In North Korea, a hardboiled cop keeps watch

NEW YORK >> The hero, a police inspector, prowls a city known more for its political malevolence than its street crime. If you read the local newspapers, you could think it’s a city with almost no crime at all. There have been no murders reported there for years, no bank robberies, no muggings, no rapes.

The city is Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, which has long hidden so many realities beneath layers of propaganda and isolation.

The hero is Inspector O, a policeman who knows those realities. And so, in many ways, does the policeman’s creator, the bearded man in the crowded Manhattan restaurant who calls himself James Church.

Church doesn’t want you to know his real name, his nationality or the name of the organization where he worked for so many years. All he’ll say is that he was raised in California, that he spent decades watching North Korea as an intelligence officer for a Western country, and that he traveled there dozens of times.

Church has also, in novels about a tormented Pyongyang police inspector who loves his country despite its many failings, found a way to write about the country he studied for so long.

Inspector O — his first name is never given; his surname is common in Korea — is a hard-boiled, old-school investigator, a Raymond Chandler character trying to do the right thing in a brutal world. But he is also quick to defend that world, especially when outsiders criticize it.

“We know how the world sees us,” he tells a Swiss intelligence official in “Bamboo and Blood,” the third Inspector O novel. “But we are not as weak as people think — or hope.”