VENTRILOQUISM by Timothy Hallinan

I am thrilled (ha) to welcome Timothy Hallinan, author of the Poke Rafferty series of tense, sinister thrillers set in Thailand, to The Thrill Begins. Not only is Tim a wonderful writer who manages to make the exotic universal, but he's also a terrific friend to emerging writers, and he knows this crazy, wonderful, tumultuous biz as deeply as anyone does. Reading Tim's body of work is a great way to get to know him. Today's post below will show you a slightly different side.

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Most of my books begin with an idea. It's usually not much of an idea – most often, a person in a situation. I usually don't know how the person got into the situation, and I never know how he/she will get out of it. I figure that out by writing the book.

But three years ago, when I was writing the third Poke Rafferty book, BREATHING WATER, I began to hear a voice. I heard it in snatches of dialogue, and then it began to tell me bits of story. That was my first glimmering of Junior Bender, the burglar who moonlights as a private eye for crooks, and who is now at the center of two books, CRASHED and LITTLE ELVISES.

BREATHING WATER had been a difficult book to write, and it was just beginning to resolve itself. I sometimes visualize writing a book as climbing a long slope, picking up things you think you'll need when you go down. The uphill portion is often tough, and in BREATHING WATER it had just barely been on the good side of possible. So I'd crested the hill and started down, and I was at the point where speed was picking up and I could sense the shape of the book and see half a dozen possible endings, and . . .

. . . and this voice wouldn't shut up.

Not only wouldn't it shut up while I was writing, but it obviously napped while I was having dinner and then had a great big pot of coffee, because it went into filibuster mode the moment I tried to go to sleep. One night, I gave up and went downstairs and wrote a long scene about a burglar trying to steal an ugly painting in a house full of Rottweilers, and the only weapons he has is a shelf full of “marital aids” over the bed in the room he's burglarizing. When it's over—and I will say, with all immodesty, that it's a very exciting and very funny scene—he gets into his car and someone in the back seat pushes an automatic into the back of his neck.

At four in the morning, I made a decision: I put BREATHING WATER aside for what I thought would be four weeks, and wrote CRASHED.

It turned out to be five weeks, which is still the fastest I've ever written a book. And I didn't actually feel like I was writing; I felt like a ventriloquist's dummy. Junior never let up until I'd (or we'd) finished, and then he went to the Bahamas or something, and I went back to BREATHING WATER. I finished that book, edited and published CRASHED as an ebook because I couldn't get a good enough offer from a traditional publisher, and wrote THE QUEEN OF PATPONG, the fourth in the Poke Rafferty series.

Ninety minutes after I finished that book, Junior started talking again.

The Junior books are written (obviously) in first-person, but he's very generous about sharing the page. He's brought a whole gallery of supporting characters with him, crooks mostly, whom I hear just as vividly as I do Junior.

One of my favorites is his friend Louie the Lost, who earned his nickname when a getaway car he was driving with four nervous crooks in front and two million in stolen diamonds in the back wound up stuck in traffic in Compton with half the black population of Los Angeles staring in through the windows. Louie is a free-associator, which is heaven for a writer. For example:

“This is a hypothetical,” I said into the phone. The light in the intersection where I was going to turn left went from green to yellow, and I slowed behind two massive SUVs whose owners were doing everything in their power to ensure the future prosperity of Saudi Arabia. “So. Let's say you're suspected of murder. Let's say you know you're suspected of murder. Let's say you're sort of sitting around waiting for the cops to come and get you. You even hire someone to try to do something about it, try to get you off the hook.”

“This has a familiar ring,” Louie said.

“And now let's say that it turns out you have a perfectly good alibi.”

After a beat, Louie said, “For?”

“For the murder. Let's say several people can place you at home the entire day when Derek Bigelow, your hypothetical victim, got made dead.”

I could hear Louie working on his cigar. “How hypothetical is this?”

“Actually, not at all.”

“This is like a word problem,” Louie said. “Remember word problems? If Karen gets on the train in Chicago going West and Harvey gets on another train in San Francisco going East and the two trains are on the same track and one of them's going 59 miles an hour and the other one is doing 83 miles an hour, and it's 1600 miles from Chicago to San Francisco, and Harvey's in the front car when the trains crash into each other, then how much did Karen weigh?”

I said, “It's like that? How is it like that?”

“Because it doesn't make any sense,” Louie said.

So Junior has talked me through two books now, and I have to say they're the most fun I've ever had with my fingers on a keyboard. It's been three years now since he started yammering in my ear, and he remains unique—no other character has done it. And as long as he wants to talk to me, I'll continue to write it down.

So far, other people seem to like him, too. Of the 32 reviews CRASHED and BREATHING WATER have received on Amazon, 32 are 5-star and one is 4-star. A third book, MUTHER'S DAY, is about one-fifth written but has been parked while I write the next Poke Rafferty, THE FEAR ARTIST.

And this time, Junior seems to understand. He's shut up for the present.

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Timothy Hallinan, the 2011 Edgar and Macavity nominee for Best Novel, will have his fifth Poke Rafferty novel published by Soho in 2012, and brings back Junior Bender, the crook who made his debut in last year's highly-praised CRASHED, in this year's LITTLE ELVISES.