National Crime Writing Month

On Location with Robert Landori

A Good Memory is a Shortcut to Great Locations
I wrote my very first book on a dare, for a girl-friend whom I had indelicately criticised for reading trash. She had reposted with: “All right smart aleck, if you’re so intelligent why don’t you write me a book that’s better?

Within a year she was reading my first novel.

I hurried to finish the book because I had bet her a dinner that I could perform within twelve months. So I had to look for short-cuts and there was no time for researching “locations”. To solve this problem I delved into my memory banks and chose the venues I knew intimately: Montreal, the Laurentian Mountains, the hospital in which I had worked to earn money as an undergraduate at McGill, the countryside around the English public school I had attended, Georgetown near Washington etc…

I am a lucky man. My work has allowed me to travel far and wide, and to visit enough locations to “situate” at least ten novels.



Galindo’s Turn
(my first novel)
Before he became Robert Lonsdale his name was Bernard Lands.

He lived with his wife, Andrea, in a remote area in the Laurentian Mountains near Montreal. (Picture 1). Islamic terrorists, tipped off by a mole inside the CIA as to his real identity, attempted to assassinate him while he was cross-country skiing, but only managed to wound him.

He was treated at the Royal Victoria Hospital (Picture 2) where the assassins struck again, missed once more, but killed his wife.

Land fled to the Washington area and entered the CIA’s Employee Protection Program where they gave him a new name, a new face and a new identity. He became Robert Lonsdale an obscure analyst with the US Environmental Agency. He bought himself a condo in Georgetown (Picture 3) and started to work for the Agency’s super secret Counter-Terrorism and Counter Narcotics Division (Picture 5).


It took him a year to identify the mole who had betrayed him and whom he then hunted down and neutralized at Frensham Ponds in Surrey, England (Picture 4).

Robert Landori went to school in England, France, Switzerland and Hungary; of necessity he learned eight languages in the process. He completed his education at McGill University in Montreal, became a Chartered Accountant then traveled for over twenty years in the Caribbean and South America as an exporter‑importer, business consultant and trustee in bankruptcy.

Charged with espionage in Cuba, he spent sixty-six days in solitary confinement, and was eventually ‘let go’ without explanation. His experiences in prison prompted him to write his fifth book, Havana Harvest (a story about a Cuban general, condemned to death by the Castro regime).

His first book, GALINDO’S TURN, was the result of a challenge, twenty-five years ago, by a girlfriend to “write an intelligent book within a year”.

Shh... "The Agency’s super secret Counter-Terrorism and Counter Narcotics Division"

TRANSLATION OF OLGA CONNOR’S REVIEW OF HAVANA HARVEST THAT APPEARED IN THE NUEVO HERALD DE MIAMI ON OCTOBER 14, 2010

Also dealing with a very Cuban theme, the Canadian novelist, Robert Landori, recently launched his latest novel, Havana Harvest, at a reading at Books & Books. The novel, a tour de force of international intrigue, is based on one of the most intricate episodes of Cuban history: the trial and execution of Arnaldo Ochoa in 1989. The author evokes the novel’s historical background – the landing of the Gramma and the assault of the Moncada Barracks, the presence of the young Ochoa among the revolutionaries, his elevation into the group of Camilo Cienfuegos’s intimates – and posterior events thereto that allowed Fidel Castro to seize power. He then reveals what inspired him to write the book: his friendship with “Dania” about whom he also comments in his blog.

“I would never have written Havana Harvest had I not met Dania,” he said. “It was she who introduced me to the important officials of the Cuban revolutionary government and it was she who then told me about what had befallen General Ochoa.” According to Landori, Dania and her husband had been tasked by Fidel with creating a clandestine revolutionary network in Havana, but Fulgencio Batista’s secret police captured them a few days before Batista fled the country.
“Dania” was a loyal revolutionary in the Sierra Maestra, said the novelist, with whom he remained in contact even after she had fled to the US.

Was Ochoa guilty of drug trafficking or was he made to be the scapegoat once the world found out that the Cubans were in bed with the Medellin Cartel? The novel is Landori’s answer to the question through a series of riveting and breathtaking fictional scenes in Havana, Angola, Budapest, Washington, Montreal, Panama and the Cayman Islands in which drug-money laundering and ivory smuggling take place. The characters are modeled on existing Cuban leaders and the premise is that the incident involved the CIA, implying thereby that the operation was a plot against Castro. In the end a CIA operative called Robert Lonsdale comes to the rescue of the good guys – a not-too-subtly-veiled reference to the author?

Hungarian-born Robert Landori says he is a public accountant, but he has been involved in mysterious incidents, such as his detention in a Cuban prison for over two months during the sixties, accused of spying for the CIA. Blessed with a great sense of humour that is reflected in his writing he succeeds in convincing the reader that everything happened just the way he tells it in his book.