When I began writing The Prisoner of Zone 22, I wanted to set the story in a place that doesn’t exist and never will. The planners of Guatemala City once designated a future Zone 22, but the area was eventually outside the final municipal line. There were later sayings that Zone 22 was a place of dreams, or alternately, where you go to die. I have chosen the place of dreams, a geography of the mind.

            But the characteristics of Zone 22 are based in reality. Zone 3, before its decline into a Red Zone, was a lower-middle class neighborhood close to downtown where I had family once. The streets, churches and businesses of the area are models for the story, though they are slightly spruced-up to make Zone 22 more of a professional suburb where a murder would be out of place. Zone 3 also borders a ravine.

            The ravine in Zone 22 plays an important role in the life of Captain Javier Ixtlan, my main character. He lived there as a child. His mother died when the earth cracked open during the earthquake of 1976. I was in Zone 3 the night of that disaster. What I saw became part of the book. A crack appeared in the shantytown down the slope in the darkness and whole families fell in. We helped the survivors as best we could. In the rest of the zone houses collapsed inward or outward: many who ran into the street for safety were betrayed by the walls behind them. There were hundreds of bodies in the morning. Hopefully the emotional impact of that experience contributes to the depth of the captain as he navigates the world as a person who lost everything.

            As Captain Ixtlan investigates different aspects of the murder case, he travels through parts of Guatemala City that are real or imagined. The Parque Central of Zone 1, the Yurrita Church in Zone 4, La Ruta Maya, a pyramid-nightclub in the heart of the Zona Viva. Eadweard Muybridge photographed the Parque Central in the 19^th century when Guatemala was an elegant, quiet city. The Yurrita Church, perhaps the most beautiful in the country, was built by a wealthy man after surviving a volcanic eruption in 1902—his prayers were answered. It long ago passed out of the family’s hands. And La Ruta Maya does not exist but might as well. It is a kind of homage by the wealthy elite to the genius of the people they conquered.

            I walked the length of Guatemala City for years. Decades ago I came across a homeless man asleep one morning on an elevated sidewalk by Sexta Avenida. I never forgot him. Who was he? Who was his mother? Everyone has a mother. My experiences helped form the impressions of Javier Ixtlan, himself an outsider, orphan, member of the dispossessed. His travels through the city and Zone 22 seeking justice, trying to protect a woman hiding a list of secret crimes. They are crimes against people and crimes of history. Captain Ixtlan rises to the occasion as best he can. Zone 22 may not exist, but it is still a place of memory and reckoning.

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Darick Allan

I owe my life to a horse. After her favorite stallion in the Royal Danish Stables was bought by a breeding farm in Kentucky, my mother asked for a job there and crossed the Atlantic. She met my father, a diplomat, at a party in Cincinnati. Their marriage broke up in Brazil just as I was born. My father was having an affair. I was her fourth child. As a single mother, she still made our lives magical. But when she died young, we learned quickly that life is brutal. Magic and horror are the stuff of fairy tales. But they come from everyday moments: coincidences, charm, sudden malevolence. I’ve lived a privileged life. Not one of money—quite the opposite—but rich in experience. When I was five years old, I met John Glenn in Liberia during a world tour after his one orbit around the Earth. I shook his hand. At ten the American ambassador was machine-gunned to death two blocks away from me in Guatemala City. So in a way I had already touched the apogee of human experience and its ultimate decline. You don’t live apart from your dreams. Because of John Glenn’s orbit I aspired to be an astronaut. But the assassination of Gordon Mein, its repercussions and the way it echoed in my memory, put me on another path. Why was he killed, and why did I happen to be close-by? I wondered what it all meant: how these random events fit together. These are the kinds of questions that made me want to be a novelist. It is a great advantage in life to know what you want. But don’t get me wrong: I have handled my career as a writer very poorly, from the perspective of having a career at all. It has been a hidden vocation. I made a living doing other things. I wrote about film for a local paper and some magazines in the 80’s, worked as a security guard, then as an art handler driving trucks. That side-step led to a web of artists, collectors, politicians, and businessmen. Many of the colleagues and clients I encountered over the decades were geniuses. So I stumbled, in the role of a servant, into a kind of elevated world. That has been my life. In the meantime I wrote my books. Each has a different story, texture, and place: but hopefully they embody the wonder and terror we all encounter after being born.