Dipping Into Korean History

The joy Brigade [by] Martin Limón

[New York] ; Soho Press [2012]

978-1-61695-148-1; $25.00

Ordinarily we see Sgt. George Sueño patrolling the community of Itaewon, right outside the gates of the Eighth U.S. Army compound in Seoul, South Korea, with his partner, Ernie Bascomb.  But this time it’s different – Sueño is on his own, on a mission of extreme importance to both the South Korean Government and the U.S. Army.  Kim Il-Sung has vowed to reunite North and South Korea before he hands control of the Government over to his son. This means the forces of North Korea will cross the DMZ and overpower the American-allied South Korean Government.  Sueño’s mission is to prevent this by sneaking into North Korea to obtain an ancient map which details the network of secret tunnels that run underneath the DMZ.  This means Sueño will eventually meet his former lover, Doctor Yong In-ja, the keeper of the map.

Sueño enters the northern port of Nampo as a Rumanian member of the crew of an Albanian freighter.  As they are welcomed into the harbor, one of the sailors is taken aside, abused in front of the others, and then taken away “to be dealt with,” while the others are welcomes into the People’s Hall of International Friendship as guests of the Great Leader, Kim Il-Sung.  They receive food and “entertainment.”

Sueño bribes an employee to get him out of the Hall, so that he can go to the nearby People’s Grain Warehouse to meet his contact, Hero Kang.  When he gets there, he finds a message that says “run,” so he does, finally finding himself hanging off a cliff above the river, with a North Korean policeman urinating on him!  When he gets back to terra firma, it is not safe, for he is captured by the Commander who had the sailor from the ship abused.  But the scene is interrupted by a big man who begins to upbraid the Commander for taking this prisoner while out of his jurisdiction.  The man is quite flamboyant, to Sueño’s amazement, and the Commander gives in, marching his troop away, leaving Sueño with his savior – Hero Kang. Kang briefs him and gives him a Warsaw Pact uniform to wear.  The next day they board a train, which takes them to Pyongyang. There are several close calls before Sueño meets Doc Yong.  Fortunately, Sueño has kept the fact that he can speak Korean under wraps, but he can still negotiate through things with life-saving awareness.

Sueño learns more about his task, which is not to be an easy one.  He must win a taekwondo tournament, so he gets some practice time in.  But while he has a black belt, he is not as in-shape as he should be.  He beats all of the foreigners except one, and is badly trounced by the North Korean Army favorite.  He does not get chosen to take the course that will easily take him past some of the major hurdles in the rest of his journey.  Instead, he has to fight hard to get past them, involving others, including Doc Yong and their son, whom Sueño had never met until then, Hero Kang and his daughter, and another man known as Moon Chaser.  There are plenty of close calls, with them getting captured and tortured, and then escaping, only to be captured again.  The journey is long and arduous, as they seek the tunnels that will take them south, where the Sergeant will hopefully be able to convince the U.S. Army to help the Manchurian Battalion, the last hangers-on of the Korean revolution, who hope to reunite their country, not under the Great Leader, but under the forces of historic righteousness.

Is the Sergeant strong enough to do this?  Will the Army listen?  What will the South Koreans do?  Will Doc Yong be captured and imprisoned for her crimes when last in the south?  What will become of the little boy who is Sueño’s legacy?

Many times during the journey, Sueño crosses paths with a beautiful woman named Senior Captain Rhee Mi-Sook of the North Korean secret police and a so-called “fixer” when things go wrong.  The last time he sees her, she is wearing a Major’s uniform in the South Korean Army.  Who is this mysterious woman, really?  Why does he keep seeing her?

This is a somewhat different book than Limón normally writes – the violence is not so general, and there’s more politics and history, but it is just as compelling as his other books.  Highly recommended. ~lss-r

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My book.





