Homes, Sweet Homes

by Timothy Hallinan


Back when I had a real job, I was bi-coastal in the sense that I had homes in both Los Angeles and New York. Now that I just sit around with my feet up, occasionally knocking off yet another effortless novel (this is a pathetic attempt at self-hypnosis), I'm more widely “bi” then ever.  I'm bi-continental.

My home towns, Los Angeles and Bangkok, are also the homes of the central characters in my two current series. Burglar-cum-private eye Junior Bender is an Angeleno, and American travel writer Poke Rafferty has taken root in Bangkok.

While I come by Los Angeles naturally (I was born there), Bangkok is one of life's little surprises.  In 1981, I was in Japan, working on a PBS series about the first multiple-city tour of Japan by a western symphony orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic.  I planned to spend a few weeks there after the shooting wrapped, but it was the coldest February in decades, so I decided to go someplace warm, someplace that didn't require a visa.  That pretty much narrowed it down to Thailand.

I fell in love with Bangkok within 24 hours. Part of it was how little like Los Angeles it seemed to be at first sight, but most of it was simply that it's the most cheerful big city on earth. Big Thai smiles everywhere—on the surface, at least, and at that point I was experiencing mainly the surface.

January 2013

It took me quite a while to realize that Bangkok and Los Angeles are a lot more alike than I initially thought.  That's one of the realizations that's dictated the way I write them.

All big cities are, on one level, ongoing collisions between dreams and concrete.  They're driven by aspiration and exploitation, need and greed.  It's probably not a coincidence that the traditional cozy is often set in a small, enclosed community while its hard-boiled cousin usually has a big-city ZIP code.  In both Bangkok and Los Angeles, achieved dreams are on ostentatious display and protected by the invisible walls of the power structure, and new, usually powerless people arrive daily to seek everything from regular meals to the key to Aladdin's cave.

In Bangkok, Thailand's financial elite, discontent with its lion's share of the income from the nation's major cash crop, is slowly taking ownership of the rice farms in the Northeast, breaking down the tight-knit community support that ensured that no one starved between crops.  Bangkok's population has grown by millions as impoverished, uprooted families poured in, ripe for exploitation.  It's not that different from the Los Angeles exploitation of Hispanic immigrants, powerless without a green card.

Most Americans would probably share my initial impression, that Bangkok is more “exotic” than, say, the San Fernando Valley, where Junior hangs out.  But I believe that exoticism, for writers, is a trap.  That's why I lived in Bangkok for more than twenty years before I tried to write about it.  To me, as a new arrival, the Thais seemed alien, otherworldly, graceful, dreamlike, venal, generous, other, but I came to see that for them, it's just Tuesday.  They think we're exotic, and I'm eternally grateful that I didn't attempt to write about them before I understood that.

The other thing that makes these two settings a bit more alike has to do with my idea of what a “setting” is.  I believe that setting is the interaction between character and place.  Place without character is, I think, just scenery.  “Bangkok” in the Poke Rafferty novels is actually several Bangkoks: it's Poke's, seen from the perspective of the foreigner who never quite breaks through the invisible film between him and this new world; it's Rose's, that of a northeastern village girl who was forced south into the sex trade and survived it; it's Miaow's, forged by her years as a homeless child being harried from one piece of sidewalk to the next.  And it's Arthit's, the perspective of a somewhat disillusioned cop who once thought he'd change the world but has learned to be grateful for the opportunity to do the occasional small good deed.

November 2012

In For the Dead, the sixth Poke book, which isn't yet finished, we see all those Bangkoks and several others as well, and I hope they provide their own kind of rhythm, the same way a series of camera placements can change the rhythm of a film.

The Junior Bender books are written primarily in the first person, which means they're set in a burglar's—Junior Bender's—Los Angeles.  A burglar sees a street lined with palatial houses very differently than does someone with a map to the stars' homes.  The real setting of the Junior novels is the shadow Los Angeles of crooks, with its own set of perils and opportunities.

But, of course, Los Angeles is also Show Business, and in all three Juniors thus far, we've entered the vast and often larcenous fringes of “the industry.”  In Little Elvises, coming out in January, it's the fringe occupied by a specific kind of music business hanger-on, someone who had a hit in the past and can't stop trying for redemption.

August 2012

One of the things Sandra Parshall asked me to think about, when she so generously invited me to blog, was (sort of) whether writing in the two cities felt different somehow.  Wherever I am, the writing life consists of a few friends, my wife (if I'm in Los Angeles), food, and a keyboard.  The keyboard doesn't vary because it goes with me.  My Bangkok friends are, arguably, more eccentric than my LA friends—Bangkok expats are a self-selecting group who really don't fit anywhere else.  Food is better in Bangkok than it is in the States.  Food is better in Bangkok than it is anywhere.  

But I write about Bangkok in Bangkok and LA in LA.  It's nice in either case to be able to look up and grab a face, an interaction, a phrase—some sort of snapshot of life in your setting.  (I steal faces from people in coffee shops all the time.)  It's such an invaluable resource, being able to write, surrounded by your setting.

It almost makes me feel sorry for science-fiction writers.

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Tim Hallinan authored the Simeon Grist mysteries and currently writes the Poke Rafferty thrillers and the Junior Bender mysteries (which have been optioned for film). A longtime writing teacher, he has also written a nonfiction book on Charles Dickens and recently edited the essay collection Making Story: Twenty-one Writers and How They Plot. In college Tim wrote songs and sang in a rock band, and many of his songs were recorded by well-known artists. He began writing books while enjoying a successful career in television. For more than 25 years he has divided his time, on and off, between Southeast Asia and his native California. He feels fortunate to be married to Munyin Choy-Hallinan. Visit his website at www.timothyhallinan.com for more information.

