Alan Cowell - from pigeons to artificial intelligence

In 1979 Alan Cowell, based in what was soon to be an independent Zimbabwe, became the last Reuters correspondent known to have filed by carrier pigeon, using a form of communication that dated back to the days of Baron Julius Reuter himself. “I’ve dined out on the story - not the birds - ever since,” he says.

 Now, more than four decades later, Cowell has turned his attention from avian to artificial intelligence with the third in a series of novels charting the life and times of the fictional correspondent Joe Shelby.

And in another sign of changing ways, Cowell brought out this latest novel –  Last Writes or The Obituarist — under his own imprint, UndatedBooks, on Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing platform. 

“Fiction is a very tight market these days for a certain demographic,” Cowell said. “Self-publishing is quicker than the traditional route through literary agents and venerable publishing houses. But there is a lot more work involved in preparing a text for publication.”  

The novel follows on from two earlier books – “A Walking Guide” and “The Paris Correspondent” – covering Shelby’s fraught progress from his early days and romances as a war correspondent, to the onset of ill-health, to the beginnings of the digital era. Last Writes takes Shelby from a kind of semi-retirement in North London to a climactic showdown in the Olympiastadion in Berlin that will have a crucial bearing on the war in Ukraine. 

The questions it asks are: will AI take on a conscious life of its own; will AI develop a soul? 

Back in the late 1970s, of course, the quandary was more prosaic: how could reporters transmit stories from remote bushlands miles from the nearest telephone or telex in an era long before satellite, cell phone and internet technology?

The answer was a team of carrier pigeons trained to fly home to a loft in the far-distant city of Bulawayo bearing stories scribbled by hand in tiny containers taped to their legs.

Some readers of Cowell’s earlier books have assumed that Shelby is a semi-autobiographical character, but the author suggests that his own experiences as a foreign correspondent over many years provide no more than a stage set for the personality and adventures of his fictional character. 

Joining Reuters in 1972, Cowell was based in Bonn, London, Ankara, Lusaka, Beirut, and Harare. In 1981 he joined the New York Times in Nairobi and was assigned thereafter to Johannesburg, Athens, Cairo, Rome, Bonn-Berlin, London and Paris.

In 2015 he retired from the staff of the NYT but remained as a freelancer in London writing mainly – no surprises – advance obituaries of the great and the good.

“In life we are in death,” Cowell said of the obituarist’s trade. “Literally.” ■