Interviewing Peter Pringle is a joy from start to finish. In part, it is because he brought along his friend John Acton with whom he was staying in Islip. They first met as teenagers at dance classes in Oxford and are obviously close friends, although Peter has lived abroad for nearly all of his adult life. The interview becomes a lively, jokey discussion, full of laughter.

As an investigative reporter for The Sunday Times's Insight Team and then foreign correspondent for The Observer and The Independent, Peter has been and seen much in his working life. So while the interview is ostensibly to talk about his first novel, Day of the Dandelion, the discussion ranges from GM foods and Putin's Russia to what it was like working in Washington during the Reagan Years. It was fantastic according to Peter. "We were always going on trips with Reagan, this summit here, a summit there - Reykjavik, Berlin, Malta, Moscow."

Peter gave up the newspaper reporting in the mid-1990s to concentrate on non-fiction, mining the rich seam of stories that he had covered over his reporting career. Now aged 67 and based in New York, he wrote about Bloody Sunday in Those Are Real Bullets, Aren't They?, the tobacco industry in Cornered: Tobacco Companies at the Bar of Justice and GM foods in Food Inc. "I tried to go straight down the middle and I got attacked by both sides, although it's now a course book in America," he said. And now he has branched out into fiction.

Day of the Dandelion was written when Peter took a break from researching his last book; a biography of the Russian geneticist Nikolai Vavilov, who was murdered by Stalin.

The resulting novel has been billed as the first in a botanical thriller series. It stars Arthur Hemmings, a botanical poisons expert at Kew Gardens, who is also a secret service agent, contemptuous of his Government employers. In the first book, Arthur is called in when a new corn plant is stolen from Oxford University's botany lab. Two people are missing from the lab, Prof Alastair Scott and his Russian assistant Tanya Petrovskaya. As Scott was working on a supergene that could control the world's entire food supply, the British government gets involved, as does the company angling to buy the results from Scott's lab.

It is all one wants from a thriller, with a fast-paced, satisfying plot, that hinges as much on whether the supergene's patent will be privatised as it does on finding out what's happened to the plant and people. Along the way, Peter manages to explain the science and to discuss the corporate control of university labs. He also uses the book to examine whether biotech discoveries should be published unrestrictedly, rather than kept for private companies. This was a deliberate ploy on Peter's part.

"My idea is to talk about a particular area of science, which is slightly complicated but ultimately important, and which newspapers and the normal media often bypass because it's in the too-hard-to-understand department," he explained. He intends to continue exploring complex issues in the thrillers.

There are many Oxford connections in the book. One of the characters is a sympathetically-drawn reporter from a newspaper called The Oxford Chronicle. Peter based the paper on The Oxford Times and Oxford Mail. Scott's body is found, a suspected suicide. Was this based on Dr David Kelly's fate?

"It wasn't based on it, but it was in my mind - under what pressure is this professor and is he suicidal because of it?" said Peter.

Arthur, aged 52 in this first book, is described as James Bond in the blurb, but he's far too much the gentleman and anyway, he has no licence to kill. Although he does have the hots for a fellow researcher, he hunts for seeds, not women.

Peter has a few things in common with Arthur. "I'm an old leftie. I used to be a Trotskyist in the sixties, and a marcher," he says. "I love botany. Having been a foreign correspondent, I love travelling. I particularly like the idea of taking on the big companies in whatever form possible, because if we don't do that, we're over." So he's not entirely unbiased - you'll get that from the book - but he and John are so much fun and so interesting, I'm sad when the interview's over.

Day of the Dandelion is published by Max Press at £7.99.