James Church and Inspector O

The face that North Korea presents to the world is that of a petulant neighbor, alternately belligerent or conciliatory concerning South Korea, with which it shares a peninsula, and its other Asian neighbors. This "axis of evil," to use former president George Bush's unfortunate term, has been the setting for the remarkable series of Inspector O mysteries by James Church, a former U.S. intelligence officer. Church not only takes us into a country few westerners know, he introduces us to the very human, very real (and, yes, occasionally evil) citizens who live, work and even laugh under the regime of Kim Jong-Il.

Perhaps one of the first things that readers notice about this series is the deadpan, often hilarious humor of Inspector O, who has worked within the system for years. He's so real and alive - and you feel the dangerous flippancy of his every cutting remark to a doltish party official or military man - that you wonder if this person actually existed.

Well, no. But he could have. "I never felt that I created him," Church says. "He really just emerged almost full blown in the process of writing the first book. When I thought about it later, it seemed to be that it must have been a combination of traits and people that I had met in working with North Koreans over the years; and they had just fused to become Inspector O, and I didn't even know it."

Church worked with many North Koreans over the years, and knows the country well, as well as any American today, probably. Which shows in the you-are-there sense of his novels.

In the newest - the fourth in the series - Inspector O is pulled out of retirement from his mountain aerie ("living in splendid isolation," Church says) to tackle a sensitive case involving South Korea. As always with this fascinating, independent-minded character, it's a game of cat-and-mouse between authority and justice. "It has to do with the possibilities of North and South Korea uniting, jockeying for position, and in the process there's a horrendous crime committed, and O discovers he has to solve it," Church says. "Naturally there are all sorts of threads connected to the political situation, and if he pulls on each thread, he discovers he gets himself deeper into a dangerous situation.

Church has seen how life in North Korea has changed over the years, and how among many North Koreans a bitter humor has become a way of self-preservation. North Koreans believed that they were going to produce a society that was more equitable. That has not happened, and optimism is harder to come by, "as the hardships have piled up, and the government and the regime have not at all be able to come through with any of its promises," Church says.

Still, "there's still a sort of a simplicity and a kind of innocence In North Korea and among the people that is something that it takes a while for outsiders to get used to," Church says. Yet, "when you look at the difference between North and South Koreans; they're fundamentally the same [people]; even though the two sides have been apart for 65 years now, and there are enormous differences economically and many other ways, there's still this fundamental foundation of Korean culture that they share. But in terms of this innocence of looking at the world, and interaction among themselves, you can see this great gulf."

Church hadn't really thought that he'd become an author (though he jokes that often his superiors in the intelligence service felt his reports had something fictional about them). For him, the idea of writing a mystery arose from his habit of reading during the long air hauls between the Koreas and the United States. "I'd pack a whole bag of detective stories with me, and when I'd land on the other end, I was always filled with different detective stories," Church recalls. "Once, when I happened to be getting my visa for North Korea, I wondered to myself whether anyone had ever written a detective story set in North Korea, and I thought, 'No, I don't think they have.' That was it: it was a challenge to myself, to try to fill this gap."

Church's experiences in writing reports and creating a narrative out of seemingly disparate events helped him master the demands of novel-writing. The result was A Corpse in the Koryo, which has been followed by Hidden Moon, Bamboo and Blood and now,
The Man with the Baltic Stare.

Church has been so attuned to events in Korea, north and south, that when he imagines plots, he is sometimes something of a prognosticator. "There are things that are happening now that are very much in line with what was in the book, which I wrote about 18 months ago. Sometimes I have to chuckle and think how strange it is how life follows fiction."

But lest readers think that these North Korea books are all about geopolitics and political maneuvering, rest assured that these are mysteries, and Inspector O unravels them with the pluck and humor of the greatest fictional detectives.

And Church is figuring out a way to bring Inspector O back for another adventure. "My first thought was this might be the last one for Inspector O," Church says, "but I like Inspector O as a person, and I hated to see him just ride off into the sunset. I'm thinking of letting him have another shot."

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