DEAD AIR was published in 2002
A loft apartment in London’s East End; cool but doomed, with demolition slated for the following week.
Ken Nott, devoutly contrarian leftish shock-jock attending a mid-week wedding lunch, starts dropping stuff off the roof of a London East End loft, hurling it towards the deserted car park a hundred feet below.
Other guests join in and soon half the contents of the flat are on the pitted tarmac... just as mobiles start to ring, and the TV is turned on, because apparently a plane has crashed into the World Trade Center
Iain said, “I kind of wrote Dead Air in my head to some degree in the months up to Christmas 2001,” he explains, “and then didn’t start actually writing it until the middle of January, and it was finished by the end of February; absolute knife-through-butter stuff. It wrote itself incredibly fast, partly because I’d had the time off to recharge the batteries but also because it’s the kind of book it is, it was always meant to be a page-turner, a thriller.
“September 11 happened about three weeks before I started writing the book. Apart from everything else I was sort of knocked back emotionally, everybody was, it was a terrible thing to take on board. But it also meant that I had to alter the book, because it was about a media guy in London, it was set in the last quarter of 2001 and the first quarter of 2002 and it would be absurd not to mention it.”