One Day at a Time

Valley of Ashes by Cornelia Read

New York ; Grand Central Publishing [2012]

978-0-446-51136-0 ; $24.99

Madeline Dare has traded New York's gritty streets for the tree-lined ‘burbs of Boulder, Colorado when her husband Dean lands a promising job.  Now a full-time homemaker and mother to beautiful toddler twin girls, Madeline has achieved everything she thought she always wanted, but with her husband constantly on the road, she's fighting a losing battle against the Betty Friedan riptide of suburban/maternal exhaustion, angst, and sheer loneli-ness. A new freelance newspaper gig writing restaurant reviews helps her to get her mojo back, but Boulder isn't nearly as tranquil as it seems:  there's a serial arsonist at large in the city.  With the support of Jon McNally, her contact at the paper, and his friend, a fire inspector named Mimi Neff, Madeline joins in the case, while reporting on it.

None of these writing gigs is mentioned to Dean, since the state of their marriage is extremely precarious a structure. This doesn’t stop Dare from writing both her restaurant reviews and covering the increasing the number of fires popping up around Boulder.  As she closes in on the culprit, the fires turn deadly -- and the stakes become tragically personal. She'll need every ounce of strength and courage she has to keep the flames from reaching her own doorstep, threatening all she holds most dear.

Madeline’s desire to ferret out the truth is an instinct not easily stamped down, but it can be swamped by the sheer overwhelming time commitment of juggling nearly single-handedly the responsibility of caring for twins in a town where she knows almost no one. While she was ecstatically happy at first, as exhaustion wears her down, she becomes dissatisfied. Her world has shrunk to an endless round of taking care of two demanding babies, a house that is never clean, and a husband who, when he is home, is more and more critical of her.

Getting to know people, however, doesn’t seem to be Dean’s problem; especially people of the female persuasion. Whether he’s out of town on a business trip or in the office working long hours, he’s drifting away. The only friend who keeps husband and wife together is Cary, who works at Dean’s office.  After his death in one of the fires, Madeline discovers just how far Dean had strayed, and she finds herself in a fight, both for her life and the preservation of her family.

The mystery concerning the arsonist is an intriguing one, but this book is about so much more than arson. It's about motherhood and marriage, it's about friendship and tragedy and grief. It's about standing up for yourself and those you love. There are many things in life that can turn to ash within the blink of an eye.  Madeline is a wonderful creation, strong yet vulnerable; smart, but sometimes completely clueless; opinionated, interesting and observant. Her story involves both love and the heartbreak of betrayal. She couldn’t be more real.

As Madeline struggles with all the issues of her life, the reader gets very emotionally involved. This sassy-mouthed woman with a big, big heart can make you cheer, laugh, and cry within the space of a very few sentences.  This is beautifully-written, emotional, soul-searing and laugh-out-loud funny fiction at its very best.

What makes Read’s crime novels unique and difficult to pigeonhole, is the fact that the action doesn’t stop—and she doesn’t stop writing—when the murder is solved and the criminals are apprehended. Nor is everything tied up in tidy packages after the climax. That’s not how real life works, nor is it how satisfying fiction is supposed to work. And it’s definitely not how life has ever worked for Dare, whose whole world takes such a blow in this book that it’s hard to fathom how she’ll get up again. But, as readers of the series know from experience, she most certainly will, while eloquently telling off anyone who gets in her way! This is a funny and sad novel about a woman trying to establish an identity for herself and justice for everyone else.  I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that Cornelia Read's voice is one of the most original, vivid and memorable in all of contemporary crime fiction. Highly recommended. ~ lss-r

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Library Book.

 

The First Detective Novel --- Ever!



The Notting Hill Mystery [by] Charles Warren Adams

[London; The British Library, 2012]

978-0-7123-5859-0 [$15.00]

This smallish tome represents the very first full-length detective novel ever published, according to the book’s introduction, bridging the gap between Poe’s short stories [“The Murders in the Rue Morgue” was published in 1841.] and the prodigious The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins [1868].  This title was first published in 8 parts in Once a Week magazine beginning on November 29, 1862.  It was later published as a book in 1865 by Saunders, Otley & Co. of London, and it is the pages of that book which are recreated here by the British Library, but including the illustrations by George du Maurier [the grandfather of Daphne], which appeared in the magazine version.

The original was published under the name of Charles Felix. Felix only wrote a couple of other books, which are thoroughly unremarkable – one now exists in only 4 copies.  But it took some real detective work to figure out who Felix was, since there was nothing in the archives of the publisher – no correspondence between author and publisher exists.  The bottom line is that there didn’t need to be any.  Charles Felix is actually Charles Warren Adams, the publisher, who had, of course, no reason to write to himself!