Guest Author Timothy Hallinan

One of the great pleasures I discovered on becoming a published author were all the other great authors out there I get to meet. And not just because they are terrific writers, but because they are also really great people. One of those is my guest here today, Tim Hallinan.

Tim's done a lot. He's got three series out there. The Poke Rafferty series, and in fact, THE QUEEN OF PATPONG, the fourth Poke Rafferty thriller, was nominated for two major awards, the Edgar and the Macavity. He also writes the Simeon Grist Mysteries and the Junior Bender Mysteries. Not only that, but he's also got some short stories up his sleeve with a contribution to BANGKOK NOIR, a collection of stories set in the Big Mango – written by some remarkable storytellers, and for a great cause—taking care of Bangkok's poorest children. And finally, moved by the aftermath of the earthquake in Japan, Tim gathered mystery authors--including yours truly--to write Japan-themed original short stories for an ebook collection called SHAKEN: STORIES FOR JAPAN, with all proceeds--including those collected by Amazon.com, truly unprecedented--going to Japan Earthquake relief.

His newest Poke Rafferty book, THE FEAR ARTIST, will be on its way to bookstores in July. But today, Tim is talking about playing with his words.

AT PLAY IN THE FIELDS OF THE WORD

by Timothy Hallinan


How come what I do for a living isn't called playing?

I've always been envious of professional athletes and musicians. When they show up for work, they're turning up to play. Me, when my wife asks me what I'm going to do all day, I say, “Work.”

Okay, I know it's just a word. I know that the pitcher who's just tossed three home-run pitches, or the defensive lineman who spends all Sunday colliding with guys the size of pre-fab houses, doesn't feel like he's frolicking. I've seen how deeply Venus Williams feels a loss. It's real, not just—well, play.

But the word “play” means something, and it's something I need to make a conscious effort to integrate into my writing. Of course, writing is, on at least one level, playing—it's playing make-believe. It's also play in that it involves daydreaming; imaginary friends; fantasies of love, adventure, and getting even; and, of course, wordplay.

And it's a unique form of play, because—if you imagine it as a board game—we're allowed to invent the entire board, one square at a time. No Park Place and Baltic Avenues for us: we've got an unlimited GPS. For that matter, we can make up the rules, within reason, and change them at will, also within reason. (Learning what comprises “within reason” was one of the most exciting things about writing for me, almost as exciting as realizing that I can occasionally move that boundary, as I become more accomplished.) And it's also play in another way: You get better at it by doing it.

I shouldn't even have to remind myself of all this. Who else in the world is as privileged as writers, composers, and artists? Who else is permitted daily to be at the moment of creation? Who but a writer gets to uncover whole segments of story, one word at a time, like using a soft brush to clear the sand from the spine of some long-buried beast? Who else experiences the thrill of realizing that a character has chewed through her leash and lit out in her own chosen direction? Who else gets to laugh out loud several times a day at jokes she didn't know she was going to make? Who else gets to leave the first footprints in the snow every single day? Who else gets to write something trivial on page five and realize on page 270 that it's absolutely essential?

On the second page of the next Poke Rafferty book, The Fear Artist, due for release by Soho in July, a stranger dies in Poke's arms. I needed, obviously, to describe the stranger. (“What are we looking at?” is one of the questions I ask myself most frequently.) This is what I wrote:

He’s a once-tough sixty-five or so, the planes of his face softened by the passage of years, wearing a T-shirt and a photographer’s vest over cargo shorts, both soaked from the rain. The chunky garments emphasize the thirty or thirty-five extra pounds that suggest he might be American or German. His fair, wet hair, vaguely military and brush-cut, all of an inch long, is in retreat from a high, balding forehead. For some reason what draws Rafferty’s attention, as people continue to run past, is that the skin on the top of the man’s head is crimson from sunburn. It’s been raining for days, but the man is sunburned.

When I wrote that, I was on the second page. I was just warming up. I paid no attention to the fact that the man was sunburned; it was just how I saw him. Not until about 65 percent of the way through the book did I have Poke ask himself why the man was sunburned, and the answer pointed him toward an understanding of his problem—and it's a whopper of a problem.

Things like this—mysteries like this—aren't part of the experience people usually have in mind when they use the word “work.”

I'm aware that the writing session isn't always going to be mystical or exhilarating, sometimes it's a slog, when every word weighs five pounds and you have to heave it into place by hand, when at at the end of the day, it feels like you've just built a sagging, uneven, substandard wall around something that wasn't even worth walling off. But the stubborn truth is that frequently, when you go back to those slogs, you find that you managed to strike the vein anyway, that it's pretty good, or—at the very worst—that you've learned one way not to write it.

Athletes and musicians qualify to “play” for a living by hours and hours of practice, thousands upon thousands of repetitions. Some of those sessions, perhaps most of them, are probably pretty boring, drudgery, in fact. But skill comes with drill in sports and the interpretive arts; and in writing, I think that drudgery can be the path to inspiration and inspiration can power the drudgery.

And yet . . . and yet. And yet, knowing all this about my chosen life, I still have a hard time putting my seat in the chair three days out of five. There are days when I would rather safety-pin my socks into pairs than write that first word.

I'd rather do anything, at those times, than go to work. And maybe that's most of the problem. Maybe, from now on, when my wife tells me what I'm going to do, I'll say I'm going to play. The very word lightens the heart. In fact, I've just had an idea about this book I'm working on.

Pardon me. I've got to play now.

For more on Tim's books, go to his site here.