Showing posts with label Tim Hallinan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tim Hallinan. Show all posts

Tuesday, October 23, 2018

LIT SALON 11/7: TIMOTHY HALLINAN, NANCY TINGLEY & WENDALL THOMAS

Join Mystery Readers NorCal in Berkeley for an evening Literary Salon with mystery authors Tim Hallinan, Nancy Tingley, and Wendall Thomas

When: Wednesday, November 7, 7 p.m.
Where: RSVP for venue address (Berkeley, CA)
This is a free evening, but YOU MUST RSVP to attend. Address sent with acceptance. Space limited.
RSVP: janet @ mysteryreaders . org

TIMOTHY HALLINAN

Award winning author Timothy Hallinan has lived, on and off, in Southeast Asia for more than 25 years. He began writing books while enjoying a successful career in the television industry. Over the past seventeen years he has been responsible for a number of well-reviewed novels and a nonfiction book on Charles Dickens.Hallinan has been nominated for the Edgar, Nero, Shamus, Macavity, and Silver Dagger awards. He is the author of twenty novels, including For the Dead, The Hot Countries, Crashed, Little Elvises, The Fame Thief, King Maybe, and Herbie's Game, which won the Lefty Award for Best Humorous Mystery. Tim currently maintains a house in Santa Monica, and apartments in Bangkok, Thailand; and Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

NANCY TINGLEY

Nancy Tingley is an independent art historian and consultant with a specialty in Asian art. She has worked extensively in the art world and as a museum curator. Most recently, she curated Arts of Ancient Viet Nam: From River Plain to Open Sea, jointly organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and The Asia Society, New York. She is the author of The Jenna Murphy Mystery series - A Head in Cambodia and A Death in Bali.



WENDALL THOMAS

Wendall Thomas teaches in the Graduate Film School at UCLA, lectures internationally on screenwriting, and has worked as an entertainment reporter, script consultant, and film and television writer. Her short fiction has appeared in the crime anthologies Ladies Night and Last Resort. Her novel Lost Luggage was nominated for the Lefty and Macavity Awards for Best Mystery of 2017.

Monday, October 10, 2016

Move Over Nordic Noir. Here Comes the Sun: Guest post by Michael Stanley

Michael Stanley:
Move Over Nordic Noir. Here Comes the Sun

Two years ago, we—a couple of crime writers who set our tales in Africa—went to the Icelandic Noir conference in Reykjavik. We arrived as fans of the subgenre known as Nordic Noir. And so we remain. But something happened at that gathering that got our goats.

It wasn’t the Scandinavian authors so much who miffed us, but rather the editors, the translators, the critics, and the garden-variety book pundits who kept differentiating Scandinavian Noir from “ordinary crime fiction.” The message was clear to those of us who write crime in sunny climes: Nordic Noir writing was special. What we wrote was ordinary.

What?

The first time we heard that distinction so stated, we rolled our eyes. But when the same words were repeated as panels came and went, that “what?” turned to “WHAT?” We vowed to throw down the gauntlet. To challenge the notion that only one variety of setting made for superior crime novels.

Within a few months, support came from Iceland in the person of our dear friend Yrsa Sigurdardottir, author of brilliant (despite the gloomy settings) Scandinavian mysteries and thrillers. In blurbing Michael Stanley’s forthcoming book, she wrote, ‘Under the African sun, Michael Stanley’s Detective Kubu investigates crimes as dark as the darkest of Nordic Noir. Call it Sunshine Noir, if you will – a must read.’ And there it was—the brand name for our challenge to the worldwide, years-long tsunami of Nordic Noir fiction.

The best way to launch the new trend, we thought, was to show off a panoply of locations. Fortunately, unlike Nordic gloom, sunshine is not localized on our globe. To this end, we have collected new, original short stories from seventeen wonderful writers from around the world, who set their stories in hot, sunny places. Sunshine Noir very well might be the most diverse array of stories in the history of crime anthologies. The voices, the settings, and the plots of the collection take readers to deserts in both hemispheres, beachfronts and ports along the equator, tropical islands, and interior jungles. Historic Istanbul and Mombasa figure into the mix, as does steamy Singapore. There are even a couple of Scandinavian villains to make a tongue-in-cheek point.

