Nightmare Range: The Collected George Sueno and Ernie Bascom Stories - Hardcover

Limon, Martin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1616953322 ISBN 13: 9781616953324

Verlag: Soho Press Inc, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

Twenty years ago, Martin Limón published his first mystery story featuring Sergeant George Sueño, a young Mexican American army detective stationed on the US 8th Army base in South Korea in the early 1970s, the heart of the Cold War. George and his investigating partner, the rowdy and short-fused Sergeant Ernie Bascom, are assigned cases in which the 8th Army has come into conflict with local Korean law enforcement—often incidents in which American soldiers, who are not known for being on their best behavior in their Asian host country, have committed a crime. George Sueño's job is partially to solve crimes, but mostly to cover top brass's backside and make sure the US Army doesn't look bad. Thoughtful, observant George, who is conversant in Korean, constantly faces difficult choices about whether to follow his orders or his conscience.

Nine critically acclaimed novels later, Soho Crime is releasing a collection of Martin Limón's award-winning short stories featuring Sergeants Sueño and Bascom. The stories within have been published over the last twenty years in a variety of magazines, mostly in Alfred Hitchcock, but have never before been available in book form. This beautifully produced limited-edition hardcover volume is sure to attract both critical attention and to appeal to collectors. A must-have for literary mystery readers.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Martin Limón retired from military service after twenty years in the US Army, including ten years in Korea. He is the author of numerous books in the Sueño and Bascom series, including theNew York Times Notable Jade Lady Burning, Slicky Boys, The Iron Sickle,Nightmare Range, and The Ville Rat. He lives near Seattle.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

NIGHTMARE RANGE
 
 
            The mama-san didn’t know how long the body had been out there. Three, maybe four days, she said. Her girls had just conducted their business a few yards farther away from it each day.
            “Where is it now?” I asked.
            “Policeman take go.” She waved her cigarette and smoke filtered through the darkened gaps between her teeth.
            The morgue was in Chorwon-ni, ten miles to the south. Ten miles south of Nightmare Range, and fifteen miles from the Demilitarized Zone that slashes like a surgeon’s knife through the heart of the Korean Peninsula.
            The war had been over for twenty years but still it lingered: a big dumb ghost that refused to go away. No peace treaty had been signed, just a cease-fire, so the fourth and fifth largest armies in the world, armed to their squinting eyeballs, faced each other across the line; fingers on trigger housings, knuckles white, dancing to the sound of no breathing.
            Our police escort, Lieutenant Pak, stood back, arms crossed, glaring at the squatting woman. He was a tall man for a Korean, slim but muscular. His khakis were starched and fit as if he had been born in them. I didn’t ask him why it had taken so long to dispose of the body. The non-person status of a “business girl” follows her into death.
            One by one the doors to the hooches slid open and groggy young women, their faces still puffed with sleep, gaped at us curiously. Some squatted in long underwear, their arms crossed over their knees, while others lay on the floor, beneath the wrinkled patchworks that were their blankets. All of the girls were ugly in some way: ravaged complexions, tufted hair, splotches of discolored skin arrayed around their bodies.
            It seem more like a war for the incurably ill than a whorehouse.
            Maybe it was both.
            Lieutenant Pak asked a series of questions of the old woman and I managed, struggling, to keep up with most of it. There had been a number of American units in the field that day and just before nightfall the old woman had stationed a few of her girls near each encampment.
            As darkness approached the girls called to the young GIs from just outside the concertina wire.
            I’d seen the game before. Sometimes the GI would wade out into the tall grass and lie on the blanket, both he and the deformed girl protected by the enshrouding night. And sometimes the bolder fellows would bring the girls into their tents, risking the wrath of the Sergeant of the Guard; sneaking in and out of the camp with the stealth of a North Korean infiltrator.
            I pulled out a map, showed it to the mama-san, and pointed to the area around Nightmare Range and the village of Mantong-ni. The old woman looked at it carefully and consulted with some of the girls. A few of them were up now and dressed. They chattered for a while, and then came to a conclusion. With my pen I marked the area beneath the old woman’s gnarled fingernail.
            I asked what type of unit it was. Big guns, they decided.
            Lieutenant Pak wiped his hands on the sides of his khaki trousers and took a step toward the gate.
            “Mama-san,” I said. “This girl. What was her name?”
            “Miss Chon,” the old woman said. “Chon Ki-suk.”
            I wrote it down. “Do you have a picture of her?”
            The mama-san barked an order and one of the girls handed me a tattered piece of cardboard folded in half like a small book. A VD card. Chon Ki-suk peered out at me from a small black and white photograph. She had a round face with full cheeks that sagged like a bloated chipmunk. All visible flesh had been pocked by the craters of skin disease. She differed little from her sisters now breathing heavily around me; a timid little girl awaiting death.
            Lieutenant Pak stomped into the mud.
            I stood up and walked with him to the gate. As he stooped to get through the small opening I looked back at the rows of blemished faces sullenly watching our every move. None of them smiled. None of them said goodbye.
            My partner, Ernie Bascom, was in the jeep curled up with a brown-paper-wrapped magazine from somewhere in Scandinavia. He unfolded his six-foot frame as we approached and started up the jeep. Some people said he looked like the perfect soldier: blue eyes behind round-lensed glasses, short-cropped sandy-blond hair, the aquiline nose of the European races. What had blown it for him was Vietnam. Pure horse sold by dirty-faced kids through the wire, women taken on the dusty paths between rice paddies, the terror rocket attacks during innocent hours. His placid exterior hid a soul that had written off the world as a madhouse. Looks were deceiving. Especially in Ernie’s case.
            We dropped Lieutenant Pak off in Mantong-ni. A dozen straw-thatched farm houses huddled around the brick-walled police station as if longing for an extinguishing warmth.
            Ernie popped the clutch, our tires spun, and we lurched forward into the misted distance.
            The roads were still slick but all that was left of the early morning rain were ponderous gray clouds rolling like slow-motion whales through the hills surrounding the long valley. We plunged into a damp tunnel and when we came out the valley widened before us. Dark clouds in the distance glowered at us like fat dragons lowering on their haunches for a nap.
            “Nightmare Range,” Ernie said. “Where generals meet to see how much their boys can take.” He pumped lightly on the brakes and slid around a sharp curve. The water-filled rice paddies on either side of the road strained impatiently to embrace our spinning tires. This valley had been the scene of some of the most horrific battles of the Korean War. Americans, Chinese, Koreans, all had died her and the bones of some of them probably still embraced each other deep beneath the piled mud. I had looked it up in the military section in the library, how many had died here. All I remember is that there was a number followed by a lot of zeros.
            The austere cement-block building of the Firing Range Headquarters was painted...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Soho Press Inc
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2013
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1616953322
• ISBN 13: 9781616953324
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 392
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar