Spies, Smugglers and Misfits: The Lawless History of Tangier with Sean McLachlan
What makes a city the perfect setting for an adventure story?
Imagine a city where a spy could disappear into a medieval medina, where ancient ruins sit in the shadow of colonial mansions, and where two continents seem to tug at the air around you.
That city is Tangier and in this episode, archaeologist and writer Sean McLachlan brings it to life.
Sean has spent months at a time there researching his Moroccan Mysteries series, and he knows the city the way a detective knows a crime scene: layer by layer. We go from its days as a lawless international zone, governed simultaneously by France, Spain, Britain, Belgium, and Italy, to the modern port city it's become, unpacking what made it such a gift to writers of adventure fiction.
The history alone reads like a novel. Drugs and homosexuality were legal when banned almost everywhere else. Anti-Franco republicans shared streets with former Nazis. Rival cafés in the Petit Socco were known to throw glasses at each other across the square. And in the antique shops today, you can still find 1950s police arrest records filled out in triplicate: English, French, and Spanish.
If you're drawn to cities where history hasn't quite been cleaned up, this one's for you.
Check out Sean's Moroccan Mystery series HERE
In This Episode, We Explore:
- Geography as character – Tangier sits between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, 14km from Spain. That proximity has shaped everything from its languages to its smuggling routes.
- The international zone experiment – from 1924 to 1956, multiple world powers co-governed Tangier under a legal framework so permissive it became one of the wildest cities in Africa.
- Espionage as backdrop – Cold War fears of Soviet influence south of the Strait of Gibraltar meant spies were everywhere, and the French and Spanish were quietly rooting for Moroccan independence to keep the Russians out.
- Layered architecture, layered identity – the Casbah, the Medina, colonial mansions on the Marshan ridge, and now Gulf Arab palaces where Europeans once lived.
- Real objects, real stories – from glass plate negatives found in a dusty box to 1950s police records pulled from antique shops, Tangier hands you material that fiction can't fully invent.
- Why authentic setting elevates fiction – when your readers can feel that you know where every street turns and why every cafe has a political leaning, the story earns its credibility.
Episode Timestamps
- 01:46 – A City Between Two Continents (and why 14km matters)
- 03:52 – The International Zone: How Six Countries Co-Governed One City
- 06:49 – Spies, Smugglers, and the Police Chief Who Learned to Look the Other Way
- 12:36 – People, Politics, and the Question of Who Gets to Be Moroccan
- 15:47 – Modern Tangier: Africa's Largest Port and a City Being Rediscovered
- 17:26 – Antique Shops, Glass Plate Negatives, and What History Leaves Behind
- 21:05 – Books That Capture the Real Tangier
- 23:42 – The Moroccan Mysteries: A Communist Detective Who Stole a Bank Case
Links Referenced in This Episode:
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Transcript
Imagine a city where a spy could disappear into a medieval medina, where ancient ruins sit in the shadow of colonial mansions, and where two continents seem to tug at the air around you.
Speaker A:That city's Tangier, and when I walked its streets last year and learned about its lawless past, I immediately knew that it would be a great place to set a novel.
Speaker A:Hey, I'm Luke.
Speaker A:I'm an author of archaeological adventure novels.
Speaker A:I travel the world looking for stories to put into my books and to share with you right here on the Adventure Story podcast.
Speaker A:Now, just quickly, before we dive in, most podcasts grow through recommendations, so please share this with any adventure lovers in your life.
Speaker A:Right, who's ready to get to Tangier?
Speaker A:But don't worry, we're in safe hands for this adventure because our guide to this shady but beautiful city is archaeologist and writer Sean McLaughlin.
Speaker A:He's travelled to more than 30 countries researching history and culture for his books.
Speaker A:Sean writes several series, including the Moroccan Mysteries, which are partly set in Tangiers.
Speaker A:He also joined me last season to talk about his Masked man of Cairo adventures.
Speaker A:And I love how he researches his books from getting to know the place from the ground up, and as an archaeologist, sometimes even beneath the ground.
Speaker A:So when he offered to come back on the show and talk about Tangiers, I had to say yes.
Speaker A:Sean, welcome back to the Adventure Story podcast.
Speaker B:Well, thanks, Luke.
