I CAN'T say I enjoyed reading 12:23: Paris: 31st August 1997, but then I was prejudiced against it before I began. A fictionalised story based on the real life events of that famous car crash in which Diana Spencer lost her life struck me as a bit tasteless, even if it has been 10 years since it happened.

I should own up straight away to being English, and though I should also add that I am not a royalist or even a celebrity-ist I did view the crash and the funeral afterwards as extremely sad and moving. My husband saw the public outpouring of grief at the funeral as manic hysteria, quite beyond the appropriate, which for an American is really saying something.

Eoin McNamee didn't think much of anything about it until three years ago, when the author picked up a factual book about Diana's crash in a second hand book shop along with some other books that he confesses he wouldn't have bothered buying and reading brand new.

The book, Death of a Princess by Thomas Sancton, sparked what I think he would allow me to call his rather dark imagination.

"I started to find this Graham Greene noir-ish story line emerging from it. What's interesting about it is I was very surprised no one else had picked up on it as a possibility for fiction because it has such great texture to it."

Texture is one way to describe it. It's a good way to describe McNamee's book, too, considering the level of blood and gore used in his descriptions of the aftermath of the crash and the thoughts of Diana as she lay dying in the Paris tunnel. Did he not consider these scenes as better left undramatised?

"I don't think you can address those types of stories unless you do actually address them. I think it's kind of coy if you turn your eyes away from it at the last minute. I think there's more dignity in the unflinching gaze than coyness."

Although based on the facts of the car crash that took Dodi Al Fayed and Diana Spencer to their deaths, the first part of the book is concerned with foreshadowing that event and introducing us to McNamee's three fictional characters. Lonely underground and down on their luck spooks who have been hired to keep watch on Diana while in Paris - or I should say Spencer. McNamee refers to the famous woman and her partner as Spencer and Al Fayed throughout. The effect for the reader is a cold-eyed view on the woman that McNamee argues could not be attained when using the name that everybody else always referred to her with and heavily evokes her iconography.

"Once you use the words Princess Diana you're using a whole range of viewpoints. And amassing those around it. I wanted to strip it all away, using quotes from her distant ancestor Edmund Spencer - trying to find different viewpoints and ways of looking at it."

McNamee grew up in Kilkeel, County Down, a place he describes as beautiful but the centre of a "quite harsh evangelical Protestantism". When he writes from "Spencer's" point of view and when other characters speak about her in the book the portrayal of her is indeed unflinching and not particularly sympathetic. Did he like Diana?

"I liked and disliked her. In the end it's impossible not to find empathy for someone in her situation. I would have no interest in the royal family, no interest in the loneliness of celebrity. But I am interested in the solitude.

Aloneness which we all will experience when a person finds themselves mortally injured in the road dirt of a Paris tunnel. It's that journey that interested me, that drew me to the character. So it's those last hours and then I drew back from that."

Moral question McNamee is 45 and has a family of his own. When I bring up the moral question of basing his theories and fictions on a subject whose children are still alive and still quite young he says he did ask himself about it when he wrote the book.

"I thought would I like to read it at their age and I thought. . . well no I don't think I would. But would I like to read it at my age? I thought well yeah I probably would."

What about a possible backlash by those who feel this is too much too soon? Does that worry him?

"I was called so many things at the time Resurrection Man was released [a thriller about a young Protestant who hates Catholics] I'm not sure there's much more they can call me. You get drawn into your stories and you immerse yourself into them and then you come out blinking into the light and you realise you are operating on a very tiny edge of something which is very very big. I don't particularly relish the idea of the controversial. It's sort of 'Oh no here we go again. Why are these the sorts of stories that appeal to you?' Why can't I write a cool modern novel of manners? But I can't seem to do it."

I believe him, especially when in another part of our chat he reveals that when he pitched the idea to his publisher three years ago the managing director of Faber and Faber was quick to point out that the book would be out in time for the anniversary of Diana's death - something that hadn't occurred to McNamee.

Now based in Sligo he was back on the border recently and describes the noise of the place as having always been "more Kraftwerk than Clannad".

Perhaps, I suggest, this background lent itself towards his ability to immerse himself in such bleakness and a belief in conspiracy, as permeates his novels. He has written several others, also based on murky factual events, including Resurrection Man.

