The Collaborators on Location with Michael Idov

Submitted: 30th January 2025

The Collaborators on Location with Michael Idov

Your mission, should you wish to accept it is to follow Michael Idov as he travels the world in his latest spy thriller. You have to be good at keeping secrets and keeping low. But once you’ve read the book, your mission is to shout about it!

Here’s Michael with a taster of your spy fuelled mission…..

There’s a reason why the best spy fiction tends to be written by former spies. Given the profession’s nature, the rest of us only know it from other books and films — which dooms civilians like myself to creating, at best, collages cut out from older, better works.

Map of locations in The Collaborators

The Collaborators Michael Idov

Map of locations in The Collaborators

In writing The Collaborators (which follows a CIA officer and a troubled LA heiress on a quest to find her vanished father), I was determined to avoid this pitfall. But how do you make a story like this feel authentic and personal? Well, my solution was to set every scene in a place where I have lived myself. No cold research, no Google Maps: only memories.

Image of globe from Wikipedia

Luckily, I have a rather peripatetic biography. I was born in Riga, Latvia, under the Soviet occupation, have moved to the U.S. at 16, and have since lived in New York, Moscow, Berlin, Los Angeles, and the south of Portugal. (Also, Cleveland, though this is not particularly useful for spy-novel purposes). I resolved to have my characters visit all of these places over the course of the book, making the plot of The Collaborators mirror my own private atlas.

RIGA

Map of locations in The Collaborators

Riga is my hometown and one of my favorite cities on the planet, so I know every street corner in it. At the novel’s beginning, the protagonist, Ari Falk, is stationed there reluctantly running a small CIA substation disguised as a media research agency. In my mind, their office is in this building, though I’ve added a Valkyrie mascaron to its balcony. It was likely borrowed from the neighboring Albert Street, home to several Jugendstil masterpieces.

Map of locations in The Collaborators

The nearby ice cream kiosk on the edge of the park (which has some significance to the plot) is actually a doner kebab place, but it did sell ice cream when I was a kid. So misidentifying it as such was actually a bit of a secret nostalgia trip.

Russia flag

MOSCOW

Map of locations in The Collaborators

I lived in Moscow for two largely miserable years between 2012 and 2014, stuck in a media job I hated (like Falk!) and watching the country around me rediscover its darkest self. In the book, KhromBank — a Russian state bank with ties to military intelligence — is headquartered in the Matryoshka building: an ominous, black thirteen-story pyramid with floors arranged around a central void in the shape of a giant nesting doll. It sounds like a wild invention but, like many insane things in Russia, it is 100% real. I have even used it as a filming location once. The penthouse is rumored to belong to the country’s odious ex-president, Dmitry Medvedev.

Map of locations in The Collaborators

Skolkovo, the ultramodern but somewhat forlorn suburb in which the Matryoshka sits, is grimly fascinating in its own right. To quote the book, “The park, meant to house tech startups in a brief era of exuberance before the 2014 Crimea invasion, looked like a half-built movie set of a progressive Scandinavian suburb. The Russia that could have been, languishing unfinished.”

Map of locations in The Collaborators

By coincidence, Kutuzovsky Avenue, the main road from Skolkovo to the Moscow city center, leads directly to the U.S. Embassy. So when Falk and Maya make their escape from the Matryoshka, pursued by unknown assailants, their route is indeed a straight line. (And yes, it passes by the world’s only Cat Theater. It’s terrible).

The way that chase ends — with Falk cleverly calling hundreds of taxis to the same address — is based on a real event as well.

Germany flag

BERLIN

Map of locations in The Collaborators

Having bolted out of Moscow in 2014, my family and I ended up in Berlin, and lived there for five years. This is one of those cases where the city map ended up actually dictating the plot. In Chapter Two, Ari Falk recuperates from secondhand nerve-agent poisoning at Charité, the famed Berlin hospital that has treated several high-profile Novichok victims. So far, so genre-appropriate.

Map of locations in The Collaborators

As I was writing it, however, I remembered that the hospital stands across the street from the Natural History Museum, so I sent Falk to meet his boss there for a debrief. Then, once they were in, I suddenly recalled a particularly weird exhibit that had once captivated me and my then-small daughter, so I set the entire scene around that.

Map of locations in The Collaborators

Harlow gave a noncommittal grunt and turned to admire the nearest display: a monstrous wheat weevil, depicted atop a grain as big as a pumpkin. “1940!” he exclaimed, leaning in and squinting to read the accompanying plaque. “Imagine that! The war’s been going on for a year. Auschwitz already operational. And here, in Berlin, a guy sits one mile from the Reichstag, painstakingly building the world’s largest weevil.”

OLHAO AND TANGIER

Olhão

Map of locations in The Collaborators

Olhão is a lovely town in Algarve, on the southernmost edge of Portugal — as close to Morocco as it is to Lisbon. The locals call it the “Cubist Town” for its Arabic-style flat-roof architecture, which has inspired a number of 20th-century artists. I spend a lot of time there (in fact, I am writing this from there). In describing the small house Maya’s father leaves her before vanishing, I have pretty much used my own, down to the address, so giving out its geolocation seems unwise.

Tangiers

Map of locations in The Collaborators

Tangiers, on the other hand, is a bit of a cheat. I have never actually lived there but traveled there several times from Olhão, so the route Maya takes (to follow a loose end left by her father — a boat moored at the port) mirrors mine: a drive down the Spanish coast, then the ferry from Tarifa. Last but not least, the Tangier hotel where Maya and Falk hook up is quite likely Dar Nour, not far from that port.