Speaker B:I'm glad to be back.
Speaker A:All right, so good to have this conversation with you again.
Speaker A:So, yeah, I was in Tangier last year and I remember being up in the Casper, and I'm in Africa, I'm in Morocco, and you can look out and you can see Spain on the other side.
Speaker A:It must be a gap of 20 miles or something like that.
Speaker A:It's very narrow, lots of big freight ships coming through.
Speaker A:So it has got this sort of European vibe to it.
Speaker A:But how much has that geography, you know, that closeness of these two continents shaped the character of the city over the centuries?
Speaker B:Well, for me, the most attractive thing about Tangier, Luke, is that it is at this crossroads.
Speaker B:It's between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic on the southern shore of the Strait of Gibraltar.
Speaker B:It's in Africa, but you can see Spain on a very clear day.
Speaker B:You can see the Rock of Gibraltar, so you can see the UK as well.
Speaker B:So it's at this nexus.
Speaker B:It's a port, it's a border area, and it's always had a mix of people passing through it.
Speaker B:If you stand up on the bluff in the Kasbah, looking out over there, you'll meet a Lot of sub Saharan Africans who are hoping to make the crossing over to Spain.
Speaker B:And it's actually 14 kilometers to Spain.
Speaker B:And everybody who's hoping to get on one of those cayuco boats knows precisely how far it is.
Speaker B:You also have the Berbers from the mountains there.
Speaker B:You have the lowland, more Arab Moroccans.
Speaker B:And of course, you have a lot of expats living there.
Speaker B:There used to be a very large Spanish and French community there, which.
Speaker B:And there's still remnants of that.
Speaker B:So you'll hear a bunch of different languages on the street.
Speaker B:And it's very common for Tanjawis to mix languages in the course of speaking with a waiter to make an order in a cafe.
Speaker B:I might use Arabic, Spanish, English and French all jumbled together, sometimes in the same sentence.
Speaker B:And it's just very common there.
Speaker B:It's just how it goes.
Speaker B:So it really is a mingle of cultures, which is a lot of fun.
Speaker A:I love that.
Speaker A:And Tanjawis, you call people who live there.
Speaker B:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker B:Tanjawi or Tanjawiya, if they're women.
Speaker A:I see.
Speaker A:I see.
Speaker A:That's great.
Speaker A:That's good to know.
Speaker A:I'll use that next time.
Speaker A:So it spent the.
Speaker A:Tangier spent a period of time when it wasn't directly Morocco.
Speaker A:It was sort of an international zone controlled by lots of different powers.
Speaker A:As I remember it, quite a confusing part of history, of the city's history.
Speaker B:Well, as the France and Spain began to take over Morocco as a colony, there was an argument among the European powers about Tangier because it was such a strategic location.
Speaker B:And the compromise was that it would be ruled as an international zone by several different countries, including France and Spain, but also the United Kingdom, Belgium, Sweden, for no good reason, Italy and a couple of other countries.
Speaker B: And that was from: Speaker B:Now, the Sultan was nominally in charge, but really it was the international committee that ran everything in Tangier and its hinterland.
Speaker B:And what was interesting about this was, for reasons that are not entirely clear, all of these countries decided that whatever was legal, or at least not illegal, in any member state, would be legal in Tangier.
Speaker B:So suddenly, it was one of the few places in the world where homosexuality was legal.
Speaker B:It was one of the few places in the world where drugs were legal.
Speaker B:At least one of the few places in the world that was run by the Western powers where drugs were legal.
Speaker B:Their passports weren't checked very much.
Speaker B:You needed almost no paperwork to open a business or even a bank.
Speaker B:And that caused some trouble.
Speaker B:So it became this free for all and attracted a lot of people who couldn't live their lives properly elsewhere.
Speaker B:And it very quickly gained a very justified reputation as the wildest town in Africa.
Speaker A:And I never knew that.
Speaker A:That's absolutely fascinating.
Speaker B:Well, and it's interesting because there's the police chief at the latter half of this period, Gerald Richardson, good name, wrote a book about memoirs about this called Crime Zone, which is long out of print, but well worth catching if you can.
Speaker B:Crime Zone by Gerald Richardson.
