Far and away the most accomplished of the many magnificent Kevin Costner vehicles to which film lovers were treated in the late Eighties and early Nineties was, as any serious critic will tell you, his 1989 tour de force, Field of Dreams.

It concerns a chap in a brown jacket whose name I forget (the scope of the film is too wide, the themes too universal, for such details to matter) hearing voices in a field telling him, “If you build it, he will come.”

What is “it”? Who is “he”? These are the questions that will haunt us as the film unfolds. This being America, Kevin is soon able to work out that the “it” must be a baseball stadium. And this being specifically the vast Midwest of that country, there is plenty of space to build one. And, this being the vast Midwest, there is not much else to do. So Kevin builds one. Being Kevin Costner, he is able to. Personally, I have trouble just remembering to mow the lawn.

The “he” who comes when it is built turns out to be the long-dead “Shoeless” Joe Jackson of the Chicago White Sox, who comes to play ball and make amends for the throwing of the 1919 World Series. They play loads of great baseball, and everyone cries.

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But then it turns out the “he” is not Shoeless Joe at all. There’s more. The man we’re actually waiting for is a fat little recluse who once wrote a novel and seems to be loosely modelled on J. D. Salinger, except black, and played by the same fellow who voiced Darth Vader, which, for film fans, is awfully distracting (every time he opens his mouth you think he is going to say, “Impressive. Most impressive…”).

From here the film tails off and becomes rubbish. It’s like if halfway through Rocky you discovered that he’s not actually going to fight for the Heavyweight Championship of the World, after all. He’s going to open a bookshop.

Aaaaaanyway, 20 years later: a young historian and novelist called Guy Walters moves out to Wiltshire to get away from distraction, write books and raise his young family. His house is set on the edge of the tireless plains south of Stonehenge, on a little chalk stream with a big barn in which he can put an office and settle down to the business of hunting Nazi-hunters (the results of which can be found in his recently published Hunting Evil [Bantam, £18.99], a grim indictment of Allied complacency after the war, and an extraordinary exposé of the fraudulence and vanity of Simon Wiesenthal).

But something haunts Mr Walters. He writes, he researches, he travels to and from Buenos Aires, Paraguay, Madrid, Berlin… He finds Nazis and he finds the hunters of Nazis, but he does not find peace.

At night, struggling to organise his material, to carve the truth from the stories, he walks on the sprawling, moonlit plain to clear his head, and then one night he hears a voice:

“If you build it, he will come…”

What? Build what?

“If you build it, he will come…”

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