Dad's death inspired novel

When Anna Blundy was 19 years old, her father, David, a foreign correspondent for a Sunday newspaper, was shot and killed while on assignment in El Salvador, central America.

I mention this stark fact at the outset because, by her own admission, Blundy's life since - she's now 33 - has been largely defined by it. "When something like that happens to you," she says, "it becomes a part of who you are. I think to an extent everything I write is going to be about it."

An occasional journalist herself - she wrote one of the first and leastsilly Bridget Jones-esque lifestyle columns - Blundy has now turned to writing thrillers, and publishes the first of a four-part series next week. The Bad News Bible, set among the foreign press corps in Israel, might not be "about her father" in any obvious sense, but it certainly takes its inspiration from his life. Although the action is contemporary, "the characters are really my dad's generation of journalists," she says, "and what they were like as I remember them when I was a child in the Seventies".

Narrated by the fearless Faith Zanetti, of an unspecified British broadsheet, and populated by a collection of thrill-junkies, nervous wrecks and shameless alcoholics, The Bad News Bible whizzes along at ferocious speed, beginning with suspected murder and ending, many violent deaths later, with a highly inventive form of suicide. Though the mechanics of the plot are occasionally clumsy, and the secondary characters at times snobbishly cartoonish (the tabloid reporter is a chain-smoking oik; the photographer a lovable drunk), it has the merit of pace and densely packed action with the feel of Alex Garland or Toby Litt.

Blundy describes the war-zone pack of popular imagination. The twist is, she places the hard-as-nails female rather than the dashing-butemotionallydamaged male correspondent at the heart of the story. "It's supposed to be intensely hectic," she says. "That's the mood I was in as I wrote it, a race to get it all down in one go ... And, yes, it's also the pace my father lived his life at." Anna learned of her father's death while she was at university in Oxford. Her parents had never married and David Blundy was constantly on the move, swooping in and out of his daughter's life to whisk her away to exotic places for brief holidays - New York, Haiti, Jerusalem - either â¡ deux or with a new girlfriend in tow, whom Anna would instantly resent.

SHE continues: "He was very charismatic. He'd focus entirely on you for a while and absolutely charm you. People adored him. But he was also very neurotic, he chain-smoked and rapped his fingers on the table all the time. A very tense man." As a child she absorbed the atmosphere and personality of the foreign press corps, the sudden arrivals and departures, the undeniable excitement of war zones and the anxiety of the families left behind.

His death left her devastated - and still throws a long shadow. "I didn't deal with it very well at first. In fact I dealt with it by drinking a lot. I think I hoped that if I got drunk for a couple of years I would somehow be rescued and it would turn out all right. I became known for it. In the pub I'd knock over a drink and everyone would mutter, 'Oh well, her dad just got killed'. And at the time I thought: 'Oh God, I don't want to be this person whose father was murdered.' But actually that's what you are. It's what you become. After a while you get used to it and don't hate it so much."

Nowadays Blundy looks every inch the "Hampstead housewife" (her words, not mine), dressed in a pretty, green twin-set, silk scarf and flatheeled boots. It's a bit of an act, she admits. "I wouldn't say that I'm happier now than I was when I was 19, but I cope with it differently. I thought I'd better pull myself together and, you know, give up the self-abuse and go to the gym."

Her ways of coping with the legacy of depression left by her father's death include writing - a book about her relationship with David was published six years ago - and various combinations of therapy, including a brief spell on Prozac which left her "... mood-less but not so panicky as I was before. In the end I thought I'd rather sit around in floods of tears than have no moods at all. I'm much better now, though I'm still very shrink-y. I've had lots and lots of analysis."

ABRIEF stint as Moscow correspondent of The Times ended when her son, now five, became "quite seriously ill" and Blundy realised that combining foreign reporting with a family involved sacrifices she wasn't prepared to make; a problem her father, of course, did not care to face.