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Where would be your dream setting for a spy thriller.
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Option 3, out o..."
All we need are some Russian soldiers and spies to play the villains and it all falls into place
Years ago, there was a proposal to build a nuclear missle defense installation on an isolated island in the Aleution Archipelago (if I'm remembering correctly). Anyway, the weather is so hairy that just getting supply ships in there and getting them offloaded is a major feat in itself because the seas are so rough--for the brief window of time when the island is actually accessible by sea.It's possible someone managing the project could have diverted a portion of the funding, which happens quite a bit, to be allocated for some nefarious purpose.
Havana in the late '40s, before Castro's revolution. After reading Havana Nocturne by TJ English the place sounds insane. It's nonfiction. I've posted it as a point of reference.Havana Nocturne: How the Mob Owned Cuba & Then Lost it to the Revolution
Additionally, Adrian McKinty's FIFTY GRAND is partially set in contemporary Havana.
Fifty Grand
Mac_dickenson *** This May Be Worth A Look***I bought this book after reading the blurb, it sounds as though the author has used his environment in a worthwhile manner.
Zodiac Station by Tom Harper
Would be interested if you read it to hear your thoughts. As I still have a dozen or so in place to get through before I'm onto this one.
Keith wrote: "Mac_dickenson *** This May Be Worth A Look***I bought this book after reading the blurb, it sounds as though the author has used his environment in a worthwhile manner.
Zodiac Station by Tom Har..."
Hey, Keith!
Thanks for the recommendation. I'll check it out. The deciding factor for me, when reading a new author, is the strength of the writing. There's a lot of stuff I won't read, including some writers who are household names, because the writing is bland. If I like the writing it doesn't matter what the story is about.
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Featuring challenges such as highly savvy law enforcement agencies and security systems, gorgeous backdrops like the Marina Barrage lake, little known gems that would be excellent for an action scene (such as where the DPRK Singapore Embassy is located) and with Singapore caught between it's friendly neighbor the PRC (This is true, they have great relations) and it's most important ally the USA, during a time when the South China Sea dispute is entering the start of the breaking point area,
I'm sure a good author who does his research and visits Singapore could make the city be the battleground for a few covert wars. Say between the MSS and CIA or a counter-terrorist thriller between Singapore's ISD (domestic intelligence) and South East Asia's growing number of Daesh extremists.
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However, sometimes a real life peaceful setting can work in favor of a story. Forces the writer to be far more imaginative than they would be with a war-torn location, and dream up worst case scenarios that haven't but COULD happen.......Like say an Islamic terrorist group managing to evade the effective ISD operatives and successfully carry out an act of terror of some kind in Asia's Garden City....or Chinese MSS officers going toe to toe with the CIA while the ASEAN group meets in Singapore.
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Vienna has long been considered the "spy capital of Europe". I'm prejudiced, I admit, because I lived and worked there and even set part of my novel in that city. Nevertheless, it's one of the most beautiful cities in the world, is very centrally located between eastern and western Europe, has more space devoted to parks than just about any other city in the world, is right next to the somewhat spooky Vienna woods, and has a wonderful tradition of smuggling and black market activities.
Beirut, Lebanon, must be considered a place apart, thanks to its volatile mix of weak government, powerful militias and armed groups, ethnic and religious conflicts, refugee camps and its proximity to Syria and Israel, plus easy access by boat from either Cyprus, Turkey, Egypt, Syria or Israel. It is a multicultural and multilingual country where either an Arab or European could go around without attracting undue attention. It has fancy nightclubs, casinos and luxury hotels, alongside refugee camps, fortified compounds, slums and more weapons dealers than you could dream of.
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Brasillia due to the unique architecture courtesy of the legendary Oscar Niemeyer and the lakes which would be a good setting for a water based action scene. For starters, the ultra-modern presidential palace of Brazil is on a lakeside. Scuba Diving is perhaps the only means of a 'covert infiltration'.
As for Sao Paulo, it's the New York of Brazil and has been said to be the only city that would be suitable for a noir thriller. With favelas that rival Rio De Janerio's in sheer scale and terror, a drab atmosphere, a high concentration of businesses (corporate corruption angle?) and multiple nightclubs and sushi bars, SP does have some potential.
