Pyongyang confidential

Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea. By Guy Delisle. Drawn and Quarterly; 192 pages; $14.95. Jonathan Cape; £12.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

Maximum Target. By Martin Gower. NoirEast Publishing; 362 pages; £9. Buy from Amazon.co.uk

The Man with the Baltic Stare. By James Church. Minotaur; 288 pages; $24.99 and £17.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

ISOLATED and isolating, North Korea has made concealment a way of being. Which may be one reason why, as a setting, it lends itself so well to the imagination of thriller writers.

A clutch of recent potboilers use the setting, but reveal little. Perhaps the most unusual of these is Guy Delisle's “Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea” (2006), the first and so far the only “graphic novel” to tackle life in the DPRK. Inspired by the author's experience as the liaison between a French animation studio and its Korean partner, it uses drab black-and-white drawings to depict the singular emptiness and mystery of the world's only neon-free capital city.

Hovering over this crepuscular world is the ever-present image of the Dear Leader, Kim Jong Il, the diminutive, shambling, designer sunglasses-wearing despot who—according to official sources— combines national leadership with the roles of philosopher, writer, opera composer, film director and world-class golfer. The day begins and ends with Mr Kim, who is seldom seen but always present. Pyongyang is the kind of city where a day-long visit to the museum of gifts presented to Mr Kim seems like quite an interesting diversion. Nothing much happens in the novel. But then, nothing much happens in Pyongyang—at least if you are lucky.

Various characters are not so fortunate in Martin Gower's “Maximum Target”, which dispenses entirely with such niceties as the slow accumulation of texture and detail, and hurls the reader straight into a world of Japanese yakuza gangsters, drug dealers, massage-parlour girls and a conspiracy that ends with an attempt on the life of the North Korean dictator.

Mr Gower's characters have a depth that befits his rapid-fire global plots and counterplots—which is to say, not much. But the text is informed and witty, the North Korean scenes sketched with what reads like first-hand knowledge, and there is an engaging take on cultural preoccupations from Karl Marx to Jean-Paul Sartre and Bob Dylan, played out against the unlikely skyline of Pyongyang with its empty boulevards and permanently unfinished multi-storey hotels.

The same locations, albeit from a different angle, also appear in a series of crime novels written by James Church, the pseudonym of a former CIA operative in East Asia. Here the central character is a Pyongyang police officer, the likeable Inspector O, who knows that in North Korea mysteries are never solved, just absorbed into larger mysteries.

The first in the series, “A Corpse In The Koryo”, which came out in 2006, is the least assured, but in some ways the most original. Daily life, rather than a particular crime, is the mystery here. Much of the story involves the inspector trying, never entirely successfully, to join the dots between one inexplicable event and the next, and connect them all to the murder of a foreigner that may or may not have taken place in the Koryo Hotel.

Mr Church keeps his own counsel, so it is not known how he comes by his information, but the scenic details and atmospherics suggest more than a passing acquaintance with the realities of life in North Korea. In the next two novels, “Hidden Moon” and “Bamboo and Blood”, a subtle, indirect satire on a state develops that is too bizarre for comedy. Finally, in last year's “The Man with the Baltic Stare”, Inspector O is called out of retirement to investigate a murder in Macao. Eventually it becomes clear that the job is not to solve the crime, but to obscure it.

This is a police procedural North Korea- style—fully inverted. It's not what you do that lets you get by in North Korea, it's what you don't do. Or as Mr Gower puts it, it is something like jazz; the notes you don't play are the notes that count.