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? Timothy: It’s funny, because the thing I love best about the Juniors – aside from a handful of the characters who are in every single book, is thinking up the crimes. Thinking up the crimes the most fun In the very first book which is called Crashed, he breaks into a house by taking a delivery truck with an empty refrigerator carton in it, wheeling it up to the front door and putting it in front of the door. Then he goes around and the carton has been cut open down the middle. He can kneel down in the refrigerator carton and work for an hour if he has to, opening the lock. And I thought, this is brilliant! Three days after that book came out, I got a call from the police in the Northern San Fernando Valley saying “how do you know about the refrigerator burglaries?” And I said, “I made it up!” And he said, “Well we’d like you to come down. We’d like to talk to you”. So I figured, OK! So I went down and we actually had a great time. I showed him the second book that I was working on, and in fact much later I called the same cop and I said: “Is there a burglar I could talk to?” And he said, “that’s kind of an unusual request…” But he in fact did set me up to talk to a guy who had stolen some emeralds. A variant of that is in Nighttown. It’s not the main crime, and in the book I believe they’re pearls. But anyway, it’s the best thing for me – first of all, is that crooks don’t have to play fair. They don’t have to be politically correct, they don’t have to be careful about people’s feelings. Junior is, but not always. Worse comes to worst, you pull out your gun and you plug somebody. So that’s fun. Anybody that writes thrillers knows that writing the crook, there’s a special sizzle with it, a kind of energy. The second thing is of course that I’m figuring out all these puzzles; how to get into houses, how to get out of houses and all the rest of that. And one more thing: I have an endless store of useless knowledge. I’ve read everything in the world, and somehow it’s all stored away in this attic in my head. When I’m writing, there’s a little guy up there flipping through this stuff and when he’s up there doing stuff, I pay attention. In Nighttown, there’s a very important plot thing that has to do with Spiritualist Movement. It came into being in the middle of the 19th century, and boomed after World War One when everybody was bereaved. It was about people who we have lost but not really being lost and actually being among us and all the rest. I know all of that, because I had read it at some point. I’m in this spooky, old mansion and I think – the picture on the wall is a spirit picture. It’s a phoney, it was made in the 19th century of somebody who’d just lost a loved one and transparent behind him or her is a loved one. And people thought it was real. It’s just a cheat double exposure, but nobody knew how photography worked in those days. That was actually a key to the development of the whole book. That picture actually became the launching pad for the solution of the crime. Spirit picture – Mary Todd Lincoln shadowed by Abe. Jenny: Yes, I was fascinated by that because I didn’t know about that spirit picture thing myself at all. I actually wondered – this is a little bit of an aside – but I wondered if its popularity may have been partly propelled by the huge number of personal losses that there were associated with the Civil War, and people just wanting to contact their loved one and make sure they were OK, or wanting to believe that. Timothy: The Civil War was earlier than this. The Spiritualist Movement- the first mediums in the world (people who talked to the dead for you)- were a pair of sisters named Fox who lived in upstate New York, and who had double jointed toes. They could pop their toes under the table to make a whole bunch of percussive noises and you would come and ask your question of your loved one, and they would translate it for you. Out of that came the Medium Movement, and out of the Medium Movement came Spiritualism which was helped along enormously by the millions of people who died in World War One, and the tens of millions of people who died in the Spanish Flu. So in the case of about five years, about 15-20 million people died. Everybody was bereaved, and Spiritualism was perfect for that. One of the funny things about Spiritualism is that the public sides pro and con. The con side – the guy that said Spiritualism was a fraud- Houdini, the magician who you think would be on the pro side. The person that said “no, Spiritualism is the answer to everything” was Conan Doyle, who created the most logical detective in the world. That just knocks me out. They brought to a close a lifelong friendship. They wound up not speaking for about 30 years, because of this. Conan Doyle and Houdini – a ‘ruined friendship’ Jenny: Look you have the most fascinating information, you really do. Timothy: Well that kind of thing moves a story along