The only problem with these two places is that there's no immediate real world "threat" that could be used. Unless you go for the Brazilian political establishment....
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http://blogdoprimo.com.br/noticias/pa...
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Interior shots courtesy of the Brazilian government.
http://www2.planalto.gov.br/presidenc...
Elite Squad:There's fictionalized movie adaptation of Elite Squad (not to be confused with the sequel Elite Squad: Enemy Within). Both are really good and highlight the challenge of a corrupt police force taking a nearly impossible job and the infighting in a compromised system.
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Samuel wrote: "With the President of Brazil about to have her goose cooked (been following the story with great interest due to the effect it will have on the olymics and Rio De Janerio which was mentioned early ..."I dunno...as violent and corrupt as it already is, in reality, fantasizing about scenarios which exacerbate the problem seems a bit depraved to me. People living in the slums report that they're more afraid of the government than they are of the police or the drug lords.
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No no no, you misunderstand me Mac. I don't mean make a scenario around Brazil government corruption (although it would be child's play for most authors). What I meant is that Brasilia would make a decent setting for a thriller novel action scene, especially the Palacio Da Alvorada, due to its picturesque location and unique architecture. Furthermore, it's proximity to a man made lake increases the flexibility of what could be done.
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Spy novels more commonly feature multiple locations – there are exceptions, of course, but from Buchan to Ambler to Fleming to Ludlum, the high stakes of the plots often involve travelling to different countries. This is also part of their appeal for readers, as we escape into places we might not otherwise have known too much about.
When I first started thinking seriously about writing a novel several years ago, I thought a lot about the setting. I wanted to return to the Cold War and write a thriller based on some of what is now known about it, but I wanted it to be set somewhere other than the locales beloved of most spy fiction, such as Berlin, Vienna and Budapest. I decided that setting it in Africa would allow me to explore some of the lesser known aspects of the Cold War.
I realized I’d have to do a lot of research to make it seem authentic. I spent a long time researching the Sixties, the Cold War and Africa, reading books, watching documentaries andimmersing myself in the time and place. I devoured information about some of the key events on thecontinent, in Angola, the Congo, and Rhodesia.
I had germs of ideas for spy novels set in each of those countries, but I eventually decided to set the book in Nigeria. I did this in part because I’d become fascinated by the extent of the superpowers’ involvement in the civil war there, and in part because I’d spent some of my childhood in the country and still had many vivid memories of it. I also had access to a lot of useful primary material about it, as my parents had kept books, maps, privately printed leaflets and the like from when we lived there. So when I had someone chase my protagonist Paul Dark across a golf course in Lagos, I was able to write it using a map the club had produced at the time that showed the exact layout of the course.
That novel, Free Agent, was published in 2009. In the next two books in the series I took Dark to several other continents. But one part of my research during Free Agent kept nagging at me: Rhodesia, that peculiar nation where many of the ruling minority white population had acted more British than the British. Middle class ladies held tea parties in the capital, Salisbury. Suburbs of the city had names like Waterfalls, Lochinvar, Mabelreign – one could almost imagine Miss Marple visiting.
In 1965, the prime minister of Rhodesia, Ian Smith, declared the country independent of the UK. It became a ‘rogue state’ in international terms. This and the bloody conflict between the white regime and the insurgents of ZANLA and ZIPRA was a story that featured on the front pages of newspapers around the world for over a decade, but is now rarely discussed unless one has a personal connection to it.
With my fourth novel, Spy Out The Land, I decided to take Dark back to Africa and into the frightening, brutal and occasionally surreal landscape of Rhodesia in the Seventies. I wanted to write about two versions of the country in the book. Firstly, to try to capture as much of the reality of the situation as I could. As with previous books, I built the plot around real events, using real historical figures (Ian Smith is in several scenes, for instance). The novel also features a real Rhodesian special forces outfit, the Selous Scouts, and I was lucky enough to come across David Paxton, who had contacts with many veterans of that and other special forces regiments from the conflict – several of them read the book and gave me amazing feedback, often on tiny operational details.
