with Andrew Lanh
We are delighted to welcome author Andrew Lanh to Omnimystery News.
Andrew Lanh is a pen name used by Ed Ifkovic, and his first novel written using it is also the first in a series, Caught Dead (Poisoned Pen Press; November 2014 hardcover, trade paperback, and ebook formats) introducing private investigator Rick Van Lam.
We asked Andrew to tell us more about the character, and he titles his guest post for us today, "The Story Behind the Mystery".
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Photo provided courtesy of
Andrew Lanh (Ed Ifkovic)
The hit musical Miss Saigon introduced audiences to one of the nagging horrors of the Vietnamese War: those children born to Vietnamese women and fathered by American soldiers. These mixed-blood children, scorned by the Vietnamese themselves, came to be called bui doi, the children of the dust. My mystery Caught Dead deals with just such a young Amerasian — son of a Vietnamese mother, and an unknown American white father — who is now a Private Investigator working in Farmington, Connecticut.
Rick Van Lam, late-thirties, is an Americanized Amerasian, a former cop, a Columbia University graduate, whose roots in a different culture often define his American life. Caught in the middle of cultures, he is a child of the dust. A part-time teacher of Criminal Justice at a college in Farmington, he does routine fraud investigations for Hartford insurance companies.
Rick is surrounded by friends like a landlady who used to be a Rockette and an old detective who acts as his mentor. His sidekick is a pure-blood Vietnamese young man who helps Rick rediscover his Vietnamese roots but who also serves as a companion for his investigations. I have worked to develop the growing Vietnamese community of Connecticut into the fabric of the book, as well as Rick's own memory of his Buddhist childhood. These characters — his close family — support but also hinder him as he investigates what, indeed, turns out to be a bizarre murder.
In Caught Dead two beautiful Vietnamese twins, distant cousins to the mother of Rick's sidekick Hank, have remained close despite two very different marriages. The younger married a Vietnamese grocer and lives a modest, quiet life. The older married a rich white man and lives in an upper-crust world far removed from Hartford's Little Saigon where both women grew up. During a hot summer, with Hank on break from the Connecticut State Police Academy, the younger sister is found murdered in a grimy, gang-invested neighborhood. Why was she even there? "She wouldn't ever be caught dead there," her sister tells Rick.
Rick is asked to look into the case, but there seems to be no solution. Then, to everyone's horror, the rich sister is found murdered on the same street corner in the same neighborhood. Two sisters dead, and Rick and Hank are stumped. As the investigation continues, ably assisted by Rick's ex-wife Liz who finds herself playing a pivotal role in the case, the two men find themselves deeply involved in a mysterious world of hidden ethnic tension and sinister criminal activity — and all of it somehow tied to seemingly disparate worlds: the carefully guarded exclusive white suburbs and the impoverished nearby ghetto.
In order to solve the murder of the two beautiful sisters — and to bring closure to the grieving Vietnamese families, including Hank's — Rick has to search in his own buried Vietnamese past for the perspective that will help him find a murderer.
Rick talks about himself in this excerpt from the book …
MY NAME IS RICK VAN LAM. MY REAL FIRST NAME IS VIET. MOST Americans can't pronounce the distinct monosyllabic Vietnamese inflections. No matter. In Vietnam I was Lam Van Viet. In America, resting in a foster home in the Bronx for a month, I was Viet Van Lam, and then I allowed myself to become Rick Van Lam at the insistence of Father He from Catholic Charities, my English-speaking conduit to my new American culture. I didn't mind — I was thirteen and I wanted to become American.
I'm that curious breed produced by the Vietnamese Conflict — I'm Amerasian, one of the so-called children of the dust, the dirty secret, the bui doi. I have no idea who my mother was, except that she was a Vietnamese woman who, in the final days of the war, carried a child by a white American soldier, also nameless and now forgotten. Left at an orphanage when I was around five, I have trouble remembering my mother, but sometimes I recall her holding me tight. I remember her story of the baby boy attacking the clay demon. That's an important story I hold in my heart. So I grew up, hated by most Vietnamese — "Your mother was a whore, your father a pig" — as I struggled through childhood in a Catholic orphanage. I was hated by white people, too. Dust boys, that's what they call us. But it also explains why I have those violet-blue eyes encased in sleepy slanted sockets, my tall lanky body, and the bone structure of an All-American soldier, probably some milk-fed boy from Des Moines or — I don't know, maybe Pensicola. God knows. I never will.
