Matt Storin in ‘House of Cards’? Yes and no.

Not mentioned in any of the reviews we’ve read of the new Netflix series “House of Cards” is that Brit Michael Dobbs, the author of the novel on which the show is based, was once a copy editor at The Boston Globe. It was the early 1970s and Dobbs was a student at the Fletcher School at Tufts. During his tenure at the Globe, Dobbs became friendly with a number of Globies, including Matt Storin, who was then the newspaper’s metro editor. Well, fast forward several years. Dobbs, who returned to England and became a top adviser to Margaret Thatcher, wrote “House of Cards” in 1989. One of the primary characters in the political thriller is a female journalist named — wait for it — Mattie Storin. “I’m better at creating plots than names,” Dobbs later joked to Storin. The popular BBC series based on the book kept the name, but in the Netflix show starring Kevin Spacey, the Mattie Storin character is named Zoe Barnes. In an e-mail this week, Storin, who now works at the University of Notre Dame, sounded only a little miffed about the change. “Sadly, Kevin Spacey has cheated me of another 15 minutes of fame,” he wrote.