But I also had in mind a different version of the place. As a teenager, I read a lot of thrillers set in Africa, by Wilbur Smith, Geoffrey Jenkins and others. During the Cold War, a lot of spy thrillers featured Rhodesia or Rhodesians (usually mercenaries). I wanted Spy Out The Land to recall books like Frederick Forsyth’s The Dogs of War, in which tough, hard men with machine-pistols smile cruelly as they plot to take over countries in intricate detail. So I worked to make sure the operational details were accurate, but I didn’t want to lose sight of the fact that I was writing a spy novel set in 1975. I wanted it to feel like it could have been published then, too.
Those two ideas for writing about a location are somewhat contradictory, of course, but they come from the knowledge that research has its limits. You also have to throw out a lot of research, or your novel ends up reading like a travel guide. At some point the author’s imagination, and voice, have to take over and do the work: the scent of a flower, the texture of a fabric, the dashboard on a brand of car... even a single word can evoke a time and place more than a dozen exhaustively researched facts. One of my favourite writers is Elleston Trevor who, using the pseudonym Adam Hall, wrote 19 taut, vivid and very atmospheric spy novels featuring a British secret agent known only as Quiller. In a 1996 interview, Trevor/Hall admitted something I found astonishing: he almost never wrote about countries he’d been to, as he felt that too detailed a knowledge of a place would limit his imagination:
‘‘This sounds very perverse,’ he would say, ‘but it is somehow that the country or area has a magic, a mystery for me that maybe came through in my writing, which doesn’t always happen if I’ve actually been there.’’
In his novels, the locations all feel totally real. But they are his vision of these places, and they are evoked by feel rather than a total adherence to reality. I found comfort in this. After all, Rhodesia is now Zimbabwe: I couldn’t visit it. The place as it was in 1975 no longer exists. All I can do as a writer is to try to evoke a place in a way that will take readers along with me. Even the word ‘Rhodesia’ has a strong atmosphere for me, and as I reached the later stages of writing the book I felt like I had finally located my own version of it. I hope it comes across for readers, too.
- Group member Jeremy Duns, author of the 4 Act Paul Dark Tragedy
Thanks for giving that post of mine a push, Samuel! And thanks for letting me into your group. Reading with interest while I try to write my next.
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Welcome to the group Jeremy, thank you for joining us, and I hope you enjoy it here. We've developed somewhat rapidly this year, lots of interesting threads about the intricacies of spy/military/geopolitical fiction and their tropes and even one or two threads on publishing (mostly focused on the realm of advertising and ebooks but I try)
I actually did a bit of advertising for your series back in the end of July. The US bumper crop thriller season had come and gone and knowing the radically unique plot concept and setting the Paul Dark Tragedy centers around, I decided they would like it and gave a general assessment of it. Check post 324 and down upon clicking this link https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...
Anyway, I'd like to thank you for packaging your first three books into a collection, one which I downloaded in ebook format for my smartphone. Quite convenient really. I also have book 4 and loved the setting. You giving behind the scene information on how it came about is the icing on the cake.
A question. You've just mentioned the existence of another book you're writing. Is that a continuation of the Paul Dark Series (It would be easy for him to change his mind and bump off Rachel when he's off the bridge) Or a new, unrelated spy novel?
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Which brings me to another question for the entire group participants of this thread.
The above book is set in a historical period.
Are there any historical periods where you wouldn't mind setting a spy novel?
Anytime during the Cold War is of course a very rich period for writers of spy novels. What is rarely seen are spy novels set in the Renaissance or Middle Ages periods, even though the Renaissance period was a prime time for intrigues, spying and assassinations. Imagine being a Spanish spy at the court of Queen Elizabeth, or a British spy at the court of King Louis XIV. Of course, if you got caught, your fate was not enviable, plus communications and travel at the time were not exactly quick, adding to the problems of a spy. You had to be a very skilled one indeed to survive and thrive as a spy in such a time period.
Would anybody be interested in an Elizabethan period spy novel if someone wrote one?
