Writing in the Cold War's Shadows

When I’m picking the setting for a new spy thriller, I typically don’t pick somewhere I’ve been; I pick somewhere I want to go. Somewhere with a mystery, an allure—the mysterious hint of history, or the gritty undercurrent of secrets. Somewhere, an operative could get lost.

Or caught.

I follow that wanderlust—that itch—into my research. Study the place, stare longingly at photos—I will even go so far as to drop that little Google Earth guy on the map and “walk” along the streets, logging details and mapping escape routes. Then, I typically become obsessed with a place and decide to go there to make sure I got it right. The photos can’t tell you if there’s always a certain smell in the air, or a sound that echoes through the town at the same time each night.

When I found myself deep in an upcoming novel with the main character fleeing Kyiv, I didn’t have much of a setting choice. Poland shares a border with Ukraine, and Krakow sits in more or less a straight line with it, offering the character his nearest promise of friendlies in the west.

I followed my process, studied the material, and wrote the scene out of geographical necessity.

But dammit, if I didn’t still get bitten by the bug.

And so here I am, in Krakow, wandering the once-Communist Bloc streets, drinking in the texture of this incredible place. I’ve been a tourist, certainly, who wouldn’t with castles and colonnades to explore. But what most tourists won’t do is find the projects, the part of town where the steelworkers were sent to live under the watchful eyes of the state, under a fabricated “utopia” made up of wide streets and concrete parcels, and walk the streets trying to see it for what it was.

In 2026, the surface looks like the affordable apartment sector for blue-collar workers.  But you start to peel back the layers of time and realize those wide streets were meant for tanks in case of an uprising. The tightly clustered apartments created tight-knit communities that formed resistance, or, alternatively, “gangs” or criminal networks for black-market goods that the state kept regulated. You start to hear their whispers.

And if you’re me, you start to think up your next plot line.

Tomorrow, I’ll be recreating the exact route this future character takes as he races away from the chain of events he’s set off. It’s a long drive through the countryside and hopefully I wont have a criminal empire on my tail, but will come away with some intricate detail to feed back into that manuscript. And I hope you’ll read it in MAY 2027 and feel the shadows closing in on you, too!