Cherchez le Crook: a guest blog by Timothy Hallinan

 

 Julia Spencer-Fleming:  We've been talking about superstorm Sandy along with mysteries this week, but today's guest, Timothy Hallinan,  is a little removed from all the drama - he's in Bangkok, where he lives for half the year (the other half he's in LA. I, for one, am jealous.)

Tim is prolific - He's written ten novels, edited two story collections, and he teaches writing. His free online course, FINISH YOUR NOVEL, is a fantastic resource for aspiring authors. But even a seasoned pro might blanch at the prospect of starting a new series by publishing three novels in November, January and June. What's his inspiration? Easy. He likes to hang out with crooks.

Like all crime writers, I love crooks. And they frighten me.

I love them because they're so much fun to write. They make up their own rules. As children they paid no attention to the hopscotch squares chalked on the sidewalk, and as adults they pay no attention to the Ten Commandments and the million lesser laws the Commandments spawned. They bubble and seethe, crablike, with malicious energy. They don't have to be politically correct. They can offend people.

They frighten me because they have a way, unless they're watched very closely, of walking away with my book.

Our heroes have to behave, at least until we've pushed them to extremis. Even then, most of the time they can't get any fun from damage they do. That might lose the reader's sympathy. Our crooks, on the other hand, can win at chess by sweeping the pieces off the board and then shooting the person sitting opposite, shrugging it off as a striking variation on the Sicilian Opening.

We've seen this taken to unfortunate extremes lately, especially in the serial-killer genre, with sadism and murder serving as straight lines for Schwarzenegger-style wisecracks. I think this is dishonest writing and actually violates the writer's agreement to take the reader's intelligence seriously. On the other hand, some of these books sell quite well, so what do I know?

But I understand the appeal of that energy. I have to admit that I'll be digging away at a book, trying to figure out where in the world I'm tunneling to (I don't outline and generally have very little idea what's going to happen until it actually does) and all of a sudden the crook tears open the page and climbs through the hole, and I experience a burst of electricity. Crooks and villains seem to bring their worlds with them, while I feel as though I have to work to fill in the worlds of my more sympathetic characters. In the fifth Poke Rafferty book, The FearArtist, we don't get anywhere near the villain of the piece until page 141, if you don't count a four-line exchange of dialogue in the second or third chapter.

All the villain, Haskell Murphy, does in his first close-up is get off a plane, climb into the back of a car, and be driven to his house, and within the four or five pages that drive took, I learned so much about him that I had to rewrite the first part of the book. That's energy. It felt like I'd been digging away at the story with a tablespoon, and all of a sudden I was holding a jackhammer. Murphy even brought a whole new character with him, his daughter, whom he calls Treasure, and she changed not only the ending of the book, but also the book I'm writing right now.

But, as much fun as he was to write, I couldn't give Murphy the book. It's a series, and most readers expect the really important series characters to be alive at the end of the book. If I'd given Murphy his head, it would have been Armageddon.

So I'm dealing with it. I'm dealing with it by writing a new series with a hero who's also a crook, a burglar named Junior Bender who moonlights as a private eye for other crooks. When a crook gets ripped off, he or she is not going to call the cops. They're going to call Junior.

I wrote the first two Junior books, Crashed and Little Elvises, as ebooks, but pretty much the moment I finished the third, The Fame Thief, they suddenly got picked up for everything – publishing (Soho), film (Lionsgate), and audio (Blackstone). So the fun I had writing them is apparently detectible on the page.

Right now I'm writing the sixth Poke Rafferty book and the fourth Junior Bender (all of the first three will be published by June) and I'm hoping that the energy will average out between the two series. As much as I love writing the Pokes, they're less fun (read: harder work) than the Juniors. Almost everyone in the Juniors is crooked to one degree or another, and they've all got that energy. Writing them is like playing with matches—the old matches that would strike on anything. I never know when the page is going to catch on fire.

Crooks. What would we do without them?

 

What are your favorite crooks, creeps and villains, dear readers?  Let us know, and you may win one of two copies of the first Junior Bender mystery, Crashed, or a copy of the latest Bangkok thriller, The Fear Artist.

