Shopping Bag
My AccountThis interview was conducted by contributor, Teresa Bergen. Ms. Bergen is the author of the novel Killing The President, and in addition to writing, transcribes and edits oral histories, paints animal portraits, makes costume devil horns, teaches yoga, and plays bass in an indie rock band.
Tim Hallinan is best known for his thriller series set in Bangkok. Unlike many crime books that take place in Asia, the primary concern of his main character, Poke Rafferty, is keeping his family together. Poke has fallen in love with Rose, an ex-go go dancer. Together they adopt a little girl who grew up on the streets. But Poke has a way of getting himself into trouble.
Now Hallinan is touring to promote Breathing Water, the fourth book in his Bangkok series. (He will be at Seattle’s Mystery Books Today, September 29, noon, and Portland’s Murder by the Book Tomorrow, September 30, 7 PM)
His website is a treasure. In addition to telling about his books, he also writes a hilarious blog, and has an extremely useful section called “Finish Your Novel.” He shares all his tips to help other writers find their way to the happier side of a rough draft.
Hallinan splits his time between Santa Monica, Bangkok, and Phnom Penh, Cambodia. He has lived in Asia for the greater part of twenty-five years, and it shows in his cultural understanding.
I’ve read two of the Poke Rafferty series so far, and love Hallinan’s portrayal of Bangkok and the relationships between his cobbled together family. It was a thrill to get to ask him the following questions via email.
One of the things I really liked about A Nail Through the Heart was that you take into consideration the lasting emotional and psychological consequences that prostitution has on women who have left that trade. It seems like Poke and Rose exemplify this more than most other expatriate protagonists in thrillers set in Southeast Asia. How did you develop this consciousness?
The central thing about prostitution, for me, is that it’s the ultimate in depersonalization. There’s an entire, living human being in the room, and she (or he) is reduced to a few inches of physiological real estate and playing whatever sexual role the client has in mind – a role that has nothing whatsoever to do with the prostitute’s own life and identity. For some reason, it’s relatively easy for me to know how my characters think and feel about things, as long as I’m clear about the situation they’re in. It doesn’t take a gigantic imaginative leap to know that prostitutes will be concerned with reinforcing their own humanity, their own worth, and the reality of their identities. They’re either going to succeed and survive or fail and lose touch completely with whoever they were to start with.
Rose and the women she tries to help get out of the Life have managed to survive their experiences, and maybe even to grow stronger. It’s also important to remember that they can preserve at least part of their self-esteem by the fact that they’re doing something that’s of primary importance in Buddhism – taking care of their families. Most of these women send 60-80% of what they make up to their impoverished parents in the Northeast, which is the poorest part of Thailand. Their earnings feed Mom and Dad and keep the younger brothers and sisters in school. So it’s easy for me to take Rose and her colleagues seriously as characters because I actually admire them.
I also have to say that, as a general rule, I vastly prefer prostitutes to their customers. But that doesn’t mean you can go one-dimensional on the customers, either. Only they know what developments in their lives brought them into that room, and that kind of material has to be taken seriously, because it’s character, and basically I think all fiction is character. After all, plot is what characters do.
I read in another interview that you are currently writing a story that involves interweaving three different time periods. How are you doing that? What are the challenges and solutions?
I’m not doing it very well at the moment. I am, to use a euphemism, in trouble. It’s the next Poke book, tentatively called The Rocks, and it begins with the sudden appearance of a nightmare character from Rose’s past – someone who put her in great danger and whom she actually believed she’d killed – and who is part of a whole side of Rose’s life as a Patpong dancer that she’s kept from Poke. This guy puts the family not only in physical peril, but also in danger of fracturing emotionally – perhaps even breaking apart.
I envisioned this as Rose’s book. In order to understand what happened before she met Poke, I’m taking the reader all the way back to the rundown little village she lived in, a painfully shy, freakishly tall 17-year-old girl who has no idea she’s beautiful and whose nickname is “Stork.” So the idea was to weave the two time frames together (with a third, now discarded) to show us how that unworldly teenage girl became, first, the most beautiful and best-known woman on Patpong, and second, Poke’s wife.
