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American, 1947-

The George Sueño novels of Martin Limón

Title	Date originally published	eBook available?	In print?
Jade Lady Burning	1992	Yes	Yes
Slicky Boys	1997	No	Yes
Buddha's Money	1998	No	Yes
The Door to Bitterness	2005	Yes	Yes
The Wandering Ghost	2007	Yes	Yes
G. I. Bones	2009	Yes	Yes

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Reviews of Martin Limón novels

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Review of The Door to Bitterness

Martin Limon may or may not be a great writer, but his novel The Door to Bitterness is plenty engaging. It is well plotted, but its strength lies in its great attention to the detail of daily life.

This particular daily life happens to be that of an American Army cop in Korea and, more importantly, the lives of many Koreans with whom he comes in contact. For some reason (his own experience, I suppose), he sets the novel (the whole series?) during the early 1970s, the time I was myself in Asia as a member of the US forces.

What amazed me, although upon reflection I can't understand why my great surprise, South Korea is as corrupt as the rest of Asia. It seems as if all our detective heroes have at least one buddy, usually a cop in the native police force, but the protagonist of this novel has only a buddy in his own Army unit. The Korean cops are antagonistic, and typically "owned" by the strong man of the local district.

The plot theme is effectively taken from Korean culture, and reflects Limon's evident immersion in the subject. There is a great deal of the same kind of activity we see in several of the Thai detective novels, namely, the rather seedy prostitution business that is either legal or tolerated in both cultures. However, the big difference is that Korea in an occupied country, and Thailand no longer has American troops stationed there. The hatred of Americans commonly expressed in Limon's book doesn't appear to have a counterpart in Thai society, at least as reflected in the mystery novels in our collection.

I'll be interested to discover, if I ever do, whether Limon writes of the 1970s because he doesn't want to deal with changes in Korea society since that time. In other words, he might well have ended his own involvement in that society around 1980, and doesn't feel comfortable representing more modern manifestations of Korean culture. Or it might be that he knows quite well that things have changed, and prefers to write of the life he saw much earlier.

I learned lots of things about South Korea from reading this novel. At one point, he notes that South Korea is a police state. Although he doesn't write "...as is its northern neighbor," we can make that connection. Korean migration to the United States has been immense, and I see no hint of that in Limon's novel. There's got to be a reason, but if so, this has no part in Limon's exciting, revealing story.

I see that his series is continuing (and I've ordered the latest), so the holes in our picture of Asia are gradually filling in...

--Michael Broschat, March 2009

Review of Martin Limon's The Wandering Ghost

When I told a co-worker who had been a soldier in Korea that I've been reading Limon's novels about CID agents in Korea, he wondered whether the novels ever touched upon a big blackmarket scandal he knew of that took place during the 1970s. Probably, because that's a big part of this novel. Whether the details of the true case share anything with this fictional account, others will have to research.

The key element of the story has to do with yet another aspect of US military life—women in the military. Set in the 1970s, Limon gets to show us that early period of female integration. My own military experience was just before women began appearing in other than female-only units that had existed since WWII. Limon's experience evidently covered that early period before it became the commonplace that it is now.

There is much about how life in the military is actually lived, and those aspects of military life that are, shall we say, not covered in the rule book and that are carried out, perhaps, in opposition to the rule book are given their due. Anyone who has served in any military has experienced these things. But once again, George and Ernie make sense of it, or at least show us how to deal with the problems.

And along the way we see lots and lots of real South Korean life, although this is perhaps intentionally out of date. It is certainly best for an author not to try to fake an historical period with which he's not well versed.

George and Ernie get into lots and lots and lots of trouble, and we're right in there with them. Once again, it really is the wonderful detail we see alongside the well-plotted and exciting perils for these two young men that makes reading Limon's novels so satisfying. We're not just being entertained, we're being educated. And pretty soon, like it or not, we're going to know everything there is to know about Asia. Right.

--Michael Broschat, April 2009

Review of G.I. Bones

I suppose that technically speaking Martin Limon gets away with a couple writing shenanigans in G.I. Bones, his latest thriller involving Sueno and Bascom. Near the end, a whole lot of things fall rather neatly into place, and there doesn't even seem to be anyone pushing from behind the curtain. But we had a good time getting to that point, and our good buddy George Sueno even falls in love.

Once again, we see a lot of Korea in the 1970s, although it is a fairly one-sided picture strongly laced with GI behavior and the behavior of Koreans using that GI behavior to make a living (and for some, a bit more). As I finished the novel, I thought of a lovely Korean college student who spoke perfect English and whom I met because she'd married a classmate during his Peace Corps time. They would have met and married during the time this novel takes place (before 1975). No one like that appears in Limon's books.

But I also saw and lived the GI life, even if not in Korea, and everything he has to tell us rings true. One vision rescues some of Limon's uglier moments (and similar ones from my memory). I saw an interview with a high ranking Mormon church official, and the interviewer was asking him, more or less, do you really think you're going to convert that many Koreans, Fijians, Sri Lankans, whatever, by sending out your young missionaries? The official smiled, and said that while converts would be wonderful, one must never underestimate the effect of missionary work on the missionary.

The American military presence outside our borders can be pretty difficult to justify much of the time. But when you see—as I do nearly every day—that civilian employees of the US government who spent time in occupied Germany keep trying to go back, you can see that whatever the bad effects of that long-time presence overseas, there have been some good consequences, especially for a nation infamous for its insularity.

This book continues a series that marvelously embodies the spirit of a foreign-set mystery thriller. Is it great literature? Who knows. But it is certainly a tale told by a great story teller, very sympathetic to the foreign environment but not foolish about it. Most of all, it involves us in a story about some people we care about. We want them to do good, to be safe, and to be around for the next story.

--Michael Broschat, Nov 2009

Review of Jade Lady Burning

Jade Lady Burning was the first novel by Martin Limón. If the experience of other writers is any measure, he probably felt he had a lot to say. Just how much the chief character is modeled after Limón, only he can know, but what he had to say is probably done more through events in the story and, of course, descriptions of the many characters.

Our two heroes are ordered to investigate the death of a Korean woman known to have engaged in prostitution. She had been cruelly killed, and the Koreans were anxious to blame GIs. Our boys do investigate, uncover all sorts of interesting things, and then—well, I'll leave the conclusion to your own reading.

It's all here, really. The Korea that Limón saw while serving in the Army needed to be put down on paper, and so he did. The book was published in 1992, and it's really good. Having read most of the series before getting to this first one, I was interested to see how George and Ernie started out. Mostly, it is easy to see the later George and Ernie in the earliest version. But there is a seriousness that I don't think characterizes the later books, and the ending suggests that Limón did not plan for the two boys to continue their careers as partners in Army CID criminal investigations.

Although the subsequent books are wonderful reads (and I'm glad I'd discovered the series), this first book has it all. This is what an intelligent observer saw in Korea during the 1970s.

It would be different now. I talked just this afternoon with a former Army officer who had been stationed more or less where the boys worked, and he said it is as modern as anywhere else in the modern sophisticated world we live in. And the Korean woman who feeds me lunch said that I wouldn't be able to afford to rent an apartment in the area where our heroes chased bad guys, discovered bodies, and enjoyed the services of the Korean "business girls." That's probably why Limón keeps his stories in that 30-year-old past. But the truths he saw then and recounts now are no less true for their having served also at this earlier time. They'll be with us in the next generation, too.

--Michael Broschat, Nov 2009

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