Speaker B:And he talked about how he went from being a London bobby to serving in World War II and then having to be the police chief in Tangier.
Speaker B:And it was all very hierarchical.
Speaker B:Like, every country had its positions.
Speaker B:The police chief had to be British, the assistant chief of police had to be French, the detectives were French or Moroccan.
Speaker B:And there was all these different positions for these different countries.
Speaker B:And he got there and he had been arresting drug addicts and homosexuals back in England as just routine.
Speaker B:And then, you know, he wasn't allowed to do that anymore.
Speaker B:And it was very interesting to read his book because he just sort of shrugged his shoulders and said, well, I'm here to enforce the law, and the law doesn't cover this, so whatever.
Speaker B: d for a police officer in the: Speaker A:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker A:Now, I know the answer to this question, because I can imagine the stories coming out of when you say that.
Speaker A:I can already picture this idea, but why did you think that that made it good as a backdrop for your stories?
Speaker B:Well, first off, because there were a lot of misfits showing up, but also there was this dynamic.
Speaker B:I have my series set in the early to mid-50s, where the independence movement's gaining strength, and the more perceptive Westerners realize that time is ticking on Tangier.
Speaker B:But there's also a lot of spying going on because it's still strategically important.
Speaker B:The World War II is in the rearview mirror now, but now you have the Soviets wanting to get control.
Speaker B:The Soviets are trying to encourage the Moroccan independence movement, which sort of encourages the French and Spanish to actually be lenient on the independent movement because they don't want the Russians to take over.
Speaker B:So fear of a Communist takeover just south of the Strait Gibraltar was one of the reasons that they actually let Morocco become independent.
Speaker B:If you look at the diplomatic discussions at the time, the Western diplomats were terrified of this.
Speaker B:So there was a lot of espionage going on.
Speaker B:There was a lot of crime going on, There was an awful lot of smuggling going on because.
Speaker B:Because very little was taxed in Tangier.
Speaker B:They would smuggle out things like cigarettes or drugs or whiskey or whatever to go to places like Spain or France that had high import duties.
Speaker B:And of course, you know, hashish, which is still being smuggled into Europe.
Speaker A:Yeah, I think that's.
Speaker A:I can see the idea of this.
Speaker A:I can see the, the stories myself.
Speaker A:As you describe it, there's.
Speaker A:Let's talk about the city as it looks architecturally right.
Speaker A:You've got the Caspers from several hundred years ago and stretching up to more modern buildings in that period.
Speaker A: n which you're writing in the: Speaker B: res haven't changed since the: Speaker B:Tangier is the city of hills, the Kasbah, which is the old citadel for the Sultan and his extended family and his top viziers.
Speaker B:And everything is a walled citadel on a hill overlooking the medina, which is the sort of labyrinthine old quarter for the regular folk.
Speaker B:And the buildings tend to be very stone buildings, very few little windows, squarish, often tower like very closed off.
Speaker B:Moroccans don't socialize in their homes.
Speaker B:Most of my Moroccan friends have never been to their home and they've never been to mine.
Speaker B:It's just not done.
Speaker B:You meet in cafes.
Speaker B:The house is like little fortresses.
Speaker B:The doors open onto blank walls of a hallway that turns left or right and goes into the living room.
Speaker B:So even when you open your front door, people can't see into your house.
Speaker B:There's little windows that are always offset from the neighbor's windows, so you can't look from one window into another.
Speaker B:Thick walls, all whitewashed with flat top roofs where people sun themselves and dry their laundry and all that.
Speaker B:And you get some wonderful views from there.
Speaker B:And if you go off to the citadel of the Kasbah, where it's surrounded by a fortified wall and some towers, some old cannons.
Speaker B:And then you go west, you get onto this ridge called Marchand, where there's a lot of old palaces, including one of the king's palaces.
Speaker B:And Malcolm Forbes had a palace there, which is now the king's guest house.
Speaker B:One of the most richest men in the world and he made it his guest house.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:So.
Speaker B:But yeah, and then looking out over the Strait of Gibraltar and then the coast turns a bit to the south and you're looking out over the Atlantic.
Speaker A:I remember doing.
Speaker A:We went on the bus up over that bit, which I think you're describing, with the mansions either side.
Speaker A:And then you get out to the lighthouse where the Atlantic and the Mediterranean meet.
Speaker A:There's a specific point, isn't there, where there's like that line in the sand.
Speaker B:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker B:What's interesting about that is another little layer of history on the eastern side of the bay, like to the east of the citadel in the Medina, is the Bay of Tangier, one of the most sheltered bays that you're going to find.
Speaker B:One of the best areas for a port that you'll find until you get all the way to Orang in Algeria.
Speaker B:Another thing that made it strategically important.
Speaker B:But on the east side of the bay is another little lighthouse.
Speaker B: at lighthouse, from the early: Speaker B:They were lighthouse keepers for like five generations.
Speaker B:But when World War I kicked off, the French are like, there's no way we're going to let Austro Hungarians, who are on the other side of the war, run our lighthouse.
Speaker B:And so they were kicked out.
Speaker B:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker B:I wonder if that family today, if they're in Austria, Hungary or wherever they are, if they're aware that they had ancestors who were lighthouse keepers more than a hundred years ago in Tangier.
Speaker A:I love the idea that someone would trace their roots back to their five.
Speaker A:Cause you'd think you weren't a Moroccan person.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:But yet for five generations, that's where your family lived.
Speaker B:Well, and this is the interesting thing about Tangiers, because it has, like, one of my Moroccan friends, I thought for a couple years he was Moroccan.
Speaker B:In fact, he is French.
Speaker B:Both his parents are French.
Speaker B:I've never met them.
Speaker B:But he grew up since infancy in Morocco, speaks fluent durija, which is the local dialect of Arabic, has lived in Tangier all his life.
Speaker B:I mean, he's 100% Moroccan, but actually he isn't.
Speaker B:And so I find that interesting.
Speaker B:And there's the Spanish population, which has been there since the early 19th century.
Speaker B:A lot of them lived there for generations.
Speaker A:Have these populations always got along, or is there tension in the different factions of the city?
Speaker B:Not so much.
Speaker B:There has been tensions in the past between the lowland Arabs and the Berbers.
Speaker B:The Berbers didn't get full equal rights at independence.
Speaker B:The current king, Muhammad vi, has gone a long way to change that.
Speaker B:He made Berber.
Speaker B:Amazigh is the actual term, unofficial language of Morocco.
Speaker B:But like, five years ago, you know, it should have been done in 56, at independence, but better late than never.
Speaker B:And it's now being taught in schools and that sort of thing.
Speaker B:But the Berbers still complain that there is less investment in their areas than in the lowland areas, which may be the case, but it's also a case that there's less investment in the rural areas, which happens to be predominantly Berber.
Speaker B:There were tensions before 56 between the Muslims and the Jewish population, although not as much as one would think.
Speaker B:When Israel became its own country, a lot of Jews moved to Israel and in fact, Moroccan Jews were the largest ethnic group in Israel until the fall of the Soviet Union when a whole bunch of Russians showed up and they're still the second largest ethnic group in Israel.
Speaker A:Fascinating stuff.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:I do find this interesting because I love in my books, and I think you do as well, to sort of play with this sense of, I would say, duality.
Speaker A:But it's more than duo, it's sort of multi layered place, you know, so for one person it has this impression, but for another person it has sort of this impression.
Speaker A:And the idea that a place can have lots of different facets, I suppose.
Speaker A:And I think in Tangier that's very obvious.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:That's something that it has in its history and in the modern world.
Speaker B:Well, it's a perfect place to have a detective, you know, trying to figure things out and all the different connections and loyalties.
Speaker B:Because after World War II a lot of people fled there.
Speaker B:So you had a lot of the old Republicanos who were the people who resisted Franco and couldn't go back to Spain, so they ended up in Tangier.
Speaker B:You also had a lot of French Communists who ended up in Tangier, but you also had a lot of former Nazis who ended up in Tangier.
Speaker B:So it got more than a little awkward.
Speaker B:You would have Spanish officials working for Franco, but being part of the international zone, passing by former anarchists and socialists and communists who had fought against Francois.
Speaker A:So it's almost like a don't mention, don't mention what happened previously.
Speaker A:You're just, you know, and you can see that tension.
Speaker A:I can imagine how that could play into a gripping story.
