Limekiller!

The late, great Avram Davidson (1923–1993) lived enough for many lifetimes and wrote enough for many lifetimes. During the 1960’s, he lived and wrote in the former colony of British Honduras. In his unpublished travel account Dragons in the Trees, he described it as “a place that you can put vour arms around.”

British Honduras became the Central American nation of Belize, famed for its Mayan ruins, beautiful coral reefs, and friendly ecotourism. Avram's experiences in that timeless tropical land became a series of magical realist tales, recounting the amazing adventures of young Jack Limekiller in the somewhat-more-than- colony of British Hidalgo.

The Limekiller series drew an enthusiastic following, and three of the six stories were nominated for Nebula or World Fantasy Awards. Avram Davidson completed the story cycle shortly before he passed on in 1993. He was planning a Limekiller collection, and the notes and dedications were discovered among his papers. The collection wasn’t published during his lifetime, but the wonderful tales of the Bloodv Man and the Manatee Gal live on in one fantastic volume, thanks to Old Earth Books.

— Grania Davis

INTRODUCTION

by Lucius Shepard

I believe Jack Limekiller may have been the man whom Avram Davidson wanted to be; though it might be more accurate to say that Limekiller was the man Avram hoped that he, in essence, was: a gentleman of sorts with — like Avram — an insatiable curiosity, a quick, old-worldish mind, and a quirky, pungent view of life, but a bit more swashbuckling, armed with less of a temper, and perhaps standing a few inches taller than his authorial original. I think that Avram was happy when he wrote these stories, and I’m quite certain he was happy when he accumulated the experiences that inform them. They are, of course, rife with his offbeat erudition and plavful use of language and voice, but in much of Avram’s work, that playfulness is underscored by a gloomy, embittered cast of mind. In the stories you’re about to read, those qualities are not so much in evidence. There is darkness in them, to be sure, but it’s lent a joyfully exotic gloss that reflects Avram’s love for the tropic in which they are set: British Honduras; called by him, British Hidalgo; now called Belize.

I've had the good fortune to live in that country, where Avram also lived for a time, and although I may not have walked in the exact places where he walked, although I can’t absolutely guarantee that, say, a certain one of his fictional towns is, in fact, the real town of Orange Walk, I’ve gone down similar roads in similar towns, and have seen sights and heard musics that resonate with those he saw and heard. It was a beautiful place, British Honduras, an old colonial state, and vet lacking to a large degree the impotent rancor that typically pervades colonies. Avram says of it, “… more than colony but not yet a country, and often left off maps because its name seems larger than itself.” There was about its people (and what a various people they were, in heritage African, East Indian, Anglo, Spanish, Middle Eastern, Arawak, Caribe, etc., etc.) a sweet spiciness of character and a lucidity of soul that a casual observer might have characterized as “innocence,” but was, in truth, nothing of the sort. Villains of every stamp have abounded in Belize during every era, and the earliest of them soon learned how to exploit those who had crossed the ocean to exploit them. The people of British Honduras were not innocent, then, but were infected by the vivid personality of the land that bred them, stained with its macaw and parrot colors, imbued with a gravitas by the power of the sea that hemmed them in against the savage modernity of Guatemala and sanguinary Mexico. Their violence, too, was of the land, steeped in a piratical tradition (many of the citizens of the country could trace their ancestry back to Kidd and Lafitte and divers lesser men who sailed the waters of the Caribbean beneath a black flag), and though to say other than that violence is violence, no matter its tradition, would be implausibly romantic, I will assert that in the main their violence lacked the mad dispassion of contemporary atrocity. Slaughter for them was a family thing, an occupation to which they were bom.