Timothy Hallinan is the Edgar- and Macavity-nominated author of the Poke Rafferty Bangkok Thrillers, the Simeon Grist Mysteries, and, now, the Junior Bender Mysteries, to be published beginning this November by Soho Crime.  Hallinan also edited the ebook SHAKEN: STORIES FOR JAPAN, which raised money for Japanese tsunami relief, and and MAKING STORY: TWENTY-ONE WRITERS ON HOW THEY PLOT, the first in a series of TWENTY-ONE WRITERS books for aspiring novelists.  Tim blogs at The Blog Cabin. You can follow him on Twitter as @TimHallinan and friend him on Facebook.

 

Into Thin Air? AUBREY SACCO, age 23,is MISSING in NEPAL

Search in Nepal Heats Up for Missing US Hiker Aubrey Sacco
(May 20) -- A massive search has been launched in Nepal for a 23-year-old Colorado woman who disappeared during a remote nature hike late last month.

ROSEMARY: Following is all the information available from news reports and the website set up by Aubrey Sacco's parents.

It's been months and there's still been no further word on the disappearance of Aubrey Sacco, a young American who left some of her things at a hotel, took a bus from Kathmandu to SYABRUBESI on April 19th, and began the 7/8 day LANGTANG trek in the Himalayas on April 20th. She planned to follow the Lonely Planet guide. She should have returned to Kathmandu between April 30th - May 1st.
We have not heard from her since she began the trek. She is trekking ALONE. Nepali agencies are working on this, including the US Embassy.
If you have any contacts or information to help with our search please eMail both:csacco2700@gmail.comfindaubreyglitter@gmail.com

I learned about Aubrey's disappearance while researching my own trip. (We went to different parks, in different directions.) It's my fervent hope that this young woman has gone totally native and is living in a tea house sharing nak cheese with a handsome Sherpa, but I fear that's not the case. Not to blame Sacco, but having just returned from trekking in Nepal, I can't imagine anyone going off on her own, even on a well-traveled trail. One lazy step can send you over the edge - maybe not into thin air or a dramatic crevasse atop Everest - but perhaps down a grassy slope or off one of the swinging bridges where it's possible that unseen, even a minor injury can turn deadly.

I saw one poster about Aubrey at the airport in Katmandu and mentioned her to our contact at the local trekking company. He told me her body had been found, which was NOT confirmed by anything I've read online since I returned. It would not be the only piece of misinformation the man gave us, so I assumed, like many people, he was pretending to know more than he did. Perhaps he said it to make sure my husband and I stayed on the trail and didn't explore on our own.

There are, of course, theories that she's been kidnapped (where's the ransom request?) or sold into slavery (I may be naive, but does this really happen much? And wouldn't be easier to find a young girl at a bar in Manhattan than on a mountainside in Nepal?) I prefer to think she's drinking a Fanta or Everest beer in one of the plywood "guesthouses" sprinkled along the trails. Or perhaps she's joined one of the monasteries and is making butter candles. I hope so.

Namaste, Aubrey.

Come back tomorrow when we feature guest blogger and fellow adventurer Tim Hallinan, author of The Queen of Patpong, a Poke Rafferty thriller.

Into Thin Air

ROSEMARY: Well, I am back from my trip to Everest Base Camp (and went straight to Crimebake where there waas more yakkking than yaks.) More than once over the course of the last few weeks I've sworn my next trip will be to Rome where I can sit in a piazza enjoying a cafe macciato and watching the handsome, long-haired boys go by instead of clinging to a mountainside waiting for the long-haired yaks to go by.

It's all S.J. Rozan's fault. I really wanted to go to Mongolia with her last summer but I flip-flopped so many times it got too late and I whined to my husband that I was never going to have any adventures anymore. (I must be careful what I say to him.) Before I knew it I had signed on for a trip to Nepal.

The gear which had served us so well when we climbed Kilimanjaro a few years back would not be good for 0 degrees and we would be limited to thirty pounds of luggage each which meant investing in some newer lightweight sleeping bags, pads, etc. The salespeople at Paragon and EMS must have salivated when they saw us coming with out three page gear lists. ("You really should go for the down booties, too.")

Like Mark Twain said "beware of all enterprises that require new clothes." And as Dorothy Gale says at the end of The Wizard of Oz "some of it wasn't very nice, but most of it was beautiful."

If I thought I'd be thin and tan by the end of the trip, not a chance. Despite walking uphill for 4-8 hours a day the way you are plied with rice, potatoes and other carbs to keep you going negates any calorie deficit, and the food is so bland I found myself fantasizing about Snickers bars and Lay's potato chips, two foods which are available even in the back of beyond. And can someone please explain the appeal of Fanta to me? It's revolting, yet it too is available everywhere. And the goggles I wore over my glasses, combined with the buff - a neckpiece that most sherpas and trekkers wear - gave me a ridiculous windburn on my face - pink and white horizontal stripes. And as for my trip mates - let's just say a fair number of them will be victims in my next book. But most of it was good and neither Bruce and I were injured nor sufered from altitude sickness. And the pictures are killer.

So what adventures or trips have you embarked on that started with certain expectations and wound up differently?

More exotic posts later this week - Are you going to eat that?, the very exotic Tim Hallinan whose Poke Rafferty series is set in Bangkok, bizarre bazaar shopping, Teamwork: How not to kill your teammates whether you are on a mountain or in a writing group (this is where visits to all those temples and monasteries helped out..) and tomorrow a tragic true ..maybe crime that happened earlier this year in Nepal.
Namaste.

ROBERTA: Well Ro, I just don't have the nerve for a trip like that. But I will love to see your pictures and hear the stories. And we did very much enjoy a trip to Rome this fall--would love to go back there. This is me sampling some local pizza...in a piazza.)

One interesting note though--we had a friend who'd been to Rome last spring and absolutely adored it. I had lunch with her and borrowed all her guidebooks and maps and she totally pumped me up. They're crazy about Paris and this was almost, almost, almost as good. So I think all her enthusiasm set us up for a fabulous experience.

JAN: Probably the most adventurous thing I do -- aside from actually having flown in my husband's old plane - which can best be described as a Volkswagen with wings - is sail. Sailing in the British Virgin islands, with my husband as the captain and me as first and only mate still isn't exactly dangerous. The islands are pretty close together. And that's as dangerous as I get these days. But once we sailed from Cuttyhunk to Newport right after a tornado and it was so rough I threw up seven times -- and I'm immune to seasickness. And once coming into Westport Harbor we hit a sandbar just as an huge wave came up and swamped us -- that means the entire boat tips completely on its side (think Titanic movie right before it drops). The boat righted itself and another wave came and it happened again. Still, I would have been a better sport about if my daughter -- then 15 months old - hadnt been strapped into a car seat on the cockpit (to this day she has nightmares about tidal waves). We survived and I made my husband sell the boat. I think the line I used was "I am not risking my child's life for leisure."

Which, Ro, can be adapted to "Hey Bruce, I'm not risking my life for leisure," if you want to get out of climbing the next mountain.....

RO: See...that's one of my worst nightmares. Ever see The Perfect Storm?

HALLIE: I'm with Roberta, Paris and Rome are much more my speed. But I so admire that you did it, Rosemary! You are the queen of adventure travel.

The most adventurous my travel has gotten is a trip to an eco-lodge in Costa Rica. My husband, who hates small planes, found a driver to take us on the 6-hour drive across the mountains from the west coast to the east and dropped us at the edge of a rickety bridge that said CARS PROHIBITED...for obvious reasons. We carried our luggage (quickly) to the other side where there was an rotting wooden dock where we waited. And waited. And waited.

Finally a white motor boat chugged by, picked us up, took us out the mouth of the river and into the ocean (VERY choppy) and around the other side of a peninsula to the beach where we climbed a steep hill in 90+ degree weather and about 90% humidity to the lodge and our tent platform -- no hot water, plenty of ants, and a wild middle-of-the-night visit from a bat. Check your shoes for scorpions in the morning.

The wildlife was spectacular.

RHYS: The most adventurous thing we ever did was to attempt to be one of the first foreigners allowed into Ladakh( I've even forgotten how to spell it). The jeep ride up the side of a 15,000 foot pass, on a narrow strip of gravel across which small torrents streamed certainly kept me awake and alert--especially as the driver thought he could save gas by switching off the engine every time we went downhil. Not wishing to plunge to my death I sat next to him and slapped his hand every time it went near the keys.

These days our adventures are tamer--although we did do the Australian Outback last fall and hiked among the crocodiles and snakes in Kakadu. But my ideal vacation these days is spending some time somewhere nice--like NICE. I loved my two weeks there this summer, going out for croissants in the morning, shopping the markets, taking local buses. Perfect. Plan to house swap in the Dordogne next summer. Any suggestions?

HANK: My riskiest trip? A blog for another day. Welcome home, Dear RO!