Speaker B:Oh, yeah.
Speaker B:And if you go to the Petite Circle, which is a little plaza down in the medina, there's Cafe Central.
Speaker A:I remember that.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:Yes.
Speaker B:Which was for the sort of more well to do richer Spaniards and French and so they tend to be more right wing.
Speaker B:And then there was a cafe right across the way and upstairs that was more left wing.
Speaker B:And so they would often have shouting matches and throw glasses at each other from across the plateau.
Speaker A:So I love that.
Speaker A:That's fantastic.
Speaker A:That's fantastic.
Speaker A:So let's.
Speaker A:Let's sort of Zoom forward to Tangiers in the modern world, then.
Speaker A:Does it still hold this sense of intrigue?
Speaker A:What's it famous for now?
Speaker B:Well, it's interesting.
Speaker B:What's happened is for the longest time, the north was underfunded.
Speaker B:And then the current king realized that there was some economic opportunity there, and they started reviving the city.
Speaker B:A bit to the east of Tangier, about half an hour's drive, is Tangier Med, which is a giant port and giant industrial port, which is now the largest port in Africa.
Speaker B:By putting that there, they started getting a lot of factories in Morocco.
Speaker B:Automotive factories, aviation parts, that sort of thing.
Speaker B:Their industrial capacity is rising a lot, and that's seeing the outskirts of Tangier grow.
Speaker B:The suburbs keep growing.
Speaker B:Every time I go to Tangier, I see new buildings.
Speaker B:I remember when I first started going, about 12 years ago, you landed at the airport and you gave it a taxi to go into town.
Speaker B:And you would pass for about 10 minutes.
Speaker B:You'd pass through farmer's fields with nothing except the occasional mosque or a little hamlet or isolated farmhouses.
Speaker B:It's almost solid buildings now, and more and more are coming up.
Speaker B:But the center part of Tangier feels just the same.
Speaker B:Nothing's really changed.
Speaker B:They put on a lick of paint and fixed up a few things, but really it's the same.
Speaker B:And that's what I like about it.
Speaker B:And there's still a Spanish community there.
Speaker B:There's still a French community there.
Speaker B:Some of the Jews are beginning to come back and invest.
Speaker B:There's a lot of Gulf Arabs who've built palaces in Marshan, where the rich old Europeans used to be.
Speaker B:So there's still a lot of.
Speaker B:You go into the antique stores there, a lot of these little hole in the wall places, and you find the most random interesting things.
Speaker B:Decorations from some Expat that died 40 years ago.
Speaker B:And, you know, anytime some old guy dies, they clear out the stuff.
Speaker B:And the antiques place, people have a bunch of things and you find.
Speaker B:I found a watch and army booklet from somebody who had been in the AFCA corps with Rommel.
Speaker B:I really wanted to buy this, but the guy knew precisely how much it was worth.
Speaker B:And I couldn't afford it, so I didn't.
Speaker B:I always kind of wondered what happened to it.
Speaker B:But I managed to find some paperwork from the old police station.
Speaker B:God knows how this guy got his hands on it.
Speaker B:But they would make out forms in triplicate in English, French and Spanish.
Speaker B: me arrest records from, like,: Speaker B:So that was kind of cool.
Speaker B:And all sorts of things, old furniture and knickknacks and all the old books and postcards.
Speaker A:And I love that when you find things like that, you're holding something that you know was special to someone and you don't know who that person is or what the story is.
Speaker A:But there's an idea that someone held onto this for a reason.
Speaker A:You know, it was, it was coveted for a reason.
Speaker B:Well, and there was a grand discovery a few years ago.
Speaker B:There was a customs, a French customs official who was in Tangier from the 20s through the 40s.
Speaker B:And he was an amateur photographer.
Speaker B:And he took hundreds and hundreds of photos of Tangier on these old glass plate negatives.
Speaker B:And nobody really knew anything about him.
Speaker B:He was forgotten until some extremely lucky antiques hunter opened a dusty old box in the back of an antique shop and found all these stacks of these amazing negatives with all these incredible photos.
Speaker B:This great documentary evidence of early Tangier.
Speaker B:Bought them for a song and donated them to the American Legation, which is a big museum there.
Speaker B:And they've done a couple of great photo exhibitions there and they come out with a good book about it too.