in a really interesting way I think. The trick is to leave it in a way so that you don’t leave out the people who don’t know it already. You have to explain it without slowing the story down. Jenny: Sure. And that leads on nicely to talking about your first mystery series, featuring a rather over-educated private eye named Simeon Grist. Now I really smiled to myself when I saw that, because it’s even obvious in the Junior books that you’ve got a tremendous amount of really interesting esoteric knowledge there. Simeon was probably where that all started to find a home, was it? Timothy: Well I started writing Simeon I based it partly on me, because I had stayed in college as long as possible. I knew how they graded you in college, but I didn’t know how they graded you outside it. So I stayed, and I got a whole bunch of really absolutely useless degrees, and Simeon did exactly the same thing. So when I wrote Simeon, I was very consciously setting up a character in which random knowledge could sometimes be very useful. I’m fond of those books, and I was sort of learning out how to write at the time that I wrote them. I was learning what a novel really was. I wasn’t actually ready for that three book contract that came when I wrote the first Simeon that was published. But I don’t regret it – after the sixth Simeon came out, it sank like a stone and I actually quit writing for about eight or nine years, made more money and then came back to writing. I started writing the Bangkok books. Pulped – a hero’s final indignity Jenny: Yes, and that’s lovely that we now morph into the Poke Rafferty thrillers, because they were thrillers rather than mysteries, and they were sent in Thailand. That was quite a big jump from what you had been doing. I read somewhere that you basically took time out of your full time job to fly to Thailand and write that book, Everything But The Squeal, the first book in the series. Is that right, have I got the right idea there? Timothy: Yes. It sounds more purposeful than it was. I knew I needed to get time to write, and I had built a fence around six weeks that I thought I was going to spend in Japan. I had been in Japan with the LA Philharmonic Orchestra on the first tour ever of Japan by a Western symphony orchestra. It was one of the most moving experiences of my life, especially the concert in Hiroshima. The people had come in, and there was this big empty square in the middle of the seats. The lights went to half, and the survivors came down the aisle. They were lame, and they were burned and it was one of the most moving moments of my life. They had been scorned after the war – people thought they were contagious. But when they came down that night, the entire audience rose and applauded them, and the conductor of the orchestra walked offstage because he was crying. Anyway, I was going to stay in Japan and write it, but it was freezing. So I called my travel agent – this is how long ago it was, there was a travel agent – and I said “send me any place in Asia that’s warm, where I don’t need a visa”. She said ‘Thailand,’ and I said ‘Fine.’ So I got off the plane in Bangkok in 93 degrees. I’m wearing a puffy coat with ear muffs, and I’m halfway across the airport and I see the immigration guys pointing at me and falling off their chairs laughing. I had never known that immigration guys were able to laugh before! I didn’t know they had that gene! I thought, maybe I’m going to like it here! And I did, I loved it. So I wrote most of the first book sitting in a cafe . . . My travel agent, a very nice young woman with a relatively restrictive frame of reference thought- “I can’t just put him anywhere in Thailand”. It’s ‘Sin Central’of world. So she booked me into a room at the Ramada Hotel, thinking nothing could be safer than the Ramada. It was right at the end of Patpong road. I woke up at 5’o clock in the evening having slept all day, walked out and here’s all this neon! There’s all these suspiciously friendly women waving me into these bars! Seriously, my very first time in Thailand and this is what I saw! So I wrote the books – I wrote the first book in a coffee shop on Patpong Road in the day time, and one thing that happened on the third or fourth day – they saved me a window seat. They would take a table by the window and put all the napkins and serving stuff on it. When I came in, they’d clear it all off and I’d go sit there because that’s the way the Thai’s are. The nicest people on earth. So I’m sitting there working, and I’m aware I’m being looked at. On the other side of the window, there’s an absolutely filthy little girl, maybe seven or eight years old, hair all matted. She’s got a box around her neck. It’s got chewing gum in it. It’s hanging from a leather strap that’s against her neck. I look at her, and she runs. About two days later she comes back, I look at her and she runs. Poke Rafferty Thrillers On the third day, I realize she’s not interested in me at all. It’s