One document I own suggests that my real last name is indeed Lam, which, like Nguyen, is as commonplace as Smith or Jones or Garcia in America. And supposedly the Van and the Viet are real. But there's no mother to guide me, as they say. And for a long time in America — sometimes even now — I looked at older white men and thought, Hey, is that you, Daddy? What did you do in the war?
Sometimes I find myself still doing that.
I was a bright child, alert, the darling of the severe, unyielding nuns, a cute little bugger who played every manipulative game because I wanted to survive. I knew the odds were stacked against me. I'd sneak out of the home at night, maneuvering my way through cluttered, hostile Saigon streets, hiding in the shadows of walls plastered with posters of benevolent Uncle Ho, the header who saved us from America. Those days I was always hungry. Soon I wormed my way into America. Being half-white was a liability in the best of worlds, but it also afforded me guilt-laced entry into the country of my father. So at thirteen I was sponsored to America by the good Catholics, who found me a permanent home in Port Elizabeth, New Jersey, where I excelled in school — of course — making my adopted parents, Jesse and Connie Greeley, inordinately proud, but not currying much favor with the less-bright natural siblings, Judith and Harry, who still don't speak to me to this day. Jesse Greeley was a lawyer, and that was to be my career. Full National Merit Scholar to Columbia College, Phi Beta Kappa, American success story, until my senior year when bouts of depression kept me in bed.
In the words of my adopted father: "What the hell's your problem all of a sudden?" I'd been a model teenager.
I never knew how to answer him. I still don't, to this day. I see my parents whenever I can, though they still look at me with the same pitying expression they wore when I stepped out of Brother He's limping station wagon onto their suburban lawn. They never lost that expression. There I was, poor boy, frightened, trembling, in a Salvation Army sweater, in baggy jeans with frayed cuffs, carrying a battered GI Joe toy I got at a Goodwill toy bin. Half-eaten Oreos in a Catholic Charities tote bag. Thirteen years old, with a war toy. Years later, with B.A. from Columbia College in hand, they hugged me like the orphan I was — barefoot boy with cheek.
How was I to tell these wonderful people, my deliverers into a safe America, that I would wake in the night in a cold sweat, hungry for something besides law and money, hungry instead for quiet and order. I wanted something to stop the shaking, the nighttime sweats. Sometimes I still get them. I wake up feeling lost and homeless. I'm drifting in space, no rock to cling to. Helpless, screaming.
In my senior year, riding the IRT subway from 116th Street down to Times Square, I saw an ad for a master's program in Criminal Justice at John Jay College. At that moment a transit cop was shoving a homeless black man into a sitting position across from me, shaking him out of a sleep, kicking him, and it seemed the only route to go for me. I wanted the front lines, not the three-piece suit world of the corporate courtroom. I wanted my blood to boil. Fire in the belly, fury in the marrow.
"What?" I can still hear Liz's precise intonation — clipped, a tinge of hysteria. I'd been dating Liz Sanburn throughout my senior year. A psychology major from a Riverdale family of psychiatrists and tax attorneys, she acted as though I'd slapped her in the face. Our romance had been magical. Madcap, stupid, filled with laughter, a little bit taboo, but it had become serious in the last spring semester. Suddenly we were talking about marriage because we were both drunk with each other. I couldn't believe there could be anyone else for me. We'd see each other in the stacks at Butler Library and burst out laughing, out of control. But when she fought me on my going into police work — I wanted the master's and then the police academy — something started to die in me. Stupidly, we married anyway, hoping the marriage certificate and the settled life in Manhattan would jumpstart our love again. It didn't. And the more I withdrew, the more Liz — so aware of my distance, my moods, my running away — tightened her hold.