Speaker B:So.
Speaker A:Oh, fantastic.
Speaker B:That was a find.
Speaker A:Yeah, I'll have to check that out when I, when I go there next time.
Speaker B:I wish I had made that discovery, but it wasn't me.
Speaker A:So, yeah, maybe next time.
Speaker A:Who knows what you'll find next time you're there.
Speaker A:How did you first end up there?
Speaker A:What brought you, what brought you to Tangiers?
Speaker B:Well, it's funny because I've been traveling in the Middle east since I was 20.
Speaker B:I've been all over Iran, Pakistan, a lot of time in Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Turkey.
Speaker B:And we decided to go down to Marrakesh, my wife and I, we actually, we never do package holidays, but my wife was pregnant, so we decided to do the easy route and we did a little package holiday and went to Marrakesh.
Speaker B:And I did not like the people we were traveling with at all.
Speaker B:So that soured it a bit.
Speaker B:And I was thinking of Marrakesh.
Speaker B:I was kind of picturing, oh, well, it's going to be like Damascus or Aleppo before the war.
Speaker B:We get there and it's a bit too touristy for my taste.
Speaker B:There's some interesting.
Speaker B:You get away from the center and things get more interesting.
Speaker B:But it was a bit too touristy.
Speaker B:So I didn't have the best impression of Morocco at first.
Speaker B:And then my wife's like, oh, we should try Tangier.
Speaker B:I'm like, eh, maybe we should go to Egypt again.
Speaker B:I was sort of putting it off.
Speaker B:Putting it off.
Speaker B:But then we went and I immediately fell in love with.
Speaker B:Was fascinating.
Speaker B:And I've been going regularly ever since.
Speaker B:I spend a couple of months a year there.
Speaker B:I'm going to be spending most of the autumn there this year.
Speaker A:Wonderful.
Speaker A:Yeah, I can imagine that.
Speaker A:And it's the sort of place that I think I could spend some time as well.
Speaker A:So as you've appeared on this podcast before, I'll have to change my final question, which is really inconvenient.
Speaker A:Thanks for that.
Speaker B:Oh, sorry.
Speaker A:So normally I would ask what adventure stories inspired you, but we can listen to the first episode for that.
Speaker A:So I'm going to ask you what adventure stories, in your opinion, capture the magic of Tangiers?
Speaker B:Adventure stories?
Speaker B:Well, you know, remarkably, there's very little that's actually, there aren't very many modern novels set in Tangier, which I'm trying to remedy.
Speaker A:Sure.
Speaker B:But there are some good books that are worth reading about Tangier.
Speaker B:I already mentioned Crime Zone, although that's out of print.
Speaker B:But there is a Berber writer, Mohammad Shukri, who wrote a book called For Bread Alone, and he was in Tangier in the 50s when we miss Burroughs and Paul Bowles and Tennessee Williams and all these big people were there and writing their books.
Speaker B:And it was the big glorious time for expats, the big party before the end.
Speaker B:But he had left his little village in the Rif mountains because they were literally starving to death, and his dad had beaten his mother to death.
Speaker B:He ran away from home as a kid, and he ended up dumpster diving and hustling in Tangier in the middle 50s.
Speaker B:It's sort of very much a flip side of that glamorous expat vision.
Speaker B:I'll never forget, he mentions in one passage where he would always search through the garbage in the European quarter rather than the Moroccan quarter, because Europeans threw away food and Moroccans did.
Speaker B:And then he begins to work his way up.
Speaker B:He becomes a waiter, he meets Paul Bowles, and he's got all these stories that he tells because Morocco is a very oral culture, a lot of oral tradition.
Speaker B:In a lot of books, especially the first few generations of Moroccan writers, it's very much they're written like they're being told in a cafe.
Speaker B:It's a very breezy, sort of concise style.
Speaker B:And he began to tell his stories to Paul Bowles, and then Bowles transcribed them and they published them together, and it became a bit of a sensation.
Speaker B:Although he got in trouble in Morocco because he was showing Disrespect to his father and talking about crimes and homosexuality and drugs and drinking and all this other stuff that you're not supposed to talk about that goes on under the table.
Speaker B:But yeah, for Bread Alone by Mohammad Choukri is excellent.
