within it readers might find something that explains why so many people are convinced that there has been a miscarriage of justice.”

At this point, let’s get back to the novel. The main thing to say about The Professor of Truth is that it does indeed do what Robertson intended – to strip away that dismissive, bored “Oh, not bloody Lockerbie again!” reaction by using fiction to tell a similar story. (...)

A disillusioned lawyer counsels Tealing against ever expecting to hear the real truth from a court case. A woman he meets in Australia who has also suffered appalling loss urges Tealing to stoically accept the randomness of fate instead of obsessively searching for the truth.

These are voices you wouldn’t hear were Robertson a lesser novelist, stacking the deck in favour of making a propagandistic point on behalf of a cause he supports. But he doesn’t: he’s too good for that.

He questions everything – even his own craft as a novelist. Sometimes, he admits, he shares the doubts that Tealing, a lecturer in English literature, has about its importance. “Most writers who think about this seriously,” says Robertson, “do wonder whether their craft is superficial. But it’s good to doubt. Doubt is one of the great virtues. That’s what allows progress to happen and societies to be more civilised and settled and open-minded.”

And though he was talking about his craft, he could be talking about the reason he wrote The Professor of Truth too. Because this is a novel written out of doubt about the Scottish justice system. “There seems to me to be a big stain on it because of Lockerbie. If in some small way the publication of this book helps, if it gets sufficient attention, to push the door open a bit so we can get this thing sorted out, that’d be fine.”

• The Professor of Truth by James Robertson is published by Hamish Hamilton, price £16.99. He will be talking about the book at 7pm on Thursday (6 June) at Summerhall, Edinburgh. Tickets £5 from Waterstones, 128 Princes Street Edinburgh.

Review by Alan Taylor of The Professor of Truth

[The following are excerpts from a review by Alan Taylor, editor of the Scottish Review of Books, in today’s edition of The Herald:]

Conspicuous by its absence in James Robertson's fifth novel is any mention of Lockerbie.

This may strike some readers as odd because The Professor Of Truth is also concerned with the bombing of a plane bound for New York which falls from the sky onto a small Scottish town killing hundreds of people, including the wife and daughter of its narrator.

The omission is of course deliberate, for Robertson is a novelist and not an investigative reporter. As such he inhabits a world where concepts such as truth and justice and retribution require more subtle coloration than that offered by black and white. Nevertheless he has chosen as his protagonist a man who needs desperately to get to the bottom of things for his own peace of mind.

It's what is routinely described as closure, which others who have lost loved ones are often inclined to embrace even when they suspect the evidence is inadequate or planted. Alan Tealing, however, does not believe that Khahil Khazar, the man convicted of planting the bomb which killed Emily and Alice, is guilty. Hence his obsession with what he calls "The Case".

Alan is a lecturer in English Literature at a university which bears glib comparison to Stirling. He is – as he is at pains to stress – not really a professor. Rather he is "the PhD kind of doctor" and would otherwise have been content to melt into the crowd. But what makes him special, what makes him unusual, are the deaths of his wife and daughter. Thus where others of his ilk might inspire disdain, he receives "a hushed kind of reverence".

As Robertson demonstrated most recently in And The Land Lay Still, he is adept at creating and empathising with characters who are in some way damaged and having difficulty in coping with the hand they've been dealt. (...)

The Professor Of Truth is touted by its publisher as a thriller in the mode of Graham Greene or John le Carre, but neither of these writers came to mind as I read it. Rather it operates on another level. Alan is not in mortal danger but on a quest. What he thinks he wants is an answer to a simple question: who really planted the bomb which killed Emily and Alice? But what he discovers is that simplicity is as elusive as truth or justice.

To learn this he must travel to the other side of the globe. His informant is called Ted Nilsen, an erstwhile agent of the American government, who turns up on his doorstep and offers hope of resolution. "We didn't just want to solve the case," Nilsen tells Alan. "We needed to solve it. There's an investment. I'm not talking budgets here, I'm talking emotional capital, mental capital. The bigger the crime, the bigger the investment." Nilsen supplies the name of a place in Australia where Parroulet is now living, having been given two million dollars for identifying Khazar. What option does Alan have but to seek him out?

