There’s a common line you see in thriller reviews: ‘Straight out of tomorrow’s headlines.’

I always wonder when I see that: does it really sell the book?

Fiction and real-world current affairs make awkward bedfellows. I had a really bright idea for my third novel, Solstice. I started writing it in 1996.

That meant it was probably going to come out in early 1999. By that time millennial fever was going to be gripping the world, wasn’t it? So why not write a story about the end of the world? How cool would that be? Good timing or what?

Well, Solstice is certainly an end-of-the-world tale, but it’s not tied to any date or event in history. Just as well really. Because being topical in a book is about as dumb as you can get, as an editor cheerfully pointed out to me when I raised this possibility. Time and time again would-be writers make the mistake of thinking real-world news can generate unreal-world fiction. Mostly it can’t.

One practical problem has to do with the calendar. That thing moves on. Your book won’t. Example: the global catastrophe of Covid. I’ll bet agents and publishers got a flurry of submissions in the middle of that for popular fiction set directly inside the curiously uncertain world we suddenly found ourselves in. On the surface the idea of a story from that time looks attractive. It’s everywhere: in the papers, on the TV, in people’s heads. When you start writing, nothing may make less sense.

Nine months later you finish it. The crisis is still going on. People are thinking, yawn . . . Even worse, if a publisher accepted your book it would take perhaps twelve months or more to bring it to the public. The odds are that by then no one in the world will want to read yesterday’s news. Something else real will probably have happened that may have drastically changed the premise of your story. What publisher wants to take that risk?

Here’s a related truth too: people usually read fiction for the internal veracity of a book, not its relation to the real world. When London suffered that ghastly terrorist attack in 2005 some unfortunate soul had a book out just a week or two before, a thriller that depicted a very similar event, bombs and all. I remember someone at a book festival saying to me at the time, ‘What timing – that will sell loads.’ No it won’t, I thought. And it didn’t.

There are some recent events that are just too close for comfort. Writing about terrorism in general is one thing. Imaginary terrorist attacks are fair game too. But the real world is different. No one wants to read much about an actual global plague. Escapism is a strong motive for picking up a book. Yes, miserable ones do sell. But normally they’re miserable in themselves, not miserable about external matters we’re all miserable about already.

It’s certainly possible to set fiction around real-world events. But far better to choose something historic – the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the Bay of Pigs crisis, even the first Iraq war – than something that’s happening right now. And do remember that, if you’re lucky, your books will have a long life. You may only be able to see a year or two ahead, but if they work they will be around for a lot longer and may get a second wind when they’re republished a decade or so later. Tying them to some specific topical thread or event in the news is like dressing them in today’s fashions. You guarantee that very soon they’ll look jaded and out of date, of interest primarily as a curiosity.

Books exist in a space all of their own. Best to leave them there, not try to drag them kicking and screaming into ours.