Buddha's Money

Buddha's Money (1998, Bantam, this edition 2005, Soho Crime), the third installment in the Sueño and Bascom series from Martin Limón, reads like it was written to get a movie deal.  There are exotic and dramatic settings, beautiful and dangerous women, lost treasure, children in peril, chase scenes, and lots and lots of fights.  There are even dangerous beasties and fighting monks, and at times, the whole things has a Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon vibe.  (I know, completely different country - except not entirely, as you'll find if you read this story.)  Extremely fast-paced, with lots of twists at the end, and more history than one might expect, Buddha's Money is entertaining but not deeply thoughtful.  Action - not contemplative investigation - drives this plot.  

That sounds like more of a criticism than it is.  This story has a lot to commend it, but it moves so fast into hard-to-imagine territory that it loses investigative nuance in all the dust-'em-ups.  Our Heroes, George Sueño and Ernie Bascom, are cops with the Eighth Army's Criminal Investigation Division in Seoul, Korea, in the early 1970s.  There's definitely a later-day Vietnam vibe in all of Limón's stories set here.  The red-light district is referred to as the ville, a number of the characters are Vietnam veterans with the psychic scars to prove it, and there is a sense of Americans running the show and not a damn thing any local can do about except make money off of dumb GIs in ways both legal and not.  

As the story opens, Our Heroes are called to intervene in the mugging of a Buddhist nun in the red-light district Itaewon.  They are quickly drawn into the kidnapping of an adopted girl from her hot-mess-of-an-American-vet father and her former-hooker/thief Korean mother (no angels, either one), which leads to the complex story of a missing rare antique that just about everyone in Korea wants a piece of - and are willing to double-cross or kill to get it.  There is a long history to the missing antiquity, and whoever gets it will have the path to untold riches as well as a legitimate claim to the long-defunct Dragon Throne in China.  

So you've got your Buddhist monks, your Mongolians, and some ancestrally-royal Chinese, all looking for this thing, and willing to kill or worse to obtain it.  Sueño and Bascom are enlisted by the parents of the kidnapped girl, but quickly get involved with a mysterious and beautiful antiques dealer, some nasty Mongolians, and a sweet little nun.  S and B drive all over Korea following leads, meeting beautiful ladies, and beating up pretty much anyone who gets in their way.  These two must be ironmen or something, they get their lights punched out almost every day (and give as good as they get), and somehow survive to keep going to the next rendezvous.  They also drive like maniacs, swim underwater for seemingly endless minutes, row boats across the sea, and drink heavily when the opportunity presents itself.   


I'm not going to attempt to say more about the story than this, because it would take too long and I'd probably miss a key piece.  But in the movie, a younger Jimmy Smits would play Sueño and if I can go x-generational, I'd cast Matt Damon as Bascom.

What do I like about these stories?  I like Limón's obvious command of place.  He writes vividly of both the gritty red-light district, where neon shimmers in the ever-present rain, and the green fields and mist-shrouded ricky islands away from the Korean capital.  The only setting that doesn't really come alive is Eighth Army HQ, which remains, perhaps intentionally, bland and even opaque.  Maybe that is because none of the action take place here.  Limón's writing is clean and does not distract either, although I can't quite decide if the story is being told by narrator Sueño in real-time, or after the fact.  And I do take issue with repeated descriptive tropes like bubbling saliva, little nuns, and sparkling neon.  There is also a lot of damp, and puddles, and fat raindrops, but it is monsoon season, so this works.  

I also like Our Heroes.  Ernie is a psychopath:  violence and policing provide the high that heroin did for him in Vietnam.  But that bad-boy aura is magnetic for the ladies:  he attracts them all, from hookers to nuns.  George is the good cop but emotionally vulnerable - army life provides a kind of family for this Cali-Mex orphan.  He is also the more thoughtful of the two, having learned some Korean and made an effort to understand the local history and culture.  And that's what keeps this story from becoming just a series of fights.  

Finally, I appreciate the background.  The only way you can possibly follow this story is because George takes the time to explain the historical background to you.  I feel like I may just possibly have learned something about Korea, even if it is history-lite.  George does this in manageable bites so not overly pedantic, but you have the sense that his partner really could not care less and is just interested in the next creep he can demolish or lady he can conquer with his ginseng gum.  

These guys are smart, and in their way, they care about the local population.  So I wish they didn't have to beat confessions out of their subjects, or the next plot-point out for the reader.  

Jade Lady Burning

I mentioned last time that I'd be getting to this review very soon because I was enjoying the book so much.  Well I did enjoy it, but best laid plans and all that. 