"When you start to look at the Dublin/Monaghan bombing it became very obvious that you are looking into an abyss of more than collusion, of covertness and interlinking conspiracies. The clumsy analogy I use is you are sitting in the cinema and watching what was going on on the screen. It seems to be real life and then all of a sudden the lights came up, the screen went blank and you realise that all the action had been going on behind your back in the projection room all the time."

Although loneliness is one of the main themes of the novel, it cannot be described as anything other than a fictionalised version of a conspiracy theory motive for her death. Last Wednesday's Channel 4 screening of a documentary about the role of the paparazzi - or lack of it - in causing the crash provoked several weeks of public outcry in the UK and other parts of Europe, due to the airing of before unseen pictures of Diana in the Mercedes just before and immediately after the crash.

Paparazzi In 12:23McNamee describes photographers taking pictures earlier in the evening of Diana's car outside the Ritz: "Some still wore helmets parked back on their heads so the car looked like it was being mobbed by aliens." In light of this description, and the fact that one of his assassins in the novel was a photographer, did McNamee see the paparazzi as instrumental in Diana's death?

"I think they come across as an ill-gotten and pathetic bunch. My impression was that they were neither here nor there in the whole thing. What was more important was what they represented. I don't think they were particularly badly behaved on the night. It's just the fact that they were there. It's too easy to reach for easy analogies for the feeding off the celebrity element. There are deeper undercurrents in the whole thing rather than that quite obvious thing. That's what the story is trying to get at."

Those deep undercurrents were explored and expanded in McNamee's imagination and onto the pages of 12:23. Does he really believe, though, having read the Lord Stevens report, that there was more to it than just a drunk driver and an unfortunate accident?

"I think there had to be more to it than that. There are too many things which are unexplained but what that thing was I don't know.

There was some sort of intervention and there was an accident, now whether the intervention caused the accident or not. . . I think there's that unease more than initially that makes you feel there was more to it."

Ah, come on.

"That's kind of vague but there are specifics.

"All the intelligence agencies involved came out with their hands up in horror at the very idea that they might have been watching what was going on in Paris that day. They said that they had no knowledge. You think well if they weren't watching why weren't they watching? Did nobody know that these two people were in Paris? That's an impossibility, I would have thought. But they all said they had no idea and had no involvement in it. Why were they not protecting her - were they leaving her open?

These things like the NSA - the National Security Agency - they tapped all her phone calls and transcribed 3,000 pages of them.

To what end, for whose eyes did they transcribe them? If you add it up - there are dozens of small things like that. The cars in the tunnels unexplained, the motorcycles unexplained. When you put it all together its very hard to say the whole thing was as simple as a car crash."

CASHING IN ON THE CRASH?

TV CChannel 4 Documentary The Witness in the Tunnel Although attacked by 'friends of Diana' and requested by her sons not to be aired the documentary actually took an evenhanded and genuine attempt to examine the role of the paparazzi in the crash.

Concluded that the press were unfairly scapegoated in the immediate aftermath by a frustrated French police and British public who needed a bad guy. Also 'Princess Diana: The Secret Tapes' in 1994;

'Diana: Legacy of a Princess' in 1998 and who could forget the dramatisation of 'Diana: Her True Story', the authorized biography by Andrew Morton that featured the bulimia and a dramatic fall down the stairs - all characters competently played by looky-likies.

FILMS TThe Queen, for which Helen Mirren nabbed this year's best actress Oscar, was centered around the crisis that Diana's death caused the royal family and their shaken relationship with the British public.

The film has currently grossed about $56.5m.

Also: Princess Diana: The Uncrowned QQueen released in 2001 DOLLS Since almost immediately after her death there have been a nauseating number of Princess Diana dolls released onto the market, initially sparking a row between a group who claimed rights over her image.

The most recent doll went on sale in January 2006. Time Capsule Toys boast the 12" 'action figure' who spouts sad phrases such as "There's far too much about me in the newspapers. Far too much." and "I don't sit here with resentment. I sit here in sadness." The run is limited to 10,000 dolls and one will set you back St�17.

BOOKS DDiana: Her True Story by Andrew Morton.

Originally released in 1992 and discovered after her divorce to have been thoroughly informed by Diana the book had sold more than 1.5 million copies by 1998. Most recent addition to the Diana book library was released in May of this year entitled Diana: The Life of a Troubled Princess - That is until '12.23: Paris 31st August 1997' (�12.99 paperback original) hits the book shops on 15 June.