Timothy Hallinan’s mysteries and thrillers have made numerous Top Ten Lists for their imaginative verve and humor – and his latest release Nighttown – No 7 in the Junior Bender series, is no exception.
Hi there I’m your host Jenny Wheeler and today Tim talks about he’s how an LA burglar came to star in a series which proves bad guys have the most fun, and why writing is better than the best job ever.
Six things you’ll learn from this Joys of Binge Reading episode:
Why writing is more fun than working with Hollywood icon Katarine Hepburn
The amazing street kid behind the Poke Raffery series
How 'getting a heap of useless degrees' finally paid off
The new Golden Age of crime fiction is here now
The writers he admires most - and they're mostly women
What he'd do differently second time around
Where to find Timothy Hallinan:
Website: http://www.timothyhallinan.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/tim.hallinan.1
Twitter: https://twitter.com/timhallinan
What follows is a "near as" transcript of our conversation, not word for word but pretty close to it, with links to important mentions.
Jenny: Hello there Tim and welcome to the show, it's great to have you with us.
Timothy: Thanks, it's a real pleasure to be here.
Author Timothy Hallinan
Jenny: Now Tim, before we even dive into the questions, I know you've just had a week away at Joshua's Tree having a sort of personal style writing retreat. That seems to me totally romantic, I just love the idea of doing that. How did that week go?
Timothy: It went amazingly well. I live a fiction in which I will never complete the book I'm working on even though I've written 21 or 22 of them. When I get completely blocked, I go up there and I walk around in the desert for 2-3 days. Everything just melts, and there I am again with the story and the characters. And it worked this time yet again, for probably the twentieth time.
Jenny: That's just wonderful. Is there a certain point in a book where you get stuck every time, or is it different with each book?
Timothy: I get stuck over and over again, but usually the big crisis is about a third of the way in. I've actually thrown out half a dozen books because I just couldn't push past the block.
Jenny: Wow that's interesting. To get ourselves launched here, how did you get started? Was there a 'Once Upon a Time' moment when you thought I've just got to write fiction? And if so, what was the catalyst for it?
Timothy: It was actually a "Twice Upon A Time" situation. We moved all the time when I was a kid. I'd lived in 22 houses by the time I was 18 years old. What that meant was I had no on-going friendships. I mean, you could move six blocks and you're in a different school. For a kid, it might as well be a different planet.
So what I did was, I read. I read all the time. When I was 11, I read The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler. I understand how the story works - it's something secret, and somebody has to figure out how it works. Somebody has to restore order. About a year and a half after that, in my family's house in Tarzana, on the old estate of Edgar Rice Burrough's, I read Gone With The Wind.
For the first time in my life, I read characters who were more real to me than the people with whom I lived. In fact, my mother said that she had to come up and call me sometimes, two or three times, and she had to literally put her hand over the page of the book before I could tune into her.
So by the time I was maybe 13, I understood that there was a kind of story I wanted to tell. And I understood that the most important part of any story were the characters. That was sort of the basis on which everything grew.
Jenny: Now you mentioned that you sort of had a "twice revelation" experience. So that was how you got to really decide you were going to be a writer. How did you actually then carry it out? You had a couple of starts, didn't you?
Timothy: Well I accidentally created a career that was really interesting. Out of college I went into public relations which didn't interest me at all, but we were doing television public relations and my partner and I decided one day that we would not represent ever again any show we wouldn't watch. All of a sudden, we had everything that was good on television. And what's more - we had art exhibitions.
We did the King Tut (Tutankhamun) Exhibition, we figured all of that stuff out. We represented public television, I represented Katharine Hepburn for her first television show ever. I was living in New York, London, and Los Angeles and it was a really good job. For all the time that I was doing that, I sat down once in a while and I wrote. And in fact finally, I decided that I was going to write a book as well as working 60 hours a week, which is what I was working. And I did.
