One Inspector, Four Seasons

3

  

So far, each of the Inspector O stories has had a season and a color.  These ingredients may not seem too important to a reader, but they turn out to have been critical to me.  Their function was not immediately apparent, and using them did not start off as part of a grand plan.   I stumbled into it, maybe the result of listening to a lot of Vivaldi years ago, when Vivaldi was on the radio quite a bit in Seoul, especially on winter afternoons.  I can’t say the repetition helped me concentrate on what I was supposed to be doing -- not on paperwork, at any rate—but it apparently had an effect.  This was the Seoul of another era, incidentally, a time when the city was a very different place than it is now.  Walking along a deserted sidewalk next to the wall of one of the palaces on a windy day—but why is he bringing up Seoul, you may ask.  What does that have to do with Pyongyang and Inspector O?  Ah, well, wouldn’t you like to know!

The first Inspector O novel takes place in late summer.   That was by design, though I can’t quite remember what the deciding factor was.  It just seemed natural to write about North Korea in summer.  Less complicated, somehow.   The second novel takes place in early spring, a more difficult time of year, often rather ratty until the flowering trees have made up their minds that the risk of freezing weather is gone for good.  By the time I started the second book, I realized that focusing on a particular season helped me highlight aspects of the North Korean countryside, and that these, in turn, helped define Inspector O. 

The colors that mark each book are more difficult to explain and may, for all I know, have some deep Freudian significance.  Why a particular color?  In a story that marches to Inspector O’s cadences, too much color can be distracting, of course, but there are certain times, during certain months, that you can’t overlook a blue, or a green, when it smacks you in the face. 

Season and color help set the mood.   A day with a high blue sky at the far edge of summer can be insanely happy.  A dead brown day of swirling dust in early spring can be terrifically unsettling.  None of this goes under the heading of outstanding insight, that weather impacts mood.  Even so, some readers seem nonplussed that it should be so in North Korea, and no wonder.  Read almost any newspaper account by visitors to the North and you’re apt to find astonishment at things most people accept as commonplace elsewhere, as if there is a force field around the North that obstructs normal weather patterns, or human emotion, or even smarmy jokes.

A Corpse in the Koryo turns out be have been written in a minor key (to get back to music).  By contrast, the second book came out, at least on the surface, sunnier, more in a major key.   I didn’t set out to change the mood or the tone in quite that way.   Once I was into the story, I started to fret.  Readers who liked the first book might complain that Inspector O had become too chirpy, with too much bounce to his step.  In fact, I've heard from some readers who didn’t like so much light flooding the background of Hidden Moon—they want their Pyongyang to be darker, more sinister. 

On reflection, I realized that to some extent, the up-tempo shift reflected an effort on my part not to write the same book twice.  At times, I could feel myself slipping into that trap, and had to make an effort to battle my way out of it.  Changing the mood, the color, and the tone seemed to help.  But most of all, the relatively sunny mood came naturally from Inspector O at that point in his development.  That's who he was.  I say relatively sunny because sunlight obviously didn’t make it into the room where O was  interrogated.  Those scenes?  They are rooted in the interrogation of someone I knew rather well, and who was released to my safekeeping after the security goons, tired of watching him hang upside down, decided they’d hooked the wrong fish.       

If I’d known writing a series was so difficult, I might have tried skydiving instead.  It’s hard to keep everything in one’s own life straight—having to do so for another cast of characters can be confusing.   Moreover, it’s difficult to keep repetition out of each subsequent book.  I constantly have to go back and make sure O isn’t repeating lines just because they seemed to ring so well the first time.  It’s all right if he does so on purpose, but I don’t want it to be the result of author memory failure.  

Obviously, if there is to be a series, there has to be a certain familiarity carried over from one story to the next.  You can’t start anew each time, though if you’ve picked up new readers in #3 (which is to be devoutly hoped for), you can’t just leave  them completely at sea, either.   A prequel doesn’t help as much as you might expect, because then you have to write a story as if no character knows anything about what is going to happen, and they’re all younger to boot.  Moreover, you can’t add layers of experience to a character in a prequel; you have to subtract them.   In the movies they just cut the main character’s hair and put him in a checked shirt to show he’s younger, throw an old car into the scene, and have a paperboy ride by on his bicycle.  It’s not that easy in a book. 

One good thing about a series, I discovered, was that I could employ the same troupe of actors, sort of like a summer stock ensemble.  For example, Books 1, 2, and 3 all have a vamp (I haven’t checked with my lawyer, but I don’t think that should be too objectionable a term; still, should something better be needed, try on femme fatale).  Every vamp is not like every other vamp, of course, but they all fill essentially the same purpose.  There are four seasons, but I don't yet know whether we will necessarily end up with four vamps or just stop where we are, thus following in the footsteps of Julius Caesar.