State of suspense: Unlocking the enigma of North Korea

His name is simply O, the fourth vowel of the alphabet, a symbol signifying zero, or a path whose end is its beginning. He is a police inspector who remarks bleakly of his trade: "Where I live we don't solve cases, for what is a solution in a reality that never resolves itself into anything definable?"

He is not real either, but the creation of a former Western intelligence officer who has taken to writing novels under a pseudonym. Yet, just possibly, he can help us crack one of the greatest mysteries of the age: his own country of North Korea.

Meet Inspector O, stalwart of the Ministry for the People's Security in the great city of Pyongyang, and hero of the thriller A Corpse in the Koryo. The Koryo is the main tourist hotel in the capital, where a murdered Westerner is found. Perhaps the dead man is a Finnish nuclear inspector, but no one really knows.

The discovery comes midway through a fiendishly complicated tale of murder and mayhem, in which two competing branches of the all-enveloping state security apparatus are running their own car-smuggling schemes from the South to China.

This is a world in which everyone is under observation, where life is cheap, and nobody is to be trusted. But it is also a fable for our time, written with grace and elegance, that has caused a stir in the tight community of North Korea-watchers and beyond.

The author goes by the name of James Church, described by the publisher as "a former Western intelligence officer with decades of experience in Asia", and who in his own words has been "in, over and around the country numerous times, dating from when Kim Jong Il was a young man ...

"In how many settings, morning and night, good weather and bad, did I sit across from North Koreans and become lost in wondering what makes them tick? How do they put up with the constant pressures of their system and still retain their humanity, which they certainly do?"

The idea of a book, he explained in an email, came to Church while waiting in a North Korean consulate several years ago. "After a long flight spent reading mystery stories, it probably shouldn't have been a surprise when on looking round the quiet office I asked myself, 'Has anyone ever written a novel about a North Korean detective?'" Now someone has. As a detective story it works in its own right. More importantly, if you read it, you will never look on North Korea in quite the same light again.

This week, diplomats in the six-nation talks in Beijing seem to have made some progress in the laborious negotiations over North Korea's nuclear programme. The usual clichés march across newspaper front pages, about the "Hermit Kingdom" and the "reclusive Communist state". Some hail this glimmering of an opening as a breakthrough. Crusty neocons such as John Bolton, America's belligerent former ambassador to the United Nations, say the West has been duped again.

But then again, the whole performance could be a charade. The North Koreans may give the impression of wanting the US out of the Korean peninsula, but what they actually want might be precisely the opposite, say Robert Carlin, a former State Department analyst and John Lewis, a Stanford professor of Asian studies, in a recent piece for the Nautilus Institute, a think-tank specialising in north-east Asian affairs.

For reasons of history and geography, Pyongyang sees Japan, China and Russia (members, along with South Korea and the US, of the group negotiating with North Korea) as threats. Its strategic problem would thus be solved by a deal with the US.

But Carlin and Lewis say North Koreans have similar pride, and the similar fear of appearing weak, as the rest of us. "Explicitly requesting that the US stay is one of the most difficult things for them to do," they say. But only with that assurance might they give up their nuclear weapon.

In A Corpse in the Koryo, (published in English by Thomas Dunne Books) you find no direct reference to these arcane diplomatic goings-on. But you do find something that makes them and much else far less arcane. Look at the country as perceived by the jaundiced yet understanding eye of Inspector O and you start to understand it. "The more I wrote," says Church, "the clearer it became that although I wanted to keep the story free of political baggage, I was exploring whether the detective story - its dialogue and even to some extent its clichés - would help illuminate those aspects of North Korea outsiders find so puzzling, frightening and exasperating."

The obvious parallel, in terms of an insider's glimpse into a closed society, is Arkady Renko, the Soviet chief inspector immortalised in Martin Cruz Smith's Gorky Park. O, like Renko, has few illusions about the system under which he lives. Like Renko, he is street-wise, hard-bitten and fatalistic, a survivor who has somehow managed to keep his humanity intact.

