PAGES : The Thrill Is Gone but He’s Surviving

The Berlin Wall is long gone, the Evil Empire has crumbled and the last time we checked, Israel and the PLO were shaking hands on the White House lawn.

So what’s a writer of spy thrillers to do?

For Ken Follett, author of such wildly successful espionage novels as “Eye of the Needle,” “Triple,” “The Key to Rebecca,” history provided a plot substitute when the present pooped out.

Follett greeted the fall of the Berlin Wall by writing “Pillars of the Earth,” about the building of a cathedral in the Middle Ages. Suddenly, his hardcover readership shot up by about 100,000. His next novel, “Night Over Water,” set on the eve of World War II, scored similar success.

Now Delacorte Press has printed a whopping 600,000 copies of Follett’s latest. “A Dangerous Fortune” is a banking saga set in Victorian England.

How well has Follett’s venture outside spydom paid off?

Well, “A Dangerous Fortune” is the first of a two-book contract, for which Delacorte paid $12.3 million.