the screen on the computer. She’s having the ‘kid screen’ reaction. About the fifth time I waved her in, I set up the game – the only game on the computer, pinball- showed her how to work the paddles, told the waitress to give her anything she wanted and went for a walk. I came back about 45 minutes later, and the booth was empty. In the middle of my plate was a stack of chewing gum. There was an astronomical pinball score on the machine. She was in the length of trillions! And I met her like that for three or four years in Thailand. Her name was actually Miao, who is the name of the little girl in the books. Then she disappeared, and nobody would tell me where she went. But I knew where she went; she was absorbed into the sex trade. In the novels, I did the thing that I couldn’t do in real life, which was to say that I adopted her- fictionally at least. As far as I’m concerned, she’s the center of that whole series. She’s the most interesting character in the whole series. Jenny: And you’ve mentioned that it is both a thriller and a family drama, an ongoing family drama, and that the family drama side of it has developed its own following. Do you think it’s because of that character? Timothy: You know when I wrote it, I had only written books with adults in them. A very funny thing happens to time when you have a child in a book. Six months means nothing to an adult, but to a child it’s half a lifetime. And she started at seven in the books, and she’s now 14 or 15 because nobody knows when her actual birthday is, and she’s a completely different human being. I mean, she’s been in a good school for six and a half years, she’s become an actress at the school starring in the school plays. But still underneath it, she’s this filthy little street kid. She cannot lose that. In the book I’m writing right now which is called Street Music, she has just won the part that she thinks she was born to play which is Eliza in Pygmalion, also known as My Fair Lady – the street girl who has turned into a fine lady. When I tell you that at the beginning, it was a fight to get her to wash her hair – the earliest books – and her idea of fun was to go into her room and line up her pairs of shoes because she couldn’t believe she had three pairs of shoes, and now she’s mastering Cockney and that’s enough to keep me writing all in itself. I decided a long time ago that when she’s 19, and she moves out and Poke and Rose are all alone drifting around in their apartment that was once so small and now feels enormous; I think that’s the end of the series. When she’s gone, it’s the end of the series too. Turning from specific books to wider look at your career – Jenny: Is the one thing you’ve done more than any other that you feel may be the secret to your longevity? Timothy: If I have longevity, which I’m not sure I do, I continue to be published but I’ve never sold a gazillion books. I think it’s because the only thing I really care about is characters. A mystery is a great plot device, because what it does is it creates a stressful situation where it stretches characters out to the point where they’re almost transparent. Their real character is revealed. That’s what’s interesting about a thriller to me, as you find out gradually who’s really OK and who’s really not. And that’s all I really care about, is characters. I don’t have any idea what I’m going to write when I write it. I knew in this book- the book I’m writing right now- that Miao was going to be Eliza, and there was going to be a horrific upset three quarters of the way through. That’s really all I knew. When I started Nighttown, what I knew was that Junior was fond of the dark- he think s of it as his portable zip code, because he’s a burglar and he does everything in the dark! And I wanted to put in some place that was too dark for him, and that’s what I knew. So I made a haunted house, this abandoned mansion that’s going to be bulldozed in four days, and which bristles with anonymity, venom and hatred. Out of that comes the whole story and that’s the way I’ve always worked. Either I have a feeling – the way a character would feel inside about something- or a sense that if I take these three people, they’re like marbles. I think about this basic idea, and if I drop them on the desk will they roll in an interesting manner? If they do, and it looks good to me, I follow them and the whole book comes out of that. I have no plot outline, I don’t know who the villain is going to be. I don’t know anything. I’m there with the characters in real time, which is one of the reasons when I break down like I just did when I went to Joshua Tree, I don’t really have anywhere to go. It’s not like I’ve got notes outlined or anything, I’ve just got a feeling and I’m writing the feeling until the book is over. Widows of Malabar Hill – Sujata Massey Timothy as Reader Jenny: The series is called “The Joys of Binge Reading” because I see it as providing inspiration for people who like to read