Anyway, here we are starting off 2013 on a high note.  I'm always game for a Soho Crime series, the more geographically distant from Cambridge MA, the better.  Martin Límon's series set in 1970s era Seoul totally delivers. The plot of Jade Lady Burning (Soho Press, 1991, this ed. 2011) first in the series, starts with an inexplicably gruesome murder, and carries us forward (in a military issue Jeep of course) through both the literal alleys of Seoul's red light district, Itaewon, and the figurative alleys of US military justice.  Toss in some obvious but entertaining military-related politics, and the murky expat lifestyle that exists on the fringes of the huge American defense complex in Korea, and you've got a satisfying stew of a story.

Our heroes are George Sueño and Ernie Bascom, two CID detectives with the 8th Army in Seoul who are not afraid to push a case beyond their orders, or to drink themselves silly on any given night.  We hear this story from Sueño's perspective mostly, and he's the sensitive one in the pair - tricky independent upbringing, curious about Korean culture, taking the time to actually speak to Korean people in Korean, highly aware of local custom.  Bascom is less deeply drawn, but still feels like a UXB.  Perhaps the next book in the series will give us more on his back story.

The plot trajectory here is pretty straightforward:  prostitute is found murdered most fouly and probably by a Yank, Sueño and Bascom are dispatched to figure it out.  The boyfriend is taken into custody, but Our Heroes are pretty sure he didn't do it so they keep poking around and uncover some very nasty relationships.  They are aided in this by an "old" prostitute named Kimiko (she's probably all of 28 or something) who commands both ridicule and respect from the other denizens of Itaewon. There's also a thread where Sueño and Bascom are taken off the murder, and told to follow around some folks who are potentially fiddling the procurement system.  Can't say much more without giving critical bits away, but there are not any outrageously unbelievable turns here - just a solid and disciplined dispersal of creeps and losers and generally bad guys. 

One highlight of Jade Lady Burning is Itaewon itself.  Límon's command of his location is completely compelling, from the opening scene on the Blue Line night train to Seoul, to a drive up into the hills toward the DMZ. Itaewon, the red light district with the Japanese name, is a place where you can get a beer at 10 in the morning, and some good gossip from the (more than likely) female barkeep.  Of course the quail is the reason that most GIs go there.  But it's not a desperate or bleak place.  Límon's Itaewon has a brightness to it, a kind of forward movement that speaks of business getting done with a a pat on the ass and a cheerful leer.
"GIs bounced up the main road of Itaewon, hands in their pockets, breath and laughter billowing from their mouths, ignoring the slippery ice as they headed for the neon.
  The village was a huge web of brightness, shrouded now in snow.  Nightclubs lined the main road and alleys branched off, up steep stone steps, to smaller, cozier clubs.  Old women lurked in the darkness ready to lead any willing GI to a brothel if he didn't have the time or the temperament for the dancing and the booze and the laughter."  (35)
One might say it's got seoul.

Another strong area includes the terrific characters peopling this Itaewon.  Límon creates a vast cast of small parts, all deftly characterized in a paragraph or two.  In Itaewon there is the fading but tough Kimiko, the cheerful Ginger who owns the American Club, Milt Gorman whose Roundup club features country and western music (of course), The Nurse, and who can forget the stately Miss Lim from Hawaii?  Sure, they're more or less in the business of selling booze and flesh, but you know, everyone knows it, and the are fair in their dealings with everyone.  On base, the characters are not as charming, although the many levels of Army bureaucracy are  magnificently rendered, something that could only be done by a military insider (cover notes indicate a ten-year tour in Korea within a 20 year Army career).  A couple of notable exceptions are Chief Winkle, who runs a motor pool and is the biggest bookie on base, and the fabulously mysterious Miss Kim, who clerks in the Admin Section of the CID and only really responds to Ernie Bascom's silent treatment and gifts of gum.  The rest are either drunks or just a little creepy.  Watch out in particular for the chaplain's office.

It's not that Límon is a spectacular writer.  His writing is good enough so that you don't notice it.  It's that he's got a great touch of combining atmosphere and character observation. 
  "The Lower Four Club was the hub for certain of the American expatriates; electronics technicians making extra pay for the 'hardship tour,' insurance salesmen thriving in a sea of uninsured young bachelors, and the occasional representative for a distributorship zeroing in on the PX market. 
  Many of them were veterans, military retirees living on their pension checks, former NCOs who'd finished their twenty years and now got a check every month for fifty percent of their former pay.  Most of them held part-time, horse-shit jobs on the compound.  Almost to a man, the retirees had a Korean wife or mistress who they lived with down in the village.  A lot of them had kids.  Often it was their second set; the first kids, by an American wife, were grown and on their own.
  They were a strange lot.  A few of them had lived through the Korean War and couldn't get away from it.  Most of them didn't really understand why they lived in Korea.  They only understood somehow that they would never go home."  (161-162)

Depressing and compelling at the same time, great, huh?  There are several more books in this series, and I look forward to reading them.