Issue #3
June 25, 2023

Dear friends,

I’ve spent most of the last month in a self-imposed bubble, working on final edits to my first novel, The Outlier. I sent the manuscript to my editor last Sunday and now feel wildly liberated.

I set this tale of psychological suspense in and around La Ventana, a beachside town on the Sea of Cortez, in the Mexican state of Baja California Sur. So, that’s where I’ve been in my head these last weeks.

In real life, I spent time at my family’s house in La Ventana nearly every year between 1996 and 2014. Over that period, it evolved from a remote string of villages with a campground into a well-known haven for wind-sport fanatics. Now it has dozens of hotels and restaurants and a lot more pavement than before. But La Ventana is still relatively off the beaten track, two and a half hours from the airport in Los Cabos and an hour from the smaller one in La Paz.

I never thought I was doing research during my sojourns in La Ventana, some of which lasted for months. I often wrote while I was there, but with one journalistic exception, always on work set elsewhere.

Yet here it is, a decade later, in my fiction.

There was a former shrimp-processing plant in La Ventana that sat empty for years and then became a kiteboarding school-slash-pizza restaurant. In The Outlier, that sandy old building has become a marine biology center.

Real life and my book also share cardón cactus forests, stucco cabins with domed roofs, otherworldly moonrises, and a teeming underwater world.

In 2013, I wrote about diving in the protected area around Cabo Pulmo (south of La Ventana) for a travel story in the New York Times. Research for that story — along with snorkeling and kayaking in Baja over the years — informed my fictional descriptions of life on and under the sea.

Everything is material, as Philip Roth may have said. Including the place where you think you’re working on something else. Or, to mangle John Lennon, research is (sometimes) what happens when you’re making other plans.

Baja. Photo by Joe Ray.

Five Faves: TV Spy Series

As I zipped through the new Netflix series The Diplomat, it got me thinking about the televised spy series as a genre of the streaming era.

To be sure, The Diplomat is not technically a spy story. Jeff Stein of SpyTalk called it a “military crisis-cum-rom/com series,” which isn’t wrong. But the CIA station chief in London is one of the main characters, and an early kidnapping sets the tone. (And the show’s creator, Debora Cahn, also worked on Homeland.)

Here are some of my favorite spy shows of recent years. I left out Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan, even though I loved the first season, because after that it becomes much less coherent. Runners up include the television adaptations of the John Le Carré novels The Night Manager and The Little Drummer Girl, which are both extremely watchable.

My favorites:

The Americans stars Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell (star of The Diplomat) as husband-and-wife Russian spies, deep undercover in suburban Washington, DC in the 1980s. It’s dark and tense, and grapples with the couple’s impossible domestic situation along with geopolitics. (2013-2018, FX, six seasons)

The limited series The Spy  stars shape-shifting actor Sasha Baron-Cohen as shape-shifting secret agent Eli Cohen, a real-life Israeli spy who penetrated the highest echelons of Syrian politics. I was fascinated to see the recreation of 1960s Damascus. To my taste, this would have been even more fun to watch in Hebrew and Arabic with subtitles, but it’s tricky to find movie stars with that kind of double-fluency. (2019, Netflix, six episodes)

In Killing Eve, Anglo-American security officer Eve (Sandra Oh) and Russian assassin Villanelle (Jodie Comer) become mutually obsessed. It’s dark, funny, camp, and deliciously psychopathic. The first season was created by Phoebe Waller-Bridge of Fleabag fame. (AMC, 2018-2022, four seasons )

Undercover agents are people too. The ones in The Bureau (Le Bureau des Légendes) perform impressive feats of deception and menace, and also go rogue, get lost, and struggle with their foibles and emotions. The show is plausibly based on the real-life accounts of former French spies. Pretty much all the actors are excellent, but Zineb Triki, who plays Syrian historian Nadia El Mansour, is especially magnetic. (2015-2020, Canal Plus, five seasons)

In Homeland, a  trio of terrific actors — Claire Danes, Damian Lewis, and Mandy Patinkin — make a sometimes outrageous plot totally compelling. Danes plays bipolar CIA agent Carrie Mathison, whose obsessions drive the action. Not incidentally, Gideon Raff, an executive producer and writer on Homeland, went on to create The Spy. (He also created the Israeli series Prisoners of War.) (2011-2020, Showtime, eight seasons)

Let’s Talk

Do you have a question about writing or travel? Ask me at eavesdrop@elisabetheaves.com.

Happy trails,
Elisabeth