Talking Location With author John Lawton (the challenge of setting)

15th May 2020

#TalkingLocationWith… John Lawton, author of Hammer to Fall: Joe Wilderness in Finland, Prague and Berlin

It seems to me that a valuable move for a writer is to have staked out your turf to the point where it can be said ‘John Harvey’s Nottingham’, ‘Sarah Ward’s Derbyshire’, ‘Robert B. Parker’s Boston’ and so on via Edinburgh, New York … Much-Binding-in-the-Marsh.

Fool that I am I have sought to avoid this. Almost none of my fiction is set where I live (Derbyshire — and I will not compete with Sarah for the patch) and while much of it is set in London I would not dare lay claim to London as I am not by any stretch a Londoner. I walk every street my characters walk, but I cannot pretend I know the city.

So — I move around. I enjoy the challenge of a new setting and on occasion put up with travel frustrations : for example when I needed to see Moscow, Yeltsin was being tight-fisted with visas. I eventually got there, after the book (A Little White Death) was published, on 31^st December 1999 on a BBC press visa. Beirut — a Palestinian friend who’d worked for Time magazine in the sixties, said ‘The city you want to write about was wiped off the face of the earth years ago. You might find it in an archive somewhere.”

I did. In a library in Safford, Arizona I found a 1959 copy of National Geographic with a long, illustrated article on pre-destruction Beirut. My Beirut is based entirely on that.

My new novel, Hammer to Fall, is set in Finland, Dublin, Prague and  Berlin, over 1966-68. Am I a masochist? Could be. I had been to three of the four locations when the plot of the book fell on me. Plots do that, they seem very prone to gravity.

I asked a Finnish friend about Lapland.

“Don’t bother. It’s entirely given over to the Santa Claus industry. Find somewhere more accessible and less touristy … like Karelia.” (I pass on this travel tip in good faith.)

Karelia it was, standing in for Lapland, just a couple of hours out of Helsinki. A snowy, misty lake that approximated what I had seen in the mind’s eye.

My ‘hero’, Joe Wilderness, is in disgrace. To avoid Joe getting into trouble his boss at MI6 posts him to Lapland — low population and a border with the USSR guarded more closely than Fort Knox. But … big but … it is also the world capital of illegal vodka distilling, and the USSR is suffering a vodka drought. So, Joe goes into the vodka business. OK, I made that up. It’s what fiction is for. But … bigger but … Finland is also the world capital of cobalt production. Not made up. Cobalt is what makes a hydrogen bomb ‘dirty’ — now who could be buying cobalt in the black market? Us or them? Read on.

Joe’s next ‘safe’ posting is to Prague, just before the Prague ‘spring’ — ‘safe’ as in ‘what could possibly go wrong?’

I’d filmed there several times for Channel 4. I’d had a drink in a theatre bar with Vaclav Havel. I’d watched a Pinter play performed in Czech … and the British embassy had been very helpful. And … I wanted to set scenes inside it.

This trip? No TV status. No Havel. No admission. I more or less got told to fuck off.

I am standing in front of the ‘spy closet’, a wooden door in the wall from which a member of the Czech Secret Service could watch the come-and-go. Subtle it was not.

The stunning garden at the back of the embassy in which, in Hammer to Fall, I pitch tents for teenage refugees during the Soviet invasion of 1968.

When what can go wrong does go wrong, Joe finds himself back where his career as both spy and smuggler began — Berlin. Back on what might well be Berlin’s second most famous landmark, the Glienicke Bridge bewteen the American sector of West Berlin and Potsdam in East Germany.

This it, just a few years before Berlin’s most famous landmark, the Wall, went up.

It’s the bridge that features in Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies, although I think his depiction melodramatic rather than accurate. I took this photograph the day after Spielberg’s crew wrapped — note, not a scrap of litter, not a thing to show they had been there less than twenty-four hours before.

What happens to Joe on the bridge? As I said a little earlier — read on.

John Lawton

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