Author Pursues Modern Maya Through His Mystery Novel

The mystery, in a sense, unfolds from a mystery.

The murders take place in Cancun, a modern high-rise ceremonial center created to celebrate ritual tourism, a profane illusion of ever-present holiday.

The action emerges, however, from a deeper background, an enigmatic historical landscape of towering limestone temples where, 2,000 years ago, priest-kings shed blood to renew their people's connection with their ancestors and gods, with destiny, with the sacred cycle of life itself.

The juxtaposition might have amused the ancient Maya, whose cosmology was built on an appreciation of opposites.

They probably also would have sympathized with the protagonist caught in the middle of Seattle author Gary Alexander's new novel, "Blood Sacrifice" (Doubleday, $17).

Luis Balam - or Luis the Jaguar, if you will - is a former Cancun police detective struggling to support his two daughters by guiding tourists through the ruins at Tulum and Coba; by selling trinkets at Black Coral, a roadside stand that tour buses too often bypass; and by occasional work as a private investigator.

And as a native Maya, Balam must constantly confront the predicament of his people. Their proud ancestors were crushed and enslaved 400 years ago. Their profound culture has struggled against conquest ever since. They're subjected to prejudice and poverty in a society that has packaged their past for sale and seems to strip their future of reasonable hope.

So how does someone like Alexander - an insurance appraiser by day and a mystery writer by night, who speaks little Spanish and no Mayan - develop the sense of place that such a novel requires? How does he breathe life into a character like Luis Balam?

The trick lies in the traveling. It's a matter of perspective, of point of view, the writer says. It's a matter of paying attention.

A tourist, and not a tourist

Alexander and I stumbled across each other in the lobby of the Hotel Hacienda Uxmal in Mexico's Yucatan earlier this year. He was laden with notebooks and camera, and a satchel of research snapshots developed daily at one-hour photo shops. He was searching for, and collecting, authenticity.

With his wife, Shari, he'd been exploring the Yucatan and northern Belize for a couple of weeks in their "Bochito" - a temperamental Volkswagen Beetle much like the one Luis Balam must contend with in the books.

Shari's passion for snorkeling often had given way to poking around back streets, parking lots, caves, and side roads into the low, thorny coastal jungle.

In fact, Shari's detailed and good-natured travel journal and cataloguing of photographs from the trip eventually has become a valuable supplement to Alexander's own collection of plot and character notes as he continues work on the second novel in his new series, tentatively titled "Dead Dinosaurs" and scheduled for publication in the autumn of 1994.

Ways of seeing

"It's not that we're not tourists," Alexander said. "We are, obviously. Still, we're not, exactly. The books don't work unless I can understand how Luis Balam thinks and feels. I need to empathize with him. So we find ourselves being more careful, maybe, about what we do - how we act, how we think even - than lots of the tourists we see.

"Just watching some tourists - the way they pile onto the air-conditioned buses in Cancun and head off for excursions to Tulum or Chichen Itza, sweat for an hour or two in the midday heat, get herded through the gift shop, all the time wishing they were really back at their resort enclaves drinking tequila slammers or cold bottles of Corona . . .

"In seeking the point of view of a local, a Maya, instead of an American tourist, I find myself alienated from other tourists. I find myself resenting what tourism has done, is doing to this place and these people. The exploitation.

"The official bird of Cancun island is the construction crane, your know. It's hovering over the eventual creation of a Miami Beach all the way down this coastline - unless, of course, the development kills all the reefs first. And that's already happening, from the silt that washes out from the artificial lagoons that have been dredged to feed tourists' fantasies."

At a poolside bar in Cancun, Alexander found a villain for his next book: "a loud braggart who insinuated himself into conversations, insulted the waiters. I took his picture just to keep the image strong in my mind."

A character is born

Alexander had already written six mystery novels, a series set in a fictional Southeast Asia country called Luong and featuring Police Inspector Bamsan Kiet. The place was based on his military experience in Vietnam in the mid-1960s.

Then character of Luis Balam asserted himself after Alexander's first trip to the Yucatan coast - a vacation at Akumal - in 1990.

"I'd thought at first I might try to make a little extra money writing some travel articles," he said. "But writing that kind of stuff is a heck of a lot harder than it looks. I gave it up. Then the idea for the novel came along.

"People talked about the Maya in the past tense. But there I was, seeing people who looked just like the ones sculpted on the walls at Tulum and Coba.' They were maids and busboys, dishwashers and laborers."

In the Cancun newspapers he scanned there were employment ads "for the good jobs" that specified "buena presentacion." Good presentation.

"That meant: No Maya need apply," he said. "It got me to thinking. . . . Sure, there was lip service from the government, about how it was going to improve conditions for the Maya. Those assurances were strongest right around election day - when I saw buses from the governing PRI party pull into little Indian villages and pile people on to take them to the voting places. It got me to thinking . . .

"I first saw Luis Balam as angry, a sullen kind of guy. He was forced to accept his place in society, but he didn't like it. He was a composite of a lot of people I saw and met. There was a lot of me in him, too, as I thought of how I'd feel if I were in his place.

"I wrote a couple of stories featuring him for the Alfred Hitchcock mystery magazine. Then the novel began to take shape."

The character has evolved. Balam is sadder now, more often than angry. Sharp wit has replaced sullenness.

The stories and observations that Alexander brought back from his most recent visit no doubt will be appearing in his upcoming books. Like the one an acquaintance told him, an American expatriate who'd hired a Maya friend to do some work for him. "Another friend, a Ladino, came over and heard the Maya address the gringo in the more familiar tu form of address, instead of usted. The Ladino lit into the Maya for forgetting his place, for being uppity . . . "

Color and accuracy

Gary Alexander's first mystery set in the Yucatan isn't a book written from inside the place and the culture. It's not as intimate, knowing and detailed as, say, Tony Hillerman's mysteries set on the Navajo reservation in the American Southwest or Paco Ignacio Taibo II's Mexico City detective novels.

But it's an honest book, and a true one.

And when a good writer sets out to explore a foreign place, a character whose experience he or she can only guess at, truth is the goal, no matter whether the writing is fiction or nonfiction.

The search for the kind of insight that leads to truth - and the intensity and honesty of observation that such a search requires - is what guides good travelers, too, Alexander said. "I've learned how to travel by being a writer," he said.

His home library about the Maya has grown to more than 30 volumes. His photo library contains detailed shots of obscure street corners, of clothing, of faces. His notebooks contain more questions than pronouncements - questions that he feels he must answer before his next book is done.

"Reading, preparation, and lots of forethought - that's what I recommend for people who'll be traveling to the Yucatan, even if they're not going to write a book," he said.

"You know, coming to know Luis Balam, I've had to try to understand the lives of modern Maya in general. Here's this ancient culture, a people surrounded by evidence of its past grandeur, caught in a time of such rapid change . . . The way Luis puts it is, things are changing so fast that he has no present. `We jump directly from the past to the future, back and forth, back and forth. You get dizzy'."

That's the kind of mystery that Yucatan travelers can try to unravel for themselves.