# 12 Jade Woman (©1988)
Genre: Mystery
Location: Hong Kong
Jade Woman (1988) is a loving tribute to Hong Kong, a city Gash knows intimately from his time there in the 1960s. In this novel Lady Jane, one of Lovejoy's many wealthy liaisons, engages in a carefree destruction of Lovejoy's way of life in order to force him into marriage. She not only has him "evicted, bankrupted, sued and dispossessed," but also pursued by an angry mobster who had depended on a confiscated fake, eight months in the making, to save a tricky financial exchange. When Lovejoy escapes to Hong Kong, he finally meets his match: the city itself, a benchmark of affluence and of poverty, a legendary showplace of capitalistic venture with everyone engaged in nefarious scams. Lovejoy falls asleep at the airport and awakens to find all his possessions gone, including his passport, and he is trapped in a city of far cleverer con artists than he has ever encountered. Where he could eke out a subsistence-level livelihood in England, on the lam in Hong Kong he is reduced to starvation and bondage. Though on the edge of the world of James Clavell's Noble House (1981), Lovejoy is trapped in a much lower social level, where the wheeling and dealing is literally cutthroat. His sex appeal proves effective only in work as a gigolo, and only his skills as a divvy save him from a life of prostitution, as he becomes caught up in murder, theft, seduction, and the machinations of a triad "Jade Woman" named Ling-Ling. To the question "Is every moral man up for grabs?" his experience answers, "quite possibly, in Hong Kong." To his attempts to make sense of triad schemes, Ling-Ling rightly responds that Chinese tactics might be "too duplicitous" for his "romantic soul."
Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 276: British Mystery and Thriller Writers Since 1960. A Bruccoli Clark Layman Book. Edited by Gina Macdonald, Nicholls State University. Gale Group, 2003. pp. 160-174.
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