Book Notes — Hallinan’s New Book Captures the Mood of The World: Weary And Frightened

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. 

Book Notes — Cotterill Joins Burdett, Hallinan in Thai Crime Fiction Writing

Just as crime readers’ tastes may vary from cozies to horror, there are favorite locales as well. In recent years, murders in cold, dark Scandinavian countries seem to have exploded on the criminal landscape. My brother has taken a sudden and almost obsessive interest in what dark things happen in Istanbul. I’m drawn to stories that take place in Thailand.

A good portion of the most recent Shanahan book, Bullet Beach, is set in Thailand. The Bangkok and Phuket setting was very important to me. But because my understanding of what it means to live in Thailand is as shallow as an urban puddle, the story is told from the point of view of someone visiting for the first time. This is a valid and possibly interesting point of view. I hope so. However, readers who seek a deeper understanding of the nature of the country they will inhabit for 300 or so pages will find their expectations met by reading John Burdett, Timothy Hallinan and now Colin Cotterill. Though not Thai themselves, they have lived in that part of the world and have developed an intimacy that a mere Western traveller cannot. Oddly and wonderfully enough, though, these three don’t write about the same Thailand.

I was first introduced and seduced by books set in Thailand by Alex Garland’s The Beach. Garland wasn’t creating a series, though — simply a fine book. So, where was I to get my fix? When I was told about Burdett, I jumped into his first Thai-related book immediately. Unfortunately, Burdett doesn’t write fast enough for me. Just in time, I was introduced to Hallinan and his Poke Rafferty series. Completely different. It took me a while to adjust to this other Thailand. Soon, I became addicted to this new drug. Unfortunately, even the combination of Burdett and Hallinan couldn’t deliver stories fast enough. Now, I’ve found Cotterill’s first in what is most likely a new series — and his very different Thailand. Perhaps now, there will be a sustaining flow of stories. But whose Thailand is the real one?

For me, Burdett captures his reader by using the spiritual, if not the dark side of that Thai spirituality, to cast his mystery. Ghosts and superstition play regular roles in what seems to me to be the most haunting of the three approaches. (Vulture Peak, the fifth in the series, will be released in January 2012.) From this fan’s point of view, Hallinan’s books present a more tangible danger. The evils here are more earthly than Burdett’s and they appear to surface in the midst of or as a result of social injustice and corruption. His main character’s family is at the center of his stories. When Rafferty’s family is threatened — and they are, of course — we care and we keep turning the pages until they are safe. (The Edgar-nominated Queen of Patpong is Hallinan’s most recent.) If Cotterill’s first in his new Thai series, Killed at the Whim of a Hat, is any indication of what’s to come, we are going to experience a more whimsical Thailand, though no less deadly. There is humor throughout his lively, song-like prose and in the creation of wonderfully, quirky and entertaining characters.

Perhaps that is why I’m so taken with Thailand as a setting. It can be seen in so many different ways — all of them fascinating.

P.S. It should be noted that another veteran writer of crime novels set in Thailand is the internationally read Christopher G. Moore, though until now he’s been comparatively invisible in the US. I’ve not yet had the privilege of reading any of his books. Asia Hand, recently released in the U.S., features private eye, Vincent Calvino. The book has just been nominated for a Shamus Award for best Paperback Original. Someone else to add to the list.