series . . . .The preference in our culture for the instant and addictive – Netflix in reading… So – turning to your taste in fiction who – if anyone – do you “binge read” Timothy: I’m not personally much of a binge reader. Almost ever the only crime fiction I’ve ever binge read is Nero Wolfe. There’s something about his New York brown stone – that is like it’s set in amber. It’s perfect. They all just sit absolutely still until you get there, and then everything comes to life! I read those every 8-10 years. Nero Wolfe’s New York brownstone Right now I think we’re in a Golden Age of crime fiction. I don’t think it’s been much better than it is today. I could name a dozen authors I love. Not all of them sell a lot, I mean Lisa Brackmann who just wrote an astonishing book about a woman who is targeted by a bunch of frustrated males on the internet- a brand new idea. You know these “in cels” These involuntary celibates who get together and essentially harass woman, and she’s written a book about a woman who’s a target of that, called Black Swan Rising. It’s phenomenal. Almost anything Lou Berney writes. There’s a lot of people whose work I really love. A lot of the books I read over and over again don’t tend to be crime fiction. Anthony Powell’s twelve novel set A Dance To The Music Of Time, I’ve read that five times in my life, and it’s different every time I read it. Lisa Brackmann – Black Star Rising Also I read a huge amount of non fiction. There’s a woman named Sujata Massey who has just written a book about India called The Widows of Malabar Hill. It’s about four women who are kept behind the screen, and they’re not allowed outside at all. Their husband has died, and the brother in law is probably cheating them out of everything. The first female attorney in all of India is assigned to make the notes to decide whether the male can intrude or not. She’s the first real female Indian lawyer. And it’s a wonderful book. I mean it takes you into a world that I knew nothing at all about. Sujata Massey; she’s terrific. A lot of the people I read right now are women. The new Lou Berney is called November Road, and it’s sensational. It’s about the Kennedy assassination. Jenny: That sounds just like the sort of thing I love to be honest… I love a mixture of fiction and fact. Timothy: He’s really good. He wrote two very funny crime novels and then he wrote The Long and Far Away Gone which is just fabulous, a completely different book. This is the third completely different kind of book for him. He’s disgustingly young. Circling around from beginning to end Jenny: At this stage in your career, If you were setting up all over again, what if anything would you change? Timothy: I would have started writing at twenty, and I would have done nothing and write to the extent that that was possible. I feel like I have not benefited from a late start, although I have had some wonderful experiences, some of which finds their way into my writing. But I would be a much better writer if I’d written 25 more books than I have. Lou Berney – November Road Jenny: Twenty books sounds pretty amazing to me, I must say! What is next for Timothy the writer – what projects do you have under development I think you’ve suggested you’d like to write more romantic suspense? Timothy: Well at the moment I’m writing Night Music, which is the Bangkok book I told you about. One of the characters is a homeless woman. She’s very interesting to write. I have a book- a series that I’m starting to work on right now – it takes place in Hollywood in 1931, which is the year after sound came in and essentially for the first time in history a mature art form- silent pictures – was simply thrown away like a piece of paper. People got killed, people killed themselves… it was just a miserable time because sound just destroyed silence. My heroine is a chorus girl in the Busby Berkley movies, which actually saved Warner Brothers’ butt. And anybody says anything in front of a chorus girl in 1931, because they’re barely human as far as the men who run the studios are concerned. Yet she is always the smartest person in the room. She will solve a murder mystery in the first book, which is called The Wrong End of the Rainbow, so I’m using that title. Jenny: It is a gorgeous title. Timothy: All these girls from all over America went to Hollywood to become stars- thousands and thousands of them. There was a rite that they had; they took with them packets of wildflower seeds. When the train crossed the border into California, they went to the caboose and they threw out wildflower seeds. For years, there were 10 or 15 miles – a stretch either side of the tracks – that were just a forest of wildflowers. And all those hopeful girls, only eight or nine became stars. The rest of them were treated like dirt or went home with their hearts broken. That interests me a lot. This young woman, who refers to herself as “an unknown who from Calimazoo” is a character that I’m really