The Bone Polisher Out as Ebook

Tim Hallinan, creator of the fabulously successful Bangkok mystery series featuring travel writer Poke Rafferty, has brought back the final novel in his previous series as an ebook available for the Kindle at Amazon.com.The title is The Bone Polisher, originally published by Dutton in 1996. Here's how the blurb puts it:

2011 Edgar and Macavity nominee Timothy Hallinan's sixth and final novel featuring erudite Los Angeles private eye Simeon Grist takes place in the West Hollywood of 1995, where the community is shaken by the brutal killing of an older man who was widely loved for his generosity and kindness. In a time when the police were largely indifferent to crimes against gay people, Simeon is hired to catch the murderer—and finds himself up against the most dangerous adversary of his career, a man who kills his victims one once, but twice: once physically and once in spirit. The story's climax takes place at a memorable Halloween-themed wake, but there's a big plot twist yet to come.

Booklist had this to say about it:

"Simeon Grist is a private detective with a problem: he is beginning to fear the bad guys . . . Hallinan's sixth Simeon Grist novel is putatively about a serial killer who is preying on the gay community of West Hollywood, but it is also a meditation on life, on commitment, on the meaning of age in a youth-obsessed and media-saturated culture. Hallinan captures the littlest human idiosyncrasies, the most mundane familial interactions, and infuses them with a depth of meaning not usually found in the crime genre. He even manages to do so with a sly grin and a loopy sense of humor. Read his latest as a straightforward detective novel, or read it as a slightly off-kilter philosophical tome, but do yourself a favor and read it!"

Mostly Murder gave it this equally glowing, though more succinct review

“Creepy . . . Screamingly funny . . . A snappy thriller . . . The only question that remains unanswered is whether success will spoil Timothy Hallinan."

Tim says it didn't sell enough copies to do that. But here's the kicker: you can get the ebook free on March 10, 11 and 12!

Do yourself as favor. Get it.

Book signing features slide show

I attended a signing last night at Mysteries & More, a great small bookstore in Nashville. I’ve been to many signings in a variety of settings where authors talk about their new books, how they came to write them, maybe even read a few pages. This one was different.

Tim Hallinan built his remarks about Breathing Water, his new Bangkok thriller, around a slide show. I haven’t read the book yet, but it sounds fascinating. Tim illustrated the theme of the book with striking photos of Bangkok, from its teeming outdoor markets and its streets clogged with creeping traffic to Patpong, the city’s infamous red light district.

The book deals with the contrasts between Thailand’s hidden elite and the underprivileged that dominate the landscape. Tim’s Bangkok thrillers are built around expatriate travel writer Poke Rafferty and his unconventional family, a former go-go dancer from the Patpong who is now his wife and a young girl from the streets he has adopted.

Tim says what interests him most is exploring the dynamics of the Rafferty family. His slide show explores the backgrounds of his characters. Wife Rose came from a poor section of the country where young girls are sold by their parents into a life of sexual slavery. Some, like Rose, go the bar girl route and travel to Bangkok where they earn money to support their families back home but are free to leave at any time.

He also showed children like those homeless on the streets by the thousands. That was the life Poke’s daughter Miaow lived before he rescued her.

Tim dealt with the secular city and the Thais’ Buddhist roots, showing striking temples and the ubiquitous saphron robes of Buddhist monks. But the main thrust of his presentation dealt with the crux of the plot in Breathing Water, the continuing tension between factions for control of Thailand. The real power in the country is wielded by a small group of super-wealthy Thai-Chinese who are prepared to do whatever it takes to remain in command.

Poke and his family are caught up in the struggle when he wins an unusual poker game. He wins the right to write the story of a flamboyant billionaire with designs to upset the power structure. But those in the dueling factions threaten Poke and his family if he writes the book…or if he doesn’t.

Read more about Breathing Water at his website, TimothyHallinan.com. I highly recommend the series, which also includes A Nail Through the Heart and The Fourth Watcher.

