Timothy Hallinan, for those who don’t know you, introduce yourself, your writing and your books
Well, I started writing under my own name in the 1990s after turning out six or seven novels under different names on a work-for-hire basis. In 1990 I wrote a mystery called The Four Last Things under my own name, and five days later I had a three-book contract with William Morrow. Ultimately the series stretched to six books, all featuring a uselessly over-educated private eye named Simeon Grist who lived in a shack in the former hippie heaven of Topanga Canyon (as I did) and had stayed in university for years because he knew how they graded people there but not how they did it in the outside world, which was another characteristic I shared with him. One of the books, Everything But the Squeal, was bought repeatedly for a feature film but never made. Although the books got great reviews, in bookstores they might as well have been glued to the shelves. The series now is sort of a cult item and I’ve begun putting it out in two boxed sets of ebooks, three books per, each with its own beautiful but entirely virtual box.
Then I took a few years off from writing to earn enough money so I wouldn’t have to do anything but sit at the keyboard and make stuff up. I’d been living off and on in Thailand since 1981, and I thought the Big Mango would be a great setting for a thriller, so in 2006 or so I wrote the first Poke Rafferty book, A Nail Through the Heart. I’m now writing the eighth book in the series, and the individual books have been nominated for everything: the Edgar, Shamus, Macavity, Nero, and so forth. It’s been bought for film but remains unmade.
A couple of years later I had a visitation from a previously unknown voice in my head that kept trying to tell me a story about a crook and a koala bear. Eventually, I wrote it down, and the missing bear was located by a guy named Junior Bender, a Los Angeles burglar who works as a private eye for crooks. The fourth book in the series, Herbie’s Game, won the Lefty for Best Comic Crime Novel of 2014 and the series has been optioned by the great Eddie Izzard for global television. The new one, King Maybe, comes out in America on April 12.
Have you always wanted to be a writer?
Yes. I’ve always been a reader, and I think the one leads to the other a lot of the time.
How did you get into writing?
When I was a kid, I lived in 22 houses in 18 years, which, when you’re under ten or twelve, is pretty much the same thing as changing planets; you lose your friends, your school, your neighborhood. I took refuge in books because the characters went with me wherever I moved, and by the time I was in my early teens I had begun to write stories. And that’s where it stayed until I was in my forties because I created a really interesting company with offices in Los Angeles, New York, and London, and I lived on planes for most of the time.
I was doing that when someone offered me the write-for-hire gig, and I thought, why not? and tried it. It was more fun than business, so I started my own series, which I’ve already told you about, and gradually added two more. By this point in my life, I’m completely addicted: if I don’t write a couple of books a year I think I’ll lose my mind. Writing allows me to process the darker impulses I don’t want to externalize in any other way; it permits me to daydream for a living; and it gives me a place to put a lifetime’s accumulation of useless knowledge. And I have to admit that I still get chills when something good actually begins to happen on the page.
When and where do you write?
Whenever and wherever, although I prefer coffee houses because, you know, that’s where the coffee is. At home I write at a big glass table in front of a wall full of books. I like to think that all those writers are looking over my shoulder and are available for suggestions whenever I get stuck.
What is the hardest thing about being a writer?
The fact that no finished book is ever as good as your early glimpses of it suggested it might be. The poet Paul Valery said, “Poems are never finished. They’re simply abandoned.” I think you can say the same thing about books. There comes a point at which the writer—well, this writer, anyway—realizes that messing with the manuscript further will actually rob it of life. You might be able to make it more symmetrical or more magical or more lyrical or more anything, but after a certain point you begin to diminish whatever amount of life flows through it.
What is your greatest fear as a writer?
That every book I finish is my last. And one of these days, I’ll be right.
Are you an outline writer or a discovery writer?
Totally, one hundred percent discovery. I begin with a few characters and a relationship or situation that I think has the potential to grow more complex and more interesting as time goes on. I sort of put that situation in the middle of my desk and then (metaphorically, obviously) I drop a handful of marbles, representing the characters, around the situation, see where they roll, and follow them. Because I write series, there are pre-existing relationships among some characters, so those characters tend to intersect as they roll around, and, if I’m lucky, that situation either endangers or strengthens some aspect of the relationship among those characters. The characters lead me 85% of the time. Often, when I start the book with some kind of slam-bang finish in mind I never get to it because that’s not where the characters take me.
I can’t outline to save my soul, and believe me, I’ve tried. I have no idea what a character will say or do until he/she says or does it. I’ve had entire books change direction because of something that’s said by a character whom I hadn’t seen coming, in a scene I didn’t know I was going to write.
The upside of this is that, for me, writing a book is literally a process of discovery; I’m always putting the first footprints in the snow. The downside is that I can go wildly off-track or hit a wall with no apparent way forward. This terrifies me every time it happens even though I know that in the past I’ve always found my way either through or around it.
