Talking Location With A B Stone – SOUTH AMERICA

10th August 2024

#TalkingLocation With … A B Stone, author of The Butterfly Hunter – SOUTH AMERICA

Twenty years after the end of the Second World War, Klara Brandt discovers that the man responsible for the brutal massacre of her family when she was a child in Germany is still alive. Her thirst for vengeance compels her to leave her comfortable life in New York and risk everything to find him. But is the man she eventually encounters in the remote backwaters of Brazil really the sadistic killer she’d set out to find, or someone else?                                         

What inspired me to write this novel? After living for two years in California, I decided to return home. I could have taken a flight from Los Angeles to New York and from there to London, and I’d have been home in two or three days. But instead, I chose to travel  through Central and South America, including several weeks living with missionaries ministering to Indian tribes in a remote region of the Amazon rainforest. It took me four months to get home. I was lucky to get home at all. There were three of four occasions during my travels when my survival was in the balance and it was only sheer luck that preserved me.

Central Manaus in 1963. The domed building on the right is the opera house where Caruso once sang. (Page 77)

I’d long wanted to visit the Amazon rainforest and meet some of the indigenous people. I was also an avid collector of butterflies and the Amazon was home to thousands of exotic species. For part of the way, I travelled with a Hungarian friend who’d escaped from Hungary after the 1956 revolution against the Russian occupiers. He was a biologist, and my character Joszef Poganyi is loosely modelled on him. On the other hand, Klara Brandt, the story’s main protagonist, is purely fictional.

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Looking straight down into Irazu’s crater during a violent eruption. (Compare page 58)

Yes, it’s fiction, but the story’s colourful settings, the engaging characters, and the tangible feeling of complete isolation in the upper reaches of the Amazon’s tributaries, vividly reflect what I saw and felt during my travels. Most of the key characters are based – again loosely – on real people I met along the way. Peter Hoffman, the Costa Rican coffee planter in my book, is based on a real coffee planter I met there. In creating Wolfgang Müller, the jaguar hunter, my thoughts went back to a hunter I’d befriended in Manaus. Nakuma, the chief of the Tukano tribe in my story, is based on the actual Tukano chief I got to know during my time living with Catholic missionaries in a settlement on the Upper River Negro. Padre Mazzanti, Padre O’Connor and their respective clericos, are fictional versions of the missionaries I met in that region. My story’s bad guy, Walther Schacht, is a fair reflection of an insufferable old man I came across in a remote backwater of Brazil, whose offensive remarks made me very suspicious of his reasons for choosing to live in that isolated place. As for my heroine, Klara Brandt, I met no one who even remotely resembled her!

Some of the dangers faced by my two protagonists are reflections of hazards I was lucky to have overcome in my real-life travels. I clearly recall the feeling of foreboding when I was lost in thick jungle for many hours, with night closing in. I know from personal experience what it’s like to have to escape from the crater rim of a violently erupting volcano (Irazu in Costa Rica), with my hair singed by red-hot gravel falling from the sky. I know what it’s like to voyage for four days on a semi-derelict riverboat crewed by a gang of down-and-outs, as Klara did. I remember exactly what it’s like to believe you are about to drown in the rapids of the River Negro, then to find that you are still alive. That’s what happened to Joszef.

Irazu Volcano, Costa Rica,1963. The road was blocked with volcanic ash and we had to walk the rest of the way. (Compare “The Butterfly Hunter” page 56)

I almost certainly wouldn’t be here to tell the story had I gone ahead with plans for a trip up a remote tributary of the River Uaupés, near Brazil’s border with Colombia. The Tukano tribesman who offered to paddle me upriver in his dugout canoe, didn’t tell me this was a no-go area, populated by a tribe with a reputation for attacking any white man who entered their territory. A missionary warned me to decline the Tukano’s offer, and at the last minute I did. On the other hand, Klara and Joszef ignored the missionary’s advice, with almost disastrous consequences.

Years later, it struck me forcibly that my experiences during those hectic months, which I’d recorded accurately in my notebook every evening, would form a wonderful basis for a fictional story. That’s how The Butterfly Hunter was born.

A B Stone 

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