Jimmy Gilroy, the freelance journalist at the center of Alan Glynn's powerfully engaging new thriller, "Bloodland," might seem like an unlikely hero. He's a laid-off journalist, barely able to pay his bills with freelance gigs.
But readers old enough to remember how a pair of Washington Post journalists helped uncover the Watergate scandal will appreciate its premise. Journalists — WaPo or otherwise — can take down governments, if they're dogged enough.
As the book opens, Gilroy has agreed to "slap together a book" about a young, cocaine-addled TV actress who died in a helicopter crash, Glynn writes. His publisher's goal: Get it printed "in time for the Christmas market."
Soon, though, clues suggest the story might offer something more than a tawdry stocking stuffer for celebrity-crazed readers.
First, a "PR guru" tries to pay Gilroy to walk away from the project. After that gambit fails, he offers Gilroy an intriguing deal: If Gilroy agrees to drop the actress's story, the PR guru will arrange for him to write the memoirs of a former Irish prime minister.
In the course of a whiskey-fueled interview with Gilroy, though, the retired statesman mentions that he was, in fact, at the conference to which the actress was traveling when her helicopter crashed.
"There's an untold story there , my friend," the politician tells Gilroy. "Holy God."
Gilroy's course is settled: Back to the actress's story. Only this time, he's going to cast a wider net.
Before long, Gilroy finds himself swept up in a multinational conspiracy that includes a Congolese warlord and a U.S. senator gearing up for a presidential campaign. And that's how journalist-heroes are made … if they survive long enough to get their story to print.
"All the President's Men" (Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward's book about the Watergate scandal) hovers like a patron saint over "Bloodland," and it's not alone. A plethora of Watergate-era, conspiracy-fueled movies — "The Conversation," "Marathon Man," "The Parallax View" — make shadowy appearances.
But like many recent thrillers, "Bloodland" sports a villain missing from the Watergate era: the greedy corporate leader. Indeed, while the Irish politician on Glynn's stage is retired, the book's corporate heavies wrestle vigorously for power.
And not just political power; that's so yesterday . In today's global marketplace, Glynn suggests, true power lies in leading multinational corporations.
"Politicians are a joke," he writes, in a passage describing the mindset of Clark Rundle, the U.S. senator's puppet-master brother. "They kiss babies and smile for the cameras. They do what they are told. Clark, on the other hand, is a businessman, and one with an international profile. He is — there's an expression for it — a mover and a shaker. He gets things done."
In an interview included in the book, Glynn acknowledges that contemporary thrillers can't shock readers with the discovery that their government is lying to them because "you can't lose your innocence twice."
But the scale of corporate power today offers conspiracy thriller writers an important new antagonist.
"These stories, consequently, are as relevant now, if not more so, than ever before," he says.
It's a compelling argument for the relevance of a long-lived genre. But at some point, readers forget about social significance. A thriller has to thrill. And "Bloodland," an intelligent, often thrilling book, delivers.
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