The writing of it is going well – I think her story is fascinating and heartbreaking and even, in some ways, inspiring. The problem is not letting it overpower the present-tense story. And that’s hard to do, because the material about Rose is so rich.
You write so much about family. What is your own family like?
Yes, that interests me, too. Poke comes from a broken, unhappy family, Rose’s father tries to sell her into prostitution (an especially terrible kind, since the women are virtual prisoners until the “purchase price” has been paid off), and Miaow was abandoned on the sidewalk at the age of three. And here they are, these three damaged people, clinging for life to this family they’ve cobbled together in the hope that there will be a happy ending.
It’s interesting because my own family was just sit-com happy – my parents stayed together for 55 years, my brothers and I got along as brothers ever do – and my marriage is the happiest aspect of my present-day life. I think the experience of loving my wife as much as I do actually made it possible for me to write about the love among Poke, Miaow, and Rose. My wife an I have been together, both married and unmarried, for a long time, and we’ve had the usual ups and downs, and it’s been a unique experience to see how love can grow and deepen to the point where it’s almost not at all the same thing that brought us together in the first place. So if you want to think of love as a color, I have access to a much wider spectrum now than I did, say, twenty years ago. And I use a lot of that when I write the family.
Your website is an excellent resource for writers. Could you talk about your experiences as a teacher? When and where? Do you still teach?
I taught aspiring novelists how to finish. It was a very specific course, much more about work habits and commitment and things like where to look for material and how to explore a story or a character than it was about the “art” of writing. I told them that they’d never finish a novel unless they built a shrine to it, not a spatial shrine, but a shrine in time: a period of time that belongs only to writing the book, not to anything else in their lives, no matter how important. And I told them they had to visit the shrine either daily or for a specific number of hours each week, so if they missed a day they could at least make up the hours. And I taught them a lot about defeating the little demons that tell you that your work stinks or that you really don’t need to write today, and so forth.
I think the only way to learn the “art” of writing is to read widely and to write all the time, and to let yourself write without judging it – just get it on the page. You can go back and make it better later. The enemy, I always told them, is not the terrible page, it’s the empty page. (I think Anne Lamott said that first.) Anyway, a high percentage of the people who took the class finished their first novel and some have been published.
I stopped teaching and put most of what I offered in the class up on my website instead. And it knocks me out that people correspond with me all the time as they work through their books. In the past six months, two women who used the site have sold their books to Random House, one here in the States and one in the UK. That makes me very happy.
Do you really think Phnom Penh is boring? What, if anything, do you like to do there besides write?
No, actually Phnom Penh is fascinating, as any city would be where one-quarter of the population was murdered by their fellow countrymen a relatively short time ago – 1975-79, when the Khmer Rouge was in power. Any time you meet a man of a certain age, the immediate question (unasked, of course) is, “Which side of the barbed wire were you on?”
All I meant by that remark was that Phnom Penh isn’t as distracting as Bangkok, which is probably the most distracting city on earth. Bangkok is the only city I know that actually never sleeps – compared to Bangkok, New York is in a coma. So Phnom Penh is a great place to write, because nothing else is claiming my time or attention.
And pretty much all I do there is write and read. I have an apartment full of books, bought mostly from the used bookstore directly below me, and I get up in the morning, drink coffee, read for a couple of hours, clean myself up, and go at about noon to a coffee house called K-Coffee, where I work for anywhere from four to six or seven hours. Then I go out to dinner with a book in my hand and, if I feel like it, see friends or drop into one of the nine million bars that front the Mekong River, which my apartment overlooks. Then it’s home and a couple of hours’ worth of reading and then to sleep. Pretty boring, but I love it.
Have you been to Portland before? If so, do you have any favorite things about our city?
I’m ashamed to say I haven’t, and even worse, that I won’t have much time to explore it this time. But I’ve heard from other writers who have been there that it’s a beautiful city and very friendly, and that people seem to take their reading seriously. What more could a writer ask?