Thus The Professor Of Truth moves from Old World to New. I don't know whether Robertson visited Australia but his depiction of it is vivid and tangible, especially the blistering heat and the boorish nature of the antipodean male. What is likewise convincing is Alan's ineptitude as a sleuth. "I felt like a student outside his tutor's room, about to deliver an essay or have one returned," Alan recollects as he is about to meet Parroulet. What he wants to hear from him is a confession of his false witness, that he is sorry for implicating an innocent man who is now dead, like Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the only person convicted for the Lockerbie bombing.

It is a fascinating scenario and one which Robertson handles beautifully. "Tell me, were you even alive before the bomb went off. I mean, really alive?" asks Nilsen of Alan, who insists he was. It is a question that recurs and to which Alan's answer is never wholly convincing. He loved his wife and daughter but did he realise how much until they were killed? It's as if he's taken on The Case out of guilt. This is one of fiction's great strengths, the ability to question the motives even of those who are good. But it takes courage and talent and integrity to do so, of all of which James Robertson has an abundance.

James Robertson

Hamish Hamilton, £16.99

The Professor Of Truth

Predictable American reaction solicited to James Robertson story

[Today’s edition of the Sunday Post contains an article headlined Mother’s fury over Lockerbie story, in which Susan Cohen reacts predictably to James Robertson’s recent jeu d’esprit.  The article reads as follows:]

The mum of a Lockerbie bombing victim has slammed a top author after he appeared to mock the law chief who led the investigation into the atrocity.

Best-selling Scots writer James Robertson has campaigned in the past to clear the name of the only man convicted of the terrorist attack, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi.

Last week — to coincide with the second anniversary of Al-Megrahi’s death in Tripoli — the writer published a short story charting the appearance of “Lord Cummerbund” at an inquiry examining the questionable conviction of “Henry Ingram”.

The character is clearly based on the late Lord Fraser of Carmylie, who as Lord Advocate brought the case against Al-Megrahi.

Four years after the conviction Lord Fraser, who died at home in Arbroath last June aged 68, cast doubt on the reliability of the main prosecution witness, Tony Gauci, a Maltese shopkeeper who had sold the clothing used to pack the suitcase containing the bomb, labelling him “an apple short of a picnic”.

In the tale Lord Cummerbund, the “former most senior law officer of the land”, is asked about evidence given by a key witness in the case. He describes it as “crucial” to the conviction even though the witness was, he says, “as thick as two short planks”.

Asked why he “continues to disparage this witness, without whose evidence the guilty verdict could not have been reached”, he responds: “Oh, come on, it’s all over now. We all know Ingram did it.”

Last year, the award-winning author released The Professor of Truth, billed as “inspired by the Lockerbie Bombing”.

It told the story of a university lecturer whose wife and daughter died in the terrorist atrocity in 1988, mirroring the life of Dr Jim Swire, whose daughter Flora was one of the 270 victims. But the story prompted a furious backlash by many of the Lockerbie families.

Last night, Susan Cohen, whose daughter Theodora, 20, was on board the Pan Am 103 flight, said: “There’s a sizeable pro-Gaddaffi faction in Scotland, including people like James Robertson.

“I’ve read this story and apart from it being an unflattering reflection of the man who headed up the investigation it’s part of a creeping assertion that Megrahi is innocent.

“Conspiracy theories are always more interesting than the mundane truth.”

Mr Robertson was unavailable for comment.

[Journalists who feel the need to write such a “Lockerbie families outrage” story when scepticism is expressed over the Megrahi conviction know that they can always rely on Susan Cohen to oblige. They also know that they won’t get such outrage and fury from UK Lockerbie relatives which, presumably, is why they don’t go to them for quotes.]