Would anybody be interested in an Elizabethan period spy novel if someone wrote one?
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Well there's a lot of plot ideas that can be used. The Virgin Queen was on the hit list of Catholic Europe and the Pope at the time had a contract out on her. Only way she kept ahead of her enemies was the first class asset network Washingham had built her.
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For a Cold War spy novel,one setting which has not been done at all yet is the Park Chung Hee era the ROK went under. During that time Mr Kim had his men conduct a shadow war with the ROK and their KCIA secret police/foreign intelligence service. Lots of assassinations and extra ordinary rendition on both sides, culminating in the Blue House attack and the disastrous Unit 684 project.
Samuel wrote: "Welcome to the group Jeremy..."Thanks very much, Samuel. Lots of fascinating discussion here, and I've been reading with interest. Thanks also for the very nice comments and reviews of my novels - it was Penguin's idea to collect the first three books in the series into one volume, not mine, but I'm delighted you enjoyed them!
Samuel wrote: "A question. You've just mentioned the existence of another book you're writing. Is that a continuation of the Paul Dark Series (It would be easy for him to change his mind and bump off Rachel when he's off the bridge) Or a new, unrelated spy novel?
I am hoping to write more Dark novels, but I'm writing a totally unrelated book at the moment. Like the Darks, it's fiction based around real events.
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A possible plot could revolve around the events of Project Searchlight. It was an operation conducted by Pakistan's army in Bangladesh, the objectives of which can be summed up as "search and destroy". During one night, they aimed to liquidate every single member of the Bengali nationalist movement. Thankfully coordination wasn't on point and they weren't fast enough with their shooting before a resistance movement was consolidated.
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Regarding the searchlight project, think Night of the long knives but expand the hit list by three times. That's how horrific it was as a purge.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operati...
I really like thrillers set in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America. I feel that heroes operating in the United States or Europe might be tough, but hey, they can't be as tough as the guys working in the developing world.I've backpacked in a few of the countries in Africa, South America and Asia, which taught me many things including that there is far less infrastructure to back you up when you are in trouble in those kinds of places. It makes the excitement for dangerous, more thrilling for me.
I was lucky enough to visit Kenya in my twenties, so I used a lot of those experiences in my novel The Benevolent Deception. Travelling there felt like a real adventure to me, so I wanted to capture that feeling in my own writing.
Jack Silkstone and James Phelan are two good authors to check out if you want your action in unusual global locations.
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excellent observations Aiden. The backwaters provide more possibilities and also mean (usually) that the protagonist is not constrained.
So you've been to Kenya? One of the more comparatively stable parts of Africa and also one of the less well known battle grounds in the war on terror, due to its proximity to Somalia and the Westgate shopping mall incident.
Thankfully however it seems the majority of the countries Christians and Muslims are in total agreement and united in trying to destroy the problem before it destroys them.
I was in Kenya during the time of the conflicts in Rwanda, Congo, Sudan, Ethiopia and Somalia (mid 1990s). Lots of refugees and aid workers in Nairobi at the time so lots of interesting conversations. Certainly taught me a lot about the world, and the difference between living in a stable Western country and life in and around unstable regimes where their is war.
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Indeed. All the trappings of life here are things not to be taken for granted. They could disappear over night and leave us in a similar position to the less fortunate.
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Back to locations.
Climax of a book I'm pages away from finishing is set here. A interesting situation where a team of gunmen take over the top floor to initiate a project that will shape history in the span of a few hours. And attempting to breach the floor are the two protagonists who have to make a creative use of the lifts and tunnels to survive and reach the top.
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/yTsUPSraU2c/ma...
The Orion Team.
Books mentioned in this topic
Tokyo Black (other topics)The Benevolent Deception (other topics)
Spy Out the Land (other topics)
Elite Squad: (other topics)
Fifty Grand (other topics)
More...
Authors mentioned in this topic
Jack Silkstone (other topics)James Phelan (other topics)
Option 3, out of the box....I ..."
There's a smattering of military bases, an oil pipeline, hundreds of miles of coastline. It'd be a good place to start or end a story with some continent hopping involved.