Apparently, Adams had both legal training and a religious bent, and these show up in this story.  His book is profoundly moral:  it asks not only why and how evil exists, but also what is to be done about it.  The author’s law school training underlies the novel’s evidentiary process, which so wowed Julian Symons back in 1972, when he wrote Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel, one of the best-known critical works in the field of crime fiction. He admitted that the book “quite bowled me over.”

The plot is fairly straight-forward. The wife of Baron R** dies after sleep-walking down the stairs into her husband’s home laboratory and drinking a bottle of acid. It looks like a tragic accident, until a private investigator, Ralph Henderson, notices that the Baron took out five life insurance policies on Madame R**, worth a staggering £25,000! Hired by an insurance company, Henderson enters into a maze of intrigue that is perfectly Victorian, with a diabolical mesmerist, kidnapping by gypsies, a mysterious carnival with odd, secretive characters, slow poisonings, and a rich uncle’s will. Oh, and murder – actually, three murders.

Source documents compiled by insurance investigator Ralph Henderson are used to build a case against Baron R**. Although the baron's guilt is clear to the reader even from the outset, how he did it remains a mystery. Finally this is revealed, but how to catch him becomes the final challenge, for he seems to have committed the perfect crime.

The evidence against the Baron is presented as Henderson’s own findings — diary entries; family letters; depositions of servant girls, other roomers in the house, police officers, etc.; a chemical analyst’s report;  and a crime scene map.  These were such innovations at the time, and wouldn’t gain currency again until the 1920s.

It’s quite a joy to read this book, which is so modern, and yet so of its own time as well.  While the culprit is known at the outset, the thoroughness and tenacity of the investigator, and the materials he amasses, are a joy to see.  Highly recommended. ~ lss-r

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Library book.



Something Like Justice, With a Baritone Hum

Ranchero [by] Rick Gavin

New York; Minotaur [2011]

978-1-250-00658-5; $14.99

This book is billed as “a crime novel,” but it’s certainly one with a difference.  It’s really more of a slice-of-life around a crime.  Yes, a crime has been committed, but the question is not a whodunit, but more like a “will justice be served” kind of thing. It is a testosterone-filled road trip-type of romp, involving a number of good ol’ boys from the Mississippi Delta.

Nick Reid, former-cop-turned-repo-man, is trying to put the bite on Percy Dwayne Dubois [that’s Dew-boys] for the 42-inch flat-screen TV he’s missed 3 payments on.  But Percy Dwayne cold cocks him with a fireplace shovel and helps himself to Nick’s wallet, cell phone, and the 1969 Calypso Coral Ford Ranchero he’s driving.  Now the car rightfully belongs to Pearl Jarvis, Nick’s landlady, whose husband Gil drove it with great pride and joy until he croaked. Nick’s borrowed it since his wheels were in the shop.  Now he fervently promises to bring it back to Pearl in mint condition.

He enlists the help of his hulking African-American colleague, Desmond, who is driving his ex-wife’s Geo Metro.  They slip by their enraged Lebanese boss K-Lo and head off with a sort-of-plan:  to head to Yazoo City, where Luther Dubois – perhaps a relative of Percy Dwayne’s – reputedly lives.    Meanwhile, Percy Dwayne calls Nick, using his own cell phone, and offers to ransom the Ranchero.  This proves fruitless, since a violent meth cooker named Guy meets up with Percy Dwayne, and takes the Ranchero, along with Percy Dwayne’s wife Sissy and their son, the diapered PD, Jr.

The whole thing reads like the plot of a ‘70’s Southern exploitation flick starring a young Burt Reynolds. Most of the characters are an iffy bunch, but, generally, their hearts are in the right place.  Aficionados of Carl Hiaasen or Elmore Leonard, who don’t mind a little b.o. and sleaze and potty humor, will enjoy this, for Gavin, like them, grounds his story in his colorful, weird, yet believable characters, their ways of thinking and speaking, and a comparison of Sonics from town to town.  It’s a trip through the backwoods South , combusting its way towards something like justice, to the music of that “glorious baritone hum” on a stolen 1969 Calypso Coral Ford Ranchero. Recommended. ~ lss-r

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Library book.