Leather wrote his fourth novel , '' The Chinaman '' , while working as night news editor on the business desk of '' The Times '' in London . At the time , the Provisional Irish Republican Army 's bombing campaign was at its height , and in '' The Chinaman '' , a Sino-Vietnamese man loses his family in an attack loosely based on the bombing of the Harrods department store in London . Having been turned away by the authorities , the man , a former Viet Cong assassin , travels to Ireland and hunts down the men responsible . The book was used as the basis for the 2017 thriller '' The Foreigner ''
bombing of the Harrods department store
Harrods bombing
Stephen Leather