In 1973 he moved back to London to become a crime reporter for the
Evening News, a sensationalistic tabloid. "It was a rotten newspaper. I mean it really stank....I used to do everything. I covered a lot of crime, but quite often I got sent on trials because my shorthand was very fast."
2 But the pay was not quite adequate for his needs, so while working for the Evening News, Follett felt compelled to try his hand at fiction. A fellow reporter had just gotten a sizeable advance for his first mystery novel, and when Follett incurred various expenses, including the birth of his daughter, the purchase of a new house and major repairs on his car, he took the pseudonym Simon Myles to write The Big Needle, a mystery about a heroin dealer. It had "a lot of sex and a hero with fancy cars, but it wasn't all that bad. I'm not ashamed of it." The book didn't sell particularly well, but well enough for him to pay his debts and whet his interest in writing commercial fiction.
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