Tim Hallinan's Writing Resolutions

The following Writing Resolutions were written by Timothy Hallinan, author of a series of Bangkok thrillers featuring an expatriate travel writer named Poke Rafferty and published by William Morrow. The most recent was THE FOURTH WATCHER. Coming next, in August, is BREATHING WATER, which Adrian McKinty has called "Another masterpiece of crime fiction from Hallinan." Tim bides his time between Los Angeles and Southeast Asia, where he is now hard at work on his next book. I thought these worthy of repeating for those who (like me) call themselves writers.

Writing Resolutions

Okay, I know that resolutions are made primarily for the brief flush of accomplishment that always accompanies good intentions, however remote the possibility of their being carried out. I make a new set every New Year and watch them recede behind me, forlorn and abandoned, by the middle of January. But I made the resolutions that follow in August of last year, and I'm still following most of them most of the time. And, for me, they work, which is to say that pages actually do emerge from wherever they come from, and pile up on my desk in an extremely satisfying fashion. And I also find that keeping these resolutions active does two important things: It actually makes me write a little better, if only because it keeps the world of my book open to me from day to day, and it reduces the anxiety that (for me, at least) always accompanies creative work.

So here are my August 2008 writing resolutions. I promised myself that I would:

1. Write daily, and by that I mean seven days a week. I will take a day off only when it’s absolutely unavoidable and never, under any circumstances, take two days off in a row.

2. Read widely, not just the kinds of books I write, but classics, science, history, biography, poetry, drama — remembering, as Nero Wolfe says, “The more you put into a brain, the more it can hold.”

3. Live consciously, remembering that everything in the world, even the things that are most unpleasant (and maybe especially those things) are all material.

4. Take chances every time I write. Try to write things I haven’t written before and don’t know how to write. Take myself off the map of the familiar.

5. Avoid glibness and try instead to bring the words from the heart. Remember that clever isn’t the same thing as smart.

6. Follow my characters rather than trying to push them around like chess pieces. Remember that plot is what characters do, not a box to jam them into.

7. Remember that the book I eventually write will not be the book I thought I was going to write. Have the courage to take off in new directions as they present themselves, and to discover, as you do when you travel, that it's possible to get on the wrong bus and then discover it's the right bus after all.

8. Be grateful that I’m allowed to take part in this internal miracle, in which whole worlds appear inside my head, usually one vivid glimpse or one turn of phrase at a time, and I have the freedom to chase them down and try to get them on the page.

9. Be open to criticism from my circle of first readers, without getting defensive; remember, if nobody likes it, it’s just barely possible that there’s something I didn’t get on the page.

10. Write hot, edit cold: when I am writing, keep the thermostat on high; be open, fecund, and grateful for everything that comes through. Rewrite only when something obviously better presents itself. When I am editing, be cold, assessing, and gimlet-eyed, willing to sacrifice even the most precious of my babies in the cause of the book’s greater good.

I could easily list ten more, but ten is the tradition. So I'll add an eleventh in the guise of a closing paragraph. In the first chapter of his new memoir, What I Think About When I Think About Running, the great Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami quotes a marathon runner as saying, “Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.” I need to keep that in mind whenever I write.

What that means to me is that there are going to be times when writing hurts: when the words won't come, when the story seems to end in a blind alley, when your characters all turn into people so awful that you would come back from the dead just to prevent them from attending your funeral. All of that is inevitable. What's optional is internalizing that, handing it to the writing demons so they can make me doubt my idea, my characters, my talent. The trick to writing (for me, at least) is the same as the trick for running: keep going anyway. The pain may be there, but I can run (or write) through it as long as I don't turn it into suffering.

And get the next word on the page, which is all that really matters.

Thanks for that sage advice, Tim. And just to show that I have followed it somewhat, here's a link to the opening chapters of my new book, The Surest Poison.