Both belong to a genre of fictional detectives who transcend ideology and country. Chandler's Philip Marlowe, Michael Connelly's wonderful Harry Bosch, at constant war with the Los Angeles Police Department, and our own Inspector Morse are just three examples. But whereas the opera-loving Morse lives among the soft spires of Oxford, O lives in a one-room flat in a crumbling East German-built block in Pyongyang, pursuing his hobby of smoothing pieces of wood into different shapes. Orphaned and brought up by his grandparents, he is now 56 and unmarried. If not entirely content, he seems quietly resigned to his solitude. Comfy, Home Counties England can never have crossed his mind. O inhabits a country where a Thermos to keep his tea hot is unobtainable; where an ancient, battered Volvo with worn-out tyres is as precious as a Rolls-Royce; where the police have long since run out of regulation yellow tape to seal off the crime scene on the Koryo's eighth floor; where they shut down the rail system of an entire province simply because some party big-wig happens to be travelling in the area.In the opening scene, we meet the Inspector on a hillside, his assignment to take pictures of a car speeding on the highway below. But this is North Korea. The battery in the camera is dead.

If the trappings are different, Morse and O are also similar: two cussed, cynical, lonely individuals, unencumbered by girlfriends, wives or families, doing what they think is right. And in the process we learn of another North Korea: not the caricature of a demon state run by the creepy, cognac-loving sadist Kim Jong Il, but a place which despite everything its people still love.

As an intelligence officer who may know the country as well as any Westerner, Church was constantly frustrated by the difficulty of conveying reality to his customers in government. The real problem, Church explains, "was not in tacking to the political winds, but devising ways to make the medicine (that is, new ideas) go down at senior levels. What started out as an attempt to challenge the common wisdom ended up reinforcing old notions. Inspector O gives me no such trouble."

The inspector's North Korea is a country with real people with real feelings, textured and nuanced, where truth - like everywhere else on earth - is not black or white, but countless shades of grey. The book does not mention the nuclear programme or famine in the countryside. Its one passing reference to Kim Jung Il is when the inspector is upbraided for forgetting to wear the obligatory pin with the image of the "Dear Leader".

The omissions are deliberate. "If readers identify James Church with particular positions, there's a good chance the doors in their imaginations will clang shut again, and they'll put North Korea back in the box in their minds labelled 'weird, funny hair, spooky, dangerous, unknowable'."

Thus it is with the towns of Manpo and Kanggye, north of Pyongyang and close to the Yalu river border with China. For Western defence analysts, these are suspected sites of North Korean chemical weapons plants. In A Corpse in the Koryo, Manpo and Kanggye are just way-stations as our hero tries to crack the increasingly murderous car-smuggling plot, ugly towns scarring a countryside whose beauty haunts the patriotic inspector.

Travelling back to the capital, O remembers how "the first time [my grandfather] had taken me to Pyongyang, I'd watched the setting sun run alongside the train. It had turned red as it touched the horizon, then flared against the paddies so they sparkled like a jewelled necklace reaching to the hills."

Church's intelligence reports, you may wonder at this point, must have been a pretty good read. Only parenthetically do foreign attitudes impinge, mainly when the inspector recounts his tale to a Western intelligence officer during a mission in Europe. But O is not planning to defect to our easier, more affluent world. Rather, he is seeking to nail a high official of his own government, who murdered his best friend.

In the process he explains the apparent xenophobia of his North Korea: "It's not foreigners, it's ourselves we don't like. In our minds, we are small, quivering, bowing, submissive, beaten, cowering dogs. If we like foreigners, it can only be because we are afraid, or currying favour, or kissing their feet."

Paranoia by another term? Perhaps. But at least it is an effort to challenge stereotypes about Kim's regime. Peter Hayes, director of the Nautilus Institute, says: "This is the best unclassified account of how North Korea works and why it has survived all these years when the rest of the communist world capitulated to the global market a decade ago. This novel should be required bedtime reading for President Bush and his national security team."

The White House, alas, may have missed it, But the President will soon have another chance. A second Inspector O novel will soon be with the printers and is due out this autumn. In the meantime, the intrepid detective has been speaking out on matters of the moment.

Late last year Nautilus ran a piece by Church on its website, in which he chats with the inspector about the news of the nuclear test. O's answer may have provided an advance explanation of this week's step forward at the negotiating table.

"Now that we've declared to the world that we have nuclear weapons, now that the people feel we are standing tall," O tells his creator, "we can afford to compromise a little. Some are arguing in the capital that we can actually do more with reforms now. We can ease up on defence spending, some say, and put more resources into technology and development."

In the fictional world, at least, that may already have happened. Finally, the inspector added, he has managed to get his hands on a Thermos for his tea.

Interesting? Click here to explore further