Tom LeClair might not have written Well Founded Fear if he and his wife hadn't been taking a quiet stroll one night in Athens.

        “We stumbled on an act of terrorism — a publisher and his body guard assassinated. That was my first experience with it. I saw it up close and saw what a powerful effect it can have on not just witnesses, but events of the day.”

        That got his attention. So did the bullet hole in the window of the University of Cincinnati English professor's study, also in Athens.

        “I guess they fired because I'm an American, though my friend says it was because I'm a writer,” he says.

        Suddenly, he was interested in terrorism. Passing Off, his first published novel (1996), was about a basketball player caught in a plot to blow up historic European buildings.

        Now comes Well Founded Fear, about persecution of the Kurds, a nomadic race of about 25 million people,

        In the book, the Kurds are trying to flee Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's poison gas attacks on their villages; relocation plans that include dynamiting homes and moving people to mud-drenched tent cities; middle-of-the-night interrogations that have little to do with questions and a lot to do with torture.

        Mr. LeClair, 56, uses Fear to give terror a face.

        It's the face of Casey Mahan, a Cincinnati attorney on sabbatical in Greece working as an interviewer for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

        It's the face of her translator Ziba, a Kurd ripped out of bed by Turkish soldiers and tortured because maybe she knows where her terrorist brother is hiding.

        It's the face of Osman, Ziba's brother and Casey's lover turned husband, who is traveling through the United States bent on poisoning wells to make a statement about U.S. aid to Turkey.

        It's the pretty face of Casey's idealism, and the ugly face of Ziba's pain and the duplicity it forces upon her. It's the hopeless face of a homeless nation and the monstrous face of Osman's revenge-driven hate.

        Mr. LeClair paints these faces with clarity, precision and strokes of terror in a sparse prose style that also uses official documents (memos, letters, communiques) to advance the plot and show the cold manner in which refugees are handled.

        While the characters are fictional, the events, procedures and political maneuvers are real, thanks to endless research (he spends at least a month in Greece every year) and long conversations with his wife, Antonia Mitroussia. She's a Greek national and Cincinnati attorney who worked for the U.N. during the Gulf War. In a role similar to heroine Mahan's, she gathered inside information about the system.

        Mr. LeClair also talked to United Nations interviewers, observed them at work, talked to translators and refugees, and visited refugee camps.

        “You know the most heartbreaking thing? You sit in on these interviews and watch a refugee fleeing for his life. He pours his heart out in wrenching terms. There's so much emotion. But there's no emotion at all from the translator. It's just like a machine.”

        Mr. LeClair imitates that machine-like attitude with a bleak, matter-of-fact style.

        Certainly not what you'd expect from an academic (he has been on the UC faculty since 1970), a breed that tends to use four syllables when two will do, running sentences on long after they deserved to end.

        “I got sick of academic prose a long time ago,” he says. “I can barely read it now, let alone write it. That's one of the reasons I went with this almost journalistic style.”

        It's lean, but not barren. Fear is rich in details and descriptions, and full of heart and soul because, he says, “It's hard to look at the Kurds and not be moved.”

        It's hard to read the book and not feel the same.

        Mr. LeClair reads from Well Founded Fear at noon Thursday in the Mercantile Library, 414 Walnut St., downtown. Free for members, $5 for non-members. 621-0717.

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