How much research goes into your books?
As little as possible. I have wonk’s encyclopedia of junk in my mind, bits and pieces of practically every discipline except math and the more arcane areas of physics, and that ever-growing hoard usually satisfies my needs, although I have to admit that my copy editor (I have the best in the world) occasionally catches me out. We just had a fight over whether some lines I attributed to Sappho in a Poke Rafferty book, The Hot Countries, were really by the famous poet of Lesbos, and for once in my life, I won.
For the Junior Bender books, which really do explore (and exploit) historical trivia, I do the standard Google sifting. There’s a long bit in King Maybe about the origins of the famous willow pattern china. I had my suspicion that it was about as Chinese as chop suey, but I had no idea how interesting, and how racist, the story actually is.
Describe your latest book to our readers
King Maybe takes Junior back into Hollywood—one of my favorite topics—and the pernicious practice of “turnaround,” in which a producer or studio pays the smallest possible amount for a long-term option on a promising story and then delays it as long as possible (perhaps to keep it off the market, perhaps to make it under a different name) and then either sells it to the highest bidder or gives it back to its originator when its time is definitely past. The “King Maybe” of the title is a studio head who earns the nickname because of the delight he takes in revenging himself on all those who took a dump on him while he was on his way up; he options their ideas and sits on them till they’re past their sell-by date and then returns them, useless. His name is Jeremy Granger, and he’s a total piece of work. When Junior asks him why he has trouble remembering people’s names, Granger says, “Contempt.”
There’s also a murder, three very dicey burglaries (Junior is, after all, a burglar), and a hitman who runs a national franchise of local hitters, sort of Deaths R Us, and collects rare stamps. Oh, yeah, and it’s funny. I really like the book, which isn’t always the case.
What was the inspiration behind it?
I was jogging about a year ago and the title came to me with zero meaning attached to it. It caught my attention because, it seems to me that kings probably say “yes” and “no” a lot more often than they say “maybe.” Maybe is equivocal, and I don’t think of kings as equivocal. So I parked it in my head as a potential title (I have dozens of them), and one morning I woke up knowing who he was and why he was called that. So I had a villain—one of several, actually—and the rest of the book arose out of my effort to get Junior enmeshed with King Maybe and then trying to get him free with his skull intact.
Also, I’d had a lot of letters asking why there had been fewer burglaries in the past couple of books, and this book is essentially all burglaries, so those people should be happy.
What have been some of your favourite scenes to write?
That’s a great question, and one I’ve never been asked before. In the Poke Rafferty Bangkok books, Poke and his Thai wife, Rose, have adopted a street child, a spiky little girl named Miaow, just like the sound a cat makes. When I started the series she was seven or eight (no one knows for sure) and now she’s thirteen or fourteen, and she still hasn’t told her adoptive parents how she was abandoned on the street at the age of three or so.
In The Hot Countries, Poke takes her to visit a terribly damaged little girl who’s taken to bed in a state of withdrawal. The little girl has her eyes closed, but Mioaw blows on her face and sees the eyelids tighten in defence, and she just keeps blowing softly until the other little girl opens her eyes, and then Miaow launches straight into her story, and it’s horrifying. But it’s what the other little girl needed to hear—that someone her own age had gone through something that heartbreaking and come out of it reasonably intact. I’ve had at least fifty letters from people who wrote to say they cried through the last part of the scene, and I take that as a tremendous compliment.
But I have favorite scenes in most of the books, just as I have dud scenes that never quite became what I hoped they’d be. That’s what happens when you write.
If you were stranded on Island and you had one book to take with you, what would it be?
I’d probably cheat and take Anthony Powell’s 12-novel sequence A Dance to the Music of Time, which changed, or perhaps saved, my life when I was in my twenties. Or I’d really cheat and take the complete works of Anthony Trollope, my favorite Victorian novelist. Yes, including Dickens.
What advice would you give to an aspiring novelist?
Write. Write every day, whether you want to or not, and especially when you don’t. Picasso said, “Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.” No one who waits until the mood (or the stars, or the light through the window) is right before he or she starts to write will ever finish a book. And the best definition of a writer I know comes from Thomas Farber: “A writer is someone who finishes.”
King Maybe (A Junior Bender Mystery) By Timothy Hallinan
Junior Bender finds himself caught in a Hollywood revenge plot epic enough for the silver screen.
Los Angeles’s most talented burglar, Junior Bender, is in the middle of stealing one of the world’s rarest stamps from a professional killer when his luck suddenly turns sour. It takes an unexpected assist to get him out alive, but his escape sets off a chain reaction of blackmail, strong-arming, and escalating crime. By the time Junior is forced to commit his third burglary of the week—in the impregnable fortress that’s home to the ruthless studio mogul called King Maybe—he’s beginning to wish he’d just let the killer take a crack at him.