Writing About Foreign Locations

By Chester Campbell

Writing mysteries with foreign locations can cause some difficulties, but when I started penning novels in the early nineties, I plunged ahead without hesitation. You do that when you're young (I was only sixty-seven then). My second book, still unpublished, was set largely in Korea, with smaller sections in Hungary and Thailand. I'm currently revising it with a new market in mind.

For the Korean part, I had the advantage of having spent a year in Seoul during the Korean War in 1952-53, plus a visit there during a tour of the Far East in 1987. I also had a Korean daughter-in-law who provided some information on customs in the country. I read lots of other views of the Hermit Kingdom, including those in various travel books.

The title of the book is The Poksu Conspiracy. Poksu in Korean means "vengeance." I found enough expressions in phrase books to give the story a realistic feel. Transliterations of Oriental languages with odd alphabets are notably inconsistent, but I tried to stick with spellings used in the media for better known words. After completion of the manuscript, I had it read by a Korean college student to catch any inaccuracies.

For the portion set in Thailand, I used the area around Chaing Mai, a popular tourist destination in the northern part of the country. In checking on Google, I found the city has grown tremendously in the past quarter century. The metropolitan area now includes a million population. I had visited Chaing Mai as part of that month-long Far East tour in 1987.

The Hungarian setting was a bit different. I had never visited that part of Europe. I read several books to get a feel for the people and the country. My chapters were set in Budapest, and I found a copy of National Geographic that included lots of good photos and details of locations I used in the story.

Using foreign locations in mysteries isn't all that difficult if you're willing to do the research. As best I recall, Martin Cruz Smith wrote Gorky Park without ever visiting the Soviet Union. Reading the book, you'd have thought he had lived there. Have you written foreign locations? If so, how did you handle it?

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Invisible

(Stork on a nest, Hungary - Photo 1979 by Pat [Cokely] Browning)

By Pat Browning

Are you ready? Experts got together in July at Microsoft headquarters to talk about sending an elevator into space along a 60,000-mile carbon fiber ribbon.

I have three words for them: Tower of Babel. (Genesis 11:4 for those who haven’t read their King James lately.)

If an elevator into space isn’t enough to send us reeling, here’s a quote from an AP story:

“Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley have engineered 3-D materials that can reverse the natural direction of visible and near-infrared light. As a result, the research raises the possibility that someday people can use the material in cloaking devices that render objects invisible to the human eye. That type of tactical technology goes well beyond the realm of H.G. Wells and Harry Potter, especially considering that some of the project's funding came from the U.S. Army Research Office and the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research.”

Now, those people I can help. The easiest, cheapest way to make a man invisible is to put him in an Olympic swimming pool with Michael Phelps. Example: Laszlo Cseh of Hungary.

In the 200-meter butterfly, Phelps takes the gold. Huzzah, huzzah! Cseh takes the silver. Yawn. The time difference is a matter of seconds. Same thing in the 200-meter individual medley. Ditto the 400-meter medley. Cseh is a shadow behind.

A commentator carries on with news that Phelps is double-jointed at the knees and elbows, his heart pumps more blood than an ordinary mortal’s, he stands 6 feet four, and has a wingspan of 6 feet eight.

WINGspan? Well, there’s a clue. Laszlo Cseh should have brought a stork to Beijing. Seriously. The stork is a good luck symbol in Hungary. It brings babies, prevents house fires. No word on a stork’s opinion of Olympic swimming, but it’s worth a shot.

Storks love people. Hungarians love them back. Year after year, storks fly in from Africa to spend summer in Hungarian villages, usually in nests on top of telephone poles.

The photo here was one of those lucky shots a tourist seldom gets. I put my cheap little camera against a tour bus window and clicked. That was almost 30 years ago. To be sure the storks still nest on telephone poles, I did some Internet research.

At www.caboodle.hu, a Hungarian news and culture web site, I found several photos, plus information on the Hungarian Ornithology Association’s campaign to protect Hungary’s nesting storks.

Hungary has an old and checkered past. Russia claimed it after World War II, and rolled tanks into Budapest to crush a 1956 uprising. When I was there, Hungary operated under a kind of “goulash communism.” Shell holes still pocked the Citadella, an old fortress overlooking the Danube, and a Russian statue stood on the roof.

Hungary was finally free of Moscow in 1989, and is now a parliamentary democracy. It joined NATO in 1999 and the EU in 2004. Through it all, the storks came back to nest on telephone poles. In this rapidly changing world, that’s nice to know.