Writing About Places We've Never Been

For most of my fiction writing career, I have stuck with the idea of only taking my characters to locations I have visited. Even that can be problematic if you aren't careful. When I wrote my first Post-Cold War thriller in 1990-91, I had visited Hong Kong. But when I revised Beware the Jabberwock for publication recently, I discovered I had used a hospital that was too far from where my character had an accident.

While revising the second book in the trilogy set just after the Cold War, The Poksu Conspiracy, due for publication soon, I realized I had broken the familiarization rule. I had a few scenes set in Berlin and Budapest. These are places I've never been. I depended on some maps of Berlin and online information for the German capital, but not much was required since it only involved a drive in from the airport to a downtown office.

The Hungarian part was a bit more complicated. I had Burke and Lori Hill spending several days there. Budapest was Lori's birthplace. Luckily, National Geographic Traveler ran a feature on the city around this time. It included great pictures of various sites and an article that provided lots of information. I also read a book by someone who had lived there several years that gave an inside look at the area.

Among the places described in the magazine was a restaurant that had been restored to its pre-Soviet satellite name, the Cafe New York. It occupied two levels of the old New York Insurance Company building, and the Communists had renamed it Cafe Hungaria. The lavishly decorated upper level was a balcony that looked down on the lower level called Melyviz, or Deep Water. In the old days, the affluent gathered on the upper level to peer down disdainfully on the writers and artists who subsisted on the cheaper fare of Deep Water. Burke and Lori made an important contact there.

My work was validated when I submitted those chapters to my writers group. Turns out one of my colleagues had lived in Budapest while her husband was there with the U.S. military. She said my descriptions were right on.

I haven't begun revising the third book, which was originally written around 1993. Titled Overture to Disaster, it is the longest of the three, currently clocking in at 165,000 words. And much of it is set in locations that I've never visited. I was well versed in the activities of the CIA and KGB back in those days, and I did a great deal of research on areas where the story is set. In the early part of the book, I have scenes in Minsk and Kiev, capitals of two of the new countries that were formerly Soviet republics.

It was only later in my fiction career that I decided to stick with locations I've visited. I'm pleased with what I did in these first three books. I'll be surprised if any of my readers takes me to task for the way I described these places nearly a quarter of a century ago.

Spies Come in from the Cold

By Chester Campbell

Today's U.S./Russia spy swap took me back to the good old Cold War days. I say "good old" in the context of a spy thriller reader and writer. I was an avid reader of the genre from early Helen Macinnes novels, through John le Carre, Graham Greene, Len Deighton, Robert Ludlum, Jack Higgins, and Nelson DeMille. One I thought did some great writing but haven't heard much of is Campbell Armstrong. His Mazurka had some really vivid descriptions.

News stories about the present spy swap call up memories of years ago when the exchanges took place at the border between East Germany and West Berlin marked on the cold steel of the Glienicke Bridge. Some of the spy novelists used that scene dramatically in their books.

Stories about the present-day Russians living normal lives in U.S. suburbia evoke thoughts of DeMille's 1988 thriller The Charm School. In it, the Soviets are revealed to have built a prototype of an American town where intelligence agents are trained to talk and act like typical Americans. According to one former U.S. official on a radio talk show, nothing was ever unearthed like The Charm School, though less elaborate training was carried out in Moscow suburbs.

I read numerous books on the KGB and espionage in general while researching a novel I wrote back in the 1960s. It involved a professor who had defected from Communist Romania and was teaching at Vanderbilt under an assumed name. He had knowledge of a Soviet device designed to block American radar. When the scopes suddenly went awry at a U.S. radar installation in the Zagros Moutains of Iran that kept tabs on the firing of intercontinental missiles, American agents came looking for the professor, as did the KGB.

The manuscript spent about six months with an editor at Avon in New York before he returned it sadly with word he hadn't been able to sell his colleagues on buying it. That ended my novel writing until I retired in 1989, when I picked up the spy thread post Cold War.

I never got into prisoner swapping. In my spy books, it was mostly take no prisoners. My knowledge of current tradecraft and operations is rather limited, but I enjoyed writing about them back in the nineties. I still have intentions of digging out some of the old stories and juicing them up for another try. The subject still fascinates me.

Mystery Mania