Speaker B:For a couple of non fiction books, I would suggest Dream at the End of the World by Michelle Green.
Speaker B:That's an excellent book.
Speaker B:And then there's another book that just came out a couple of years ago, something called Tangier.
Speaker B:And I'm blanking on the name of the author, but those are good history books that bring you through the past of Tangier from all the way from the early Phoenicians all the way up to modern day.
Speaker A:And we must mention your, your series that's set there.
Speaker A:Tell us a moment about that and where we might find that book and sort of the premise.
Speaker A:What's the premise of your story set there?
Speaker B:Okay, well, the Moroccan mysteries, it starts with Tangier Bank Heist.
Speaker B:It follows my detective.
Speaker B:His name's Shorty McAllister.
Speaker B:He's short, he's like 5 4.
Speaker B:He has many layers himself.
Speaker B:He's an American, but he can't go home because he fought for the Republicans against Franco in the Spanish Civil War.
Speaker B:He's a die hard communist, but he's anti Stalinist, which means that the communists are out to get him too.
Speaker B:I sort of play it for laughs because his girlfriend's like, come on, this never works, you gotta give it up.
Speaker B:But he's got his little faction that he's still doing espionage with and he ends up fighting the Stalinists more than he fights anybody else.
Speaker B:But he also has murders to solve.
Speaker B:So he's stuck in Tangier, can't go home, can't go back to Spain, can't even go into the Spanish zone of the colony without getting arrested.
Speaker B:So he's literally stuck within the city.
Speaker B:But he gets to know the city very well.
Speaker B:And the first book, Tangier Bank Heist, this happens in the first couple of paragraphs.
Speaker B:So I'm not giving anything away, but somebody set up a bank and nobody really checks paperwork back then.
Speaker B:Set up a bank that was supposed to be a branch of a larger bank.
Speaker B:And then one day, the bank's gone, the money's gone, the safe's gone, the furnishings, gone.
Speaker B:The guy just packed up and left overnight, taking everybody's money with him.
Speaker B:So he didn't rob a bank, he stole a bank.
Speaker B:And this was a real case that happened and I fictionalized it a bit, but yeah, wonderful.
Speaker A:That's got me Interested for sure.
Speaker A:That's a great premise.
Speaker B:So every book, and there's four of them there, every book has a murder case or a robbery case and also some espionage going on.
Speaker B:And I got to come up with another one.
Speaker B:I'm working on the next one later in the year.
Speaker B:But you can get if you subscribe to my newsletter, you can get the prequel Trouble in Tangier for free as an ebook.
Speaker A:Fantastic.
Speaker A:And where can people do that?
Speaker A:Where can people find your things online, John?
Speaker B:If you go onto Sean mclaughlin.net S E A N M C L A C H L-A-NET you can get on it there.
Speaker B:And you can find my books on Amazon and various other platforms.
Speaker B:What's interesting is is they are going to be reissued with new covers pretty soon because Vinci Books out of the UK has bought the rights.
Speaker B:So should be interesting.
Speaker B:Trouble in Tangier is going to remain a freebie on my newsletter, but it's going to be interesting to see how they change the covers and work on the marketing.
Speaker B:And there's going to be a new print edition that's getting into brick and mortar stores.
Speaker A:Oh wow.
Speaker B:Audiobooks eventually.
Speaker B:So that should be nice translations.
Speaker A:Do you know any bookshop owners in Tangier?
Speaker A:You can?
Speaker B:Well, yeah, actually there is a bookshop that already carries my books.
Speaker B:Yeah, Interzone Tangier after the International Zone.
Speaker B:It's run by a friend of mine who's half Danish, half Moroccan, which is so typical of Tangier.
Speaker B:And he's a huge history.
Speaker B:He has a little private museum in the Kasbah along with his bookshop and they even have Tangier Bankai's T shirts and tote bags which I think is hilarious.
Speaker A:That's brilliant.
Speaker A:That's brilliant.
Speaker A:Sean, this has been fantastic.
Speaker A:Thank you so much for making the time to talk again.
Speaker B:Well, thanks a lot Luke.
Speaker B:It's been a lot of fun.
Speaker A:This is the Adventure Story podcast.
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