The country of British Hidalgo exists on no map known to contemporary geographers, yet this tiny Central American country is richly evoked in the writings of Avram Davidson. The seven stories featuring Jack Limekiller are rooted in Davidson's two-month visit to British Honduras in 1965-1966, when the question of independence was a burning issue in the colony. Davidson also drew upon his experiences during a prolonged period of residency circa 1968-1969.  (See Hugh Leddy's memoir in The Nutmeg Point District Mail Vol.IV, No.4-5).  Not long after Davidson's visits, British Honduras became the independent country of Belize.
    In 1966, Davidson completed a nonfiction travelogue, Dragons in the Trees (still unpublished), that would later serve him as a textual source for the creation of the fictional British colony, its physical and human geography, and its history (Map of British Honduras in the 1960s  [53K]).  Three excerpts from Dragons in the Trees were published in The New York Review of Science Fiction (June 2000).
     In the Limekiller stories, Davidson retraced much of his Dragons in the Trees itinerary and transmuted his earlier observations into a work unique in modern fantasy.  These six "canonical" Jack Limekiller stories are collected in ¡Limekiller!, edited by Grania Davis and Henry Wessells (Old Earth Books, 2003) :

• "Bloody Man" (Fantastic Magazine, Aug. 1976).
• "Manatee Gal, Ain't You Coming Out Tonight" (Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Apr. 1977).
• "A Good Night's Sleep" (Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Aug. 1978).
• "There Beneath the Silky-Tree and Whelmed in Deeper Gulphs Than Me" (Other Worlds 2, Ed. Roy Torgeson. New York: Zebra, 1980).
• "Limekiller at Large" (Asimov's, June 1990).
• "A Far Countrie" (Asimov's, Nov. 1993).