Martin Fletcher at his computer while in Italy this summer.
“My goal with the book was to write a novel about television journalism that my colleagues would want to read. I actually wrote this for my friends, I really did,” Martin Fletcher tells TVNewser about his new novel, The War Reporter. “It’s a thriller, it’s a love story, and it’s about how foreign correspondents work.”
In his fifth book, the retired NBC News Tel Aviv bureau chief —now a globetrotting freelance feature reporter for PBS NewsHour Weekend—has created a fictional foreign correspondent, Tom Layne, who’s diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder after covering events in the war-torn Balkans.
The novel follows Layne’s journey back to Serbia years later to film a documentary on (real-life) former Bosnian Serb military chief Ratko Mladic. That’s when, per the book jacket, Layne enters a “web of intrigue and deceit that threatens his life as well as that of the woman he loves.”
Fletcher says the character is loosely inspired by NBC News colleague Neil Davis, who died in 1985 while covering an attempted coup in Bangkok. “He was literally the nicest guy I’ve ever met,” recalls Fletcher. “He was such a kind, charming person, a genius at operating in the field. He just knew what to do.”
Fletcher, who these days spends about half the year at his home in Mexico, shuttling the rest of the time between New York and Israel, knows that unlike Davis and the fictional Layne, he emerged relatively unscathed—both physically and psychologically—after nearly four decades covering the world’s hot spots for NBC.
While never experiencing PTSD, Fletcher says he took “a lot of things to heart. Cumulatively, it’s quite painful to visit people on the worst day of their lives, be with them, and then walk away as if nothing happened. So that became quite painful for me. On the other hand, I think it serves as great inspiration for my writing.”
The War Reporter is Fletcher’s third novel, the fruits of leaving full-time journalism to devote more time to writing fiction. At 68, he’s pleased to have been a correspondent during “the golden age of international news on the networks. That’s over, there’s no doubt about it,” he says, perceiving a decreased focus on foreign coverage over the years.
While he calls today’s foreign correspondents such as NBC’s Richard Engel and CNN’s Clarissa Ward “terrific,” Fletcher faults the networks for focusing “progressively more on the ‘theater’ of reporting.
“You see many stories about all the obstacles a reporter faced getting somewhere, and then, ‘Here we are reporting, and by the way, here’s so-and-so who’s lost his wife or something.’ It’s so much about the journey of the reporter, rather than a story about people.”
For Fletcher, life after the daily reporting grind is good. Along with his NewsHour work, he cherishes time spent with his wife, three sons, and one year-old granddaughter. He’s also writing another book, but won’t divulge details just yet.
“It’s a much slower pace of life, but I’m very busy!” Fletcher reflects happily. “With PBS, and writing the books, and my granddaughter, and traveling—if I had to write the scenario of what I want to do, this is it.”