We stayed together for three years, she getting a psych master's at Hunter while I became a foot patrolman in Chelsea. She cried every night. I never wanted to go home. My brief stint on the force was a blur, a kind of manic, headlong assault on crime and injustice. One day, collaring some piece of trash who'd just beat up an old woman for her purse and a few bucks, I found myself up against a .22 pressed into my neck. I flipped out, overreacting, fighting the scumbag. He fired, grazing my left shoulder — I still have a jagged, lighting-bolt scar — as I tried to wrestle the gun from him. He was stronger than he looked, a wiry drugged-out maniac who fought for his life. As did I. I won, getting out my revolver and blowing him away.
But something happened to me as I stood over him, my body virtually connected with his, pumping lead into him. My head became light and airy, echoey, and I found myself staring into the man's face, and I kept yelling, Take that, take that take that you fucking bastard, until I was pulled off him by my partner. Years later, when I dreamed about it, things got mixed up. In those feverish awakenings, I found myself yelling: take that, father, take that, father, take that, father. Over and over. The day the little Vietnamese boy struck back at his white daddy. Today on Dr. Phil.
Months of police-mandated therapy and my own mournful introspection compelled me to leave the force. Frankly, I was happy to go. But when I did, I realized I had to clear up a number of nagging lies, and one was my sputtering marriage. I needed a fresh start, so I asked for a divorce. Liz knew it was coming.
An old police friend had connections in Farmington where the College was initiating a new degree in Criminal Justice. He got me the job, I made the move out of the city, I connected with a private investigator named Jimmy Gadowicz because I still wanted to be active in the profession — out there in the field — and that's how I ended up where I am. Jimmy took care of me, maneuvering me through the medieval criminal justice red tape of Connecticut. Proudly he gave me tours of places like the Connecticut State Police Forensic Crime Lab in Meriden. The Connecticut Police Academy. He has buddies everywhere. Everyone likes him. He took care of me.
Now, years later, Connecticut — this town, Farmington, so far from Manhattan and the frantic life I led there — is the only home I want. Quiet, quiet. I teach undemanding kids — a little too pampered, a little too dumb — at the small liberal arts college that struggles to stay afloat. I do knee-jerk fraud investigations and slimy divorce investigations with Jimmy. Quiet. Life hums along, the heartbeat of the dead.
I wanted nothing to do with murder.
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Andrew Lanh is the pen name of Ed Ifkovic, who taught literature and creative writing at a community college in Connecticut for over three decades, and now devotes himself to writing fiction. A longtime devotee of mystery novels, he fondly recalls his boyhood discovery of Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason series in a family bookcase, and his immediate obsession with the whodunit world.
You can find Ed on Facebook.
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Caught Dead
Andrew Lanh
A Rick Van Lam Mystery
One of the beautiful Le sisters is dead.
Hartford, Connecticut's small Vietnamese community is stunned. Mary Le Vu, wife of a poor grocery-store owner, is gunned down in a drive-by. Her twin sister insists dutiful Mary "wouldn't be caught dead" in that drug-infested zone. The police rule it an unlucky accident. Skeptics hire private eye Rick Van Lam to get to the truth.
Amerasian Rick — his father an unknown US soldier — is one of the Bui Doi, children of the dust, so often rejected by Vietnamese culture. But his young sidekick, Hank Nguyen, a pureblood Vietnamese, can help Rick navigate the closed world of Little Saigon. Surrounded by close friends — a former-Rockette landlady, his crusty mentor, and his ex-wife Liz — Rick immerses himself in a world that rejects him, but now needs his help. Especially when a second murder strikes in Little Saigon.
Rick and Hank delve into the families of the Le sisters, one poor, one very rich, and uncover a world of explosive ethnic tension and sinister criminal activity ranging from Hartford's exclusive white suburbs to the impoverished inner city. To solve the murders — and bring closure to Mary's grieving circle — Rick looks to long-buried memories of his Buddhist childhood for the wisdom that will lead him to a murderer.
Mac
