A couple of years ago, a talented, but still struggling crime writer lamented that all of the media attention went to writers who didn’t need it. It’s true if only because many of them are dead. Yet J.D. Salinger continues to be a hot item. For living writers, however, there’s something else at work — the “bandwagon effect.”
Quite a few years ago, I attended a mystery conference where
Elmore Leonard spoke about what he
called “The New York Times Best
Sellers Club.” He spoke as if he were letting his audience of a couple hundred
writers and hundreds more devoted crime fiction fans in on a big trade
secret. If you make the list, he
suggested, it’s hard to get off it. What
the club seems to create is a kind of perpetual promo machine. The writer sells
lots of books and makes the list and because the writer is on the list he or
she sells lots of books and is on the list again and ever shall be, kudos
without end.
I think that’s also true — seems so, anyway — though I
certainly don’t know from personal experience. I believe there are two other
factors as well. One is that some
writers are just that good. It might also be that the gifted writer creates
people and or places you wish to visit again and again. Cara
Black invites us to Paris. Who
doesn’t want to go to Paris? Louise Penny has created an entire
village full of people readers care about.
What’s happened since we last looked in on them? What’s going on with that woman who reminds
me of Aunt Ida?
I’m not sure if Timothy
Hallinan has made the Best Sellers Club yet; but he’s far from suffering
anonymity. He doesn’t need me to promote his work. Yet, he makes my point. He is a writer of a couple of increasingly
popular series. Of those, I’m a member of the “Poke” Rafferty series cult. I
return because of his characters, and because he spins compelling tales. The truth is, though, I return mostly because
of Bangkok. Here is an excerpt from Hallinan’s most recent Bangkok book, The Fear Artist.
As he hits the street
and opens Rose’s umbrella, he feels a bit of the old tingle, the little
carbonated fizz of anticipation he’d felt all those years ago. When he first arrived. When Bangkok was just one jaw-dropper after
another. When he spoke none of the language, when he might as well have been blind
for all the sense the signs meant to him.
When he felt the odds were fifty-fifty each time he went down a new
street that it would be dedicated to holiness — temple carvers, amulet makers,
gold-leaf hammerers — or hedonism — bars restaurants, flamboyant neon
signifying the fall-off edge of his middle-class map of life Whether the people
on the sidewalks would be housewives toting plastic bags or children playing
tag, or transsexual hookers gossiping as they waited for dark. When it felt like the whole city changed
every time he went out as though they knocked it down behind him and built it
up in front of him.
 |
| Timothy Hallinan |
This is exactly the Bangkok I felt on my brief stay there.
This is the city that seduced me, that I’m homesick for, even though it has never
been my home. His Bangkok is one of the reasons his books resonate with me. His books take me back to one of my most
favorite paces at a time when I no longer travel.
In this fifth “Poke” novel, Hallinan sets
things in motion quicker than the corps of muscular, sweaty young men can set
up Patpong’s night market.
Out of the blue a man is shot on the street. He falls dead
against Poke, whispering something nearly incoherent in
his last breath. Those last words, in a world of terrorist-induced fear and
corresponding suspicion, do not go unnoticed.
It is not far-fetched. It could
happen to you.
Suppose a high-level
international terrorist misdials and gets your cell. You answer. Perhaps the
caller utters a few unrecognizable words before he disconnects. Then the NSA
and the full force of our country’s perhaps understandable paranoia comes
crashing down on YOU. The Fear Artist mirrors this mood of the
20-teens. We all feel it. Marathon race bombings, massive electronic
eavesdropping, drone assassinations, torture, official kidnapping and what is
euphemistically called “extraordinary rendition” to secret chambers in foreign
lands not bound by U.S. laws.
Poke feels it.
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