Peter Hanington is a writer and journalist. He is the author of the acclaimed William Carver series: A Dying Breed, A Single Source, A Cursed Place, and The Burning Time. His highly anticipated new book, The Darkest Tide, will be released in May 2026. He has worked as a radio journalist for over twenty-five years including stints at Radio 4, the BBC World Service, The World Tonight and sixteen years on the Today Programme. He lives in London with his wife and has two adult children living in Glasgow.
Why William Carver?
I think I knew wanted to write a fictionalised version of what it’s like to work as a radio news producer about half an hour after starting at the Today Programme. There were too many characters, anecdotes, and stories to resist. Almost too much material.
From the beginning, friends encouraged me to keep notes, to write some of these stories down for posterity or simply for fun. I would answer with a non-committal shrug while secretly doing exactly that…filling notebooks with facts, observation and out and out fiction.
Not all my motives were good. I used my scribblings to settle scores. The bad tempered, sour breathed Downing Street adviser - I would pin a version of him to the page the way a lepidopterist pins a chloroformed cabbage white to a cork board. The same went for the odd foreign office minister, civil servant, army spokesman or arrogant Today Programme presenter.
A six-month contract turned into a twenty-year career…a stretch which included the seemingly unending wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the heyday and slow withering away of New Labour, the Presidencies of Clinton, George W. Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden and much else besides. I share with my hero - John le Carre – this fascination about men and women of power and a desire to know ‘what made them tick.’
As time went by and the number of notebooks grew, I began to think I might have something to say and that an old-fashioned thriller could be the way to say it.
This story which I chose to place at the heart of the first book was at first glance a commonplace one - an unremarkable bomb blast in an ordinary Afghan street but the story spreads and deepens until it becomes a conspiracy with the potential to bring down more than one government. Alongside that specific tale, the larger question I try to ask while writing all the Carver books is how we decide which stories are told and which are not? Who decrees what is newsworthy and what isn’t? And at a time when serious journalism is in retreat (newspapers closing, broadcasters and print media shedding jobs) who will keep asking the awkward questions? Speaking truth to power?
My answer is William Carver…an unloved, unlovable and unpredictable old hack. I don’t know an exact replica, but I’ve been lucky enough to work with a number of journalists who bear a passing resemblance and to travel with them to Russia, America, various countries in Africa and the Middle East.
As my working life was dominated by the various episodes in the ongoing war on terror and more recently the so-called war on truth so is Carver’s. I sent him first to Iraq, then Afghanistan, Hong Kong, the Middle East, America and beyond. I asked him to report the facts as he found them, witness the horrors and worry about the things we all worry about: how do you tell the truth in a time of war? How do the army, the secret intelligence services and mainstream media work together? How do we know who to believe?
The books are old-fashioned thrillers, written under the influence of the likes of le Carre, Graham Greene, Eric Ambler, Patricia Highsmith et al. I love these writers for many reasons but not least for creating characters who are morally and ethically complex. Greene insisted that human nature was never ‘black and white but black and grey’. That squares with my life in radio and applies absolutely to the cast of characters in the Carver books – Carver himself, Patrick, Naz, Rebecca and the rest…a rainbow of grey.
A Brief Tribute to My Role Models—Eight Great Hacks:
Broadcast & Print, Living & Dead, Real & Fictitious
-
Martha Gellhorn
From The Face of War: ‘It took nine years, and a great depression, and two wars ending in defeat, and one surrender without war, to break my faith in the benign power of the press….Good people, those who opposed evil wherever they saw it, never increased beyond a gallant minority. The manipulated millions could be aroused or soothed by any lies. The guiding light of journalism was no stronger than a glow-worm.’ Typically good stuff from one of the most gallant of the gallant minority and the brightest of glow-worms.
-
Raoul Duke
The king of Gonzo journalism delivers many useful lessons including how to properly prepare for an assignment Stateside: ‘We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-coloured uppers, downers, screamers, laughers…and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls. Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can.’
-
Christopher Hitchens
I became a journalist because I didn’t want to rely on newspapers for information.’ Intellectual, contrarian, orator and a great reporter and journalist. I saw him talk a few times and interviewed him once, before he’d let me start he pressed some crumpled notes into my hand and told me to go round the corner and buy some Smirnoff blue label vodka. When, during the subsequent conversation I apologized that some of his ideas were going over my head he was patient and kind: ‘Not over your head, around your flanks perhaps. Hopefully you’ll broaden.’
-
Hildegard Johnson
The original fast talking newspaperwoman brought to life brilliantly by Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday. Also delivers an object lesson in how to talk to your news editor: ‘I wouldn’t cover the burning of Rome for you if they were just lighting it up. If I ever lay my two eyes on you again, I’m gonna walk right up to you and hammer on that monkey skull of yours ‘til it rings like a Chinese gong.’
-
george orwell
He wrote six novels, great reportage, took fascism, Soviet communism and imperialism to task and came up with one of the most important and pithy definitions of journalism you could wish to read: “Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.” What else? Oh yes, he also taught us how to make a proper cup of tea: Indian or Ceylonese and never, ever with sugar in case you were unsure.
-
Dame Ann Leslie
One of the most special of special correspondents…fifty odd years of foreign reporting, stamps from seventy different countries in her passport. She’s been ‘chased round the furniture’ by presidents, dictators, film stars and fellow journalists and always come out ahead. A living legend with a wonderful way with words…I worked with her on a special Today Programme recently and escorting her through Broadcasting House, cynical hacks bowing and genuflecting as she passed, we came across Allan Little who told her how great she looked (she did look great) her response: ‘Oh shut up Allan, we both know what that is, it’s a fuck of a lot of slap. My spinal column is like the rubble of Aleppo.’
-
Thomas Fowler
A jaded, middle-aged, opium addict, wannabe bigamist and accomplice to murder. The sort of journalistic hero that only a genius like Graham Greene could conjure up. And if that wasn’t enough, The Quiet American also delivers the unhappiest happy ending you could ever wish for.
-
Lyse Doucet
I saw her speak at a Radio 4 World Tonight event at Cheltenham Literary Festival last year alongside Jeremy Bowen…not a bad double bill and they both had an eight hundred strong audience rapt. Lyse is not just smart, analytical and ridiculously well-informed, she is also compassionate. As long as there are people like that plying the trade, there’s hope.
JOURNALISTS IN CRIME FICTION: A QUIZ
-
A. Joseph Rouletabille
-
A. Baltimore
-
A. THE FIELD OF BLOOD
-
A. Gregory McDonald
-
A. Liza Marklund
-
A. Kennedy
-
A. FINDING MOON
-
A. Andrew Klavan
-
A. DEATH SPINS THE PLATTER
-
A. Lindsay Gordon and Allie Burns
-
A. MILLENIUM