having a good time writing. So that will probably be a series. And I’ve just finished a book called Mrs Archuleta and Magic, which is about a little girl who’s seven and a woman who’s 70. The woman is the border in the house the little girl’s mother bought when the marriage was falling apart. The little girl is alone because the father left her, and the woman upstairs is done by choice and hates children. But 70 years apart, they’re the same little girl And the way they cross each other’s lives changes everything for both of them. It’s not a mystery… I have no idea what it is. But I love it, and I haven’t even shown it to an agent yet so you’re the first person outside of my family who knows about it. But I’ll write whatever I can as long as I can keep writing. “Archuleta” is a Basque name. When she was 8 years old, she was hauled from the cool rained Pyrenees to Phoenix, Arizona where she spoke no English, and went to school dressed in wool in the middle of summer. The kids broke into laughter when she walked into the room, and she had to claw her way out of that childhood. It did not leave her sympathetic. She’s one of my favourite characters, but so is the little girl! I love this book. I don’t know if it will ever get published – there are obviously genre problems with it – publishing is largely a matter of “which shelf do you put this on in the store”. This crosses genres, but I loved it and I’m glad I wrote it. Jenny: You wouldn’t consider self publishing? Timothy: You know I actually did self publish the first two Juniors. I went to my editor at William Morrow, and said “look, I’ve got an idea. It’s like comic crime fiction and the hero is a burglar who’s the private eye for crooks”. And she said “in all seriousness, I don’t think the public associates you with comic crime fiction”. And I said, “Joan. I don’t think 99% of the public knows I’m alive, but a lot of them like comic crime fiction”. And she said, “well I don’t think I’m interested”. So I wrote it and published it myself, and immediately Soho bought it. I also self published recently the seventh Simeon Grist book. That’s something I wanted to write for a long time, in which the last copy of the last book in the Simeon series gets pulped. When that happens to you, all of a sudden you’re in a limbo with all the other unsuccessful literary private eyes and cops. Your only contact is when somebody opens one of your books down here in used book form, briefly, but you can follow the words that person is reading. When they close the book, you’re disconnected again. You’re sitting there in this house you’ve lived in forever- it’s always got the same number of beers in the refrigerator, it’s just endlessly dull. And in the third chapter, after he’s watching one of his readers reading The Man With No Time I think, a pair of hands come around his throat. And the book lands on the floor, and the guy lands face down on top of the book. One of his readers has been murdered. He doesn’t have that many readers. He’s got to figure out how to get down there, and solve it. And he does. It’s a crazy book. It’s called Pulped. I never showed it to a publisher, I just self published it. Jenny: That’s wonderful. Coming to an end where can readers find you online… Timothy: I absolutely love to engage with my readers. First of all, I have a website called www.timothyhallinan.com. On that is a button that says “Contact Tim”. All they’ve got to do is push that, and then they can send me their name or address, or send me a letter. I have a newsletter right now that goes to about 9000 people, all of whom got on that mailing list by doing that. The newsletters are pretty funny, and there’s only about four a year so you’re not being inundated. So that’s the best way to get in touch with me. Also at the end of every book, I write about the music I listened to when I wrote it. I get hundreds of people writing to me to suggest music to me. I really appreciate that. Jenny: Look wonderful, we could talk all day I’m sure! But it’s lovely to have had the chance to have this time together. Timothy: Thank you, and thank you for asking me. California wildflowers – for all the girls who never made it. Thanks To Our Technical Support: The Joys of Binge Reading podcast is put together with wonderful technical help from Dan Cotton at DC Audio Services. Dan is an experienced sound and video engineer who’s ready and available to help you with your next project… Seek him out at [email protected] or Phone + 64 – 21979539. He’s fast, takes pride in getting it right, and lovely to work with. Our voice overs are done by Abe Raffills, and Abe’s another gem. He got 20 years of experience on both sides of the camera/microphone as a cameraman/director and also voice artist and television presenter. Abe’s vocal delivery is both light hearted and warm and he is super easy to work with no matter the job. You’ll find him at [email protected]

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