A famous client - Katharine Hepburn
I wrote the first book I ever finished, which was a terrible book with a great title, The Wrong End of the Rainbow. I'm going to use this again in a book I'm working on right now. I put it in a drawer, and at a certain point in around 1990, I decided I was going to write. Period.
I wrote the very first Simeon Grist to be published. I sent it off, and within about 10 days I had a three book contract with William Morrow. From then on, in the next two or three years I wrote in my spare time before closing everything down and writing full time.
Jenny: Fantastic. It sounds like an amazing, almost fantasy life that you had.
Timothy: It was wonderful. I was working with some of the great artists of the world. We represented the New York Philharmonic, we represented most of the major art museums in the country, we represented public television and we got to a point where we were no longer in public relations.
We were a crossroads, where companies that have lots of money and want to do something good, and I don't mean audience good, but I mean something "good good" would come and ask us if we knew of anything that might work for them. In many cases, I put major American companies into public broadcasting.
And another - Sir Laurence Olivier
In some cases, I literally wrote the internal corporate white paper that justified their move into public television. And of course I worked with everybody in the world. I worked with Sir Laurence Olivier, I worked with Katharine Hepburn. It was a great job, but it wasn't writing.
Jenny: Now you have in this last twenty years or so written thrillers and mysteries in three different series. But you've got a new book out next month, and so we'd really like to look at the "certifiably fresh," (to use a Rotten Tomatoes rating) the latest Junior Bender mystery. Junior is an unusual protagonist, because he's a burglar, and one close to your heart, I suspect. How did the idea of a protagonist who's a burglar come about?
Timothy: I was writing one of the Poke Rafferty Bangkok books, and I was having a rough time. I kept getting this voice in my ear that wanted to tell me a story. And the story was about a crook, and a Koala bear. The crook and his wife had been given a Koala bear and they fell in love with it. It was their child, it was their everything, and it was stolen, and it broke the crook's wife's heart. So he went to a guy he knew to figure out, who stole the Koala bear. That turned out to be Junior. The crook is a guy named Louis the Lost, who is in all the books now.
But I came up with Junior that way. I thought a burglar, who's a private eye for crooks is a really interesting idea. And of course, there have been lots of crooks that are heroes in books all the way back to before the Chandler days- and even before that, there was a series about a guy who was a cracksman- which is also a burglar- and he solved crimes from time to time.
A couple of people have written books about crooks who are protagonists, but I think Junior is the only actual detective who's a crook. And of course the good thing about it is he has a kind of insight into the mentality of people on that side of the law - that private eyes who aren't crooks don't have.
They're his friends and they're his enemies. He's living in that world, and it's open to him in the way that it isn't. For example, to my original private eye Simeon Grist- he never really understood them. Junior understands what's going on on that side of the fence.
Junior Bender - a master burglar and PI
Jenny: Sure. He's got his own internal moral compass as well- and there are cases where he tries to refuse. In the latest book Nighttown, he finds himself embroiled in a case that at the beginning anyway, he would dearly like to get out of if he could! How does he decide which one's he is going to take and which one he is going to try and walk away from?
Timothy: First of all, he has two moral codes. There's the one he has as a burglar, and this was instilled in him by the guy who trained him; the man who essentially came along and changed his life. That is, when you go into a house, look for the best thing they own and don't take it. That will allow you to sleep while you're a burglar. He's always lived by that.
But the other thing about why he doesn't take some cases has actually nothing to do with the moral code. He would turn them all down if he could, because when he's in that situation, he's looking for someone who will kill him if they find out he's looking for them.
And he's working for somebody who will kill him if he doesn't figure out who it is. So part of the game of the book, in addition to solving crime is he's walking a fine line between his client and whoever committed the crime. So he's turning down as many as he can, because they're just too dangerous.
Jenny: Yes. You get the sense that you've really enjoyed creating this character, who thumbs his nose at the normal world. I wondered if there was a fantasy of yours, that you'd like to be that kind of outsider?
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