IN WHICH INTRODUCTIONS ARE MADE ALL AROUND

1

  

To those who already know Inspector O, welcome.  To those who do not, pull up a chair and stay awhile.  The third of Inspector O's stories, Bamboo and Blood, has finally entered the fray, having rested comfortably for several weeks in a queue at the printers, along with numerous other presumptive books.  This is a curious time, little known to the general public, when characters from stories of all types mingle and trade hyperbole from their last reviews.  It is a way of relieving tension before being thrown into the public arena; authors might benefit from similar time in dark, quiet places.

Once the Inspector emerged from the printer’s, we had a free moment to sit on a bench at the top of a small rise near my home.  I took the opportunity to mention that it was time we tried our hand at a blog.

O grunted. “Ever wonder why some oak leaves won’t let go, even in late autumn?”  He waved vaguely at a stand of trees in the distance.

“Never mind oaks,” I said.  “We’re discussing blogs.  Who stays up nights typing, who paralyzed two fingers on his left hand recording your so-called exploits?  Are you going to help me with this, or not?”   

“Paralyzed?"  O stood up and reached into his pocket.  “This is birch, “ he said, holding small piece of wood for me to see.  “Nice, quiet tree.  Very soothing, if you like that sort of thing.  Good for aching fingers.”  He looked thoughtfully at me, smiled, and strolled away down the path.

With your permission, that pretty much defines the subject of this first blog--the relationship between what is laughingly called the author to the main character.

Readers sometimes ask if O is a real person, that is to say, does he exist in North Korea?  If he did, and if I wrote about him as I have, then he likely would no longer be a policeman.  He might even no longer be.  So, no, I will tell you he isn’t any particular person, or at least, not anyone you’d recognize if you bumped into him in the street.

Actually, I don’t claim to know entirely who O is, though the more I write, the more I find out.  Much as I have tried to create a coherent biography for him, it turns out there is always something I’ve overlooked.   Until he mentioned it to the Russian stocking salesman in Hidden Moon, for example, I didn’t know that O had been employed forging passports early in his career.  This is not literary hoo-ha.  I honestly wasn’t aware of that fact.

Here we have a question: Does O have a mind of his own?  Flatly impossible.  After all, I am his creator.  Am I not?  He dances to my tune--except at 2:00 in the morning, after five or six hours at the word processor, when it is no longer clear who the fiddle player and who the dancer.  O opens doors I didn't know existed, runs across characters I never planned, effortlessly comes up with wisecracks that in real life I could only manufacture long after the fact.  True enough, O may not be a complete person, but then, who is?

It is easy enough to get O to talk, though not necessarily in long sentences.  On the other hand, it is difficult to get him to take action, of any type.  The hardest thing is to move him out the door into a fistfight, or a shootout, or even an afternoon walk around his sector. 

“Enough,” I say, “get up, go outside, mix it up a little, detective-like.”

“Right."  But he doesn’t move and after a few more attempts, I literally have no choice but to end the scene and start a new one, putting him out on the street.  

“Now move,” I say. 

He nods.  “How about we find a cup of tea?”   

In Bamboo and Blood, I seriously wanted him to slip into a disco in Geneva.  He wouldn’t, and ended up doing something else--more interesting as it turns out.

Inspector O emerged rather quickly, as soon as I began to write the first in what has turned out to be (but was not planned as) the Inspector O series.  That he showed up so confidently has made me suspect that I’d known him for quite a while, that during my time in intelligence work he was always nearby.  In retrospect, I have no doubt that when I was in Macau many years ago, O was there as well, which may be why I could hear his laughter when I started, earlier this year, thinking about the fourth book in the series and realized some of it would necessarily be set in Macau.  When a friend had made that same suggestion, I’d laid it aside as too difficult.  But O is hard to refuse.

The Inspector is certainly not Philip Marlowe, yet he has probably read Chandler (not a few North Koreans l’ve known have liked detective stories).  In fact, when I first got the idea for A Corpse in the Koryo, the thought that immediately popped into my mind was “Raymond Chandler meets Kim Jong Il.”   That is to say, I knew wanted to write a detective story, not a political tract about North Korea.  I wanted to take the familiar conventions of the police procedural and plop them into a North Korean setting to see how they fared.  It was an experiment, and anyway, I couldn’t just leave that title rattling around in my head.

As a result, O is not, at least in the first instance, a symbol of anything, even though that is what many readers want him to be.  In fact, if any of my characters turn into political symbols, I make every effort to boot them from the story.  Still, as I’ve learned, many readers get out of a book pretty much what they bring to it—and a few take out of it things I hadn't realized were there. 

Some readers even find themselves lost in North Korea with Inspector O.  That, to my mind, is the best of all outcomes, because being lost can prove useful now and again.  Leave the GPS at home, for heaven’s sake!  It’s when you don’t know where you are that you frequently discover the most important things, or have the most interesting experiences. That’s one reason I deliberately stripped out of the Inspector O stories many familiar markers and stereotyped guideposts about North Korea.  It’s unnerving for some readers, but invigorating for others, not to know all the time where they’re going, where they’ve been, or even where they have ended up in a book.   This is connected to a complicated problem for an author—and one on which agents, editors, and critics also often hit their shins.   If the main character doesn’t know and can never fully learn what is happening to him, how can (and should) the reader be any more informed? 

 "A good question," O often says to me.  "A very good question."