I’d like to welcome my guest Timothy Hallinan. Timothy has written ten published novels, all thrillers. A series of six mysteries he wrote in the 1990s featuring erudite Los Angeles private eye Simeon Grist is a cult favorite and is now becoming available in e-book form. Since 1981, Timothy has divided his time between Los Angeles and Southeast Asia, the setting for his Poke Rafferty novels: A NAIL THROUGH THE HEART, THE FOURTH WATCHER, BREATHING WATER, and the upcoming THE QUEEN OF PATPONG. As of this writing, THE QUEEN OF PATPONG has already received “starred” reviews in two of the four major publication trades.
We are lucky to get two 25 years ago stories for the price of one! Timothy shares what he was doing 25 years ago, and also gives us the scoop on the past of his character, Poke Rafferty. Read his post below.
TIMOTHY: This is kind of fun – I hardly ever look back on my life, much less those of my characters.
Twenty-five years ago, in 1985, I was living in LA, New York, London, and Bangkok – the first three for business and the fourth for fun. I had a life that must have looked incredibly privileged from the outside: money coming out of my ears, my own company of about 30 people advising giant corporations about their television activities, all those houses, limousines, first-class flights everywhere.
And I was miserable, so miserable that I was using, to put it delicately, substances to get me through the day and other substances to get me to sleep at night. I could afford lots of substances, economically speaking, although my body had a different perspective.
And then, in 1987, I started sitting down at 7 PM wherever I was and writing a novel. And about eight months later, I finished it, and it was terrible. It had a great title, The Wrong End of the Rainbow, but it was all downhill from there. So I wrote another one and then a third, and I sold the third – it got me a three-book contract – and my life changed. Over the next seven or eight years, I phased out the business (and, inadvertently, a lot of the money) and became a full-time writer. And the substances disappeared, too.
Best thing I ever did. In fact, I really have only two regrets about my life – that I never had children and that I didn’t write that first, awful novel about ten years earlier.
The hero of my current series, Poke Rafferty, was twelve years old, living twenty-five years ago in a dreary little house in the middle of some featureless desert near Lancaster, California, with his uncommunicative father, Frank, and his voluble half-Filipina mother, Angela. He hated it there. As he describes it in the second book in the series:
“. . . everything was brown. The desert was brown, our house was brown – half the time, the sky was brown, courtesy of the smog Los Angeles sent us every day. Buildings were brown and square: flat roofs, small windows to keep the heat out. Nothing was ornamented, nothing was designed a certain way just because it looked good. It was like people went out of their way to make it ugly.”
But his life is about to change. In his parents’ bedroom is a metal box, battered, rusting, and always locked. One day, Poke – his real name is Philip, but he got the nickname from his habit of poking his nose where it didn’t belong – popped the lock on the box with a bobby pin and found in it the remnants of his father’s mysterious sojourn in Asia years before Poke was born: money from various Asian countries.
“I just saw the bills as pictures,” he later tells Rose, the Thai woman he will marry. “Clouds. Trees. Buildings with roofs that tilted up at the corners like prayers. Lakes with bridges over them, and the bridges looked like . . . I don’t know, like lace or something. Everything seemed to float. In Lancaster the rocks were heavy and the buildings were like bigger, heavier rocks. And I unfolded that money, and I was looking at a world where everything was light enough to float.”
Eventually, the pictures on that money, and the need to track his father who has disappeared once again into China, will take Poke to Asia, where he will take up live as an expatriate in Bangkok.
His wife, Rose, was six years old twenty-five years ago, living in a poverty-stricken village in northeastern Thailand, just starting school, and eleven years away from the life-changing discovery that her father intends to sell her into prostitution. That discovery is at the heart of the fourth book in the Poke Rafferty series, THE QUEEN OF PATPONG, which came out on August 17.
I only hope I can continue to write the series long enough to look back again, twenty-five years from now, and thank so much, Stacy, for letting me do it this time.
Thanks for joining us, Timothy! It’s amazing the positive effects that getting on the right life path can bring. Check out THE QUEEN OF PATPONG on Amazon.
Life in Bangkok looks good for American expat travel writer Poke Rafferty and his little family – his wife, Rose, is happily running a domestics agency that offers bar girls an alternative to The Life, and their adopted daughter, Miaow, once an abandoned street child, is now enrolled in a good school and trying desperately to conform. And then, out of nowhere, comes the nightmare customer from Rose’s life in the bars, who he threatens not only their lives but their emotional relationships as well. To do battle with him, Rafferty needs to know more about Rose’s past, and there are things he may be unable to confront as we follow the path that took a shy village teen to Bangkok and turned her into the queen of Patpong.