For all the fun and friendly competition that we hope to unleash with the Sunshine Noir challenge, we think it addresses a real issue. The field of crime fiction is crowded with many, many worthy authors. A few superstars, whose books go directly to the bestseller lists, are extremely well known and widely read. At the same time, there are also scores of mid-list writers whose work is excellent, admired by their fellow authors, and praised by critics, but whose existence is not well known, even to avid readers of the genre.

In times past, independent bookstore owners and clerks took a keen interest in discovering new fiction voices. Knowing their customers, they would recommend the little known writers. With thousands of such possible champions around the country, a less-than-famous author had a chance of building a readership. Not so anymore, now that so many Indie bookstores have gone out of business. At the same time, publishers—squeezed for profits—have abandoned efforts to publicize their mid-list books, leaving it to authors to make the effort. Nowadays, short of a film deal that actually results in a hit movie (the odds are about that same as being hit by lightening), all but already famous authors must rely on personal appearances and whatever mix of social media noise they can manage, to make themselves known.

Recently, the craze for Nordic Noir made this self-promotion easier for authors entering that sub-genre. With a built-in interest in all crimes Scandinavian, with critics and bloggers covering the field, and fans following the fad, many new authors easily found buyers for their work. We applaud this.

However, we find the rationale for the craze doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. When asked why Scandinavian crime writing stands out, pundits give a couple of reasons: They say “The settings of the stories enhance their effect because they intensify the psychological depth of the protagonists.” That is certainly true of some Nordic crime novels, but not all. And these qualities are certainly not exclusive to stories from the gloomy northern climes. Or they say “The landscape becomes a character in the story.” This is true of almost all vivid mysteries and thrillers, regardless of where they are set.

So, in the hopes of starting a trend of our own, we offer an intriguing alternative to the unrelenting gloom of those northern settings where real crime rates are low because it’s too cold to go outside, and it’s difficult to pull a trigger with gloved hands. Rather we want to remind readers that the shadows are darkest where the sun is brightest—places where tempers are short and crime flourishes.

Noir film and crime fiction were born in sunny California. Those early examples find their legitimate descendants in the stories in Sunshine Noir. Characters caught in dark doings in hot, sun-filled places. Thrillers in Yemen, the Sahara, Ethiopia, Puerto Rico. Murder mysteries in Botswana, Guadeloupe, Arizona, Singapore, Nigeria, Ghana, New Orleans, Istanbul.

Sunshine Noir proves the point made by Tim Hallinan in his Preface to the anthology: “The bright, warm, lush world is a greenhouse for evil.” 

Move Over Nordic Noir! The following HOT writers are gunning for you:

Leye Adenle, Annamaria Alfieri, Colin Cotterill, Susan Froetschel, Jason Goodwin, Paul Hardisty, Greg Herren, Tamar Myers, Barbara Nadel, Richie Narvaez, Kwei Quartey, Jeffrey Siger, Michael Stanley, Nick Sweet, Timothy Williams, Robert Wilson, and Ovidia Yu.  Edited by Annamaria Alfieri and Michael Stanley

Friday, March 21, 2014

Left Coast Crime 2014: Calamari Crime

What a terrific convention! The 24th Left Coast Crime Convention is being held in beautiful Monterey, CA this year! The weather is beautiful, the panels and interviews are exciting, and the  people are great!

I decided to post photos today!  I'll post a summary when I get back...or if I find any time while I'm here!

Monterey Bay
Seagull waiting to Register for LCC
Authors Catriona McPherson & Rhys Bowen

Award Nominees: Louise Penny, Catriona McPherson, Jeff Siger, Lisa Brackmann
Authors Tim Hallinan & Lisa Brackmann

Award winner William Kent Krueger
G is for Guest: Sue Grafton
Sunrise on another day at Left Coast Crime!


Friday, August 2, 2013

Lisa Brackmann & Tim Hallinan: Lit Salon, August 7

Literary Salon: August 7, 7 p.m. Berkeley, CA. Make a comment below for more info and to RSVP.

Lisa Brackmann has worked as an executive at a major motion picture studio, an issues researcher in a presidential campaign, and was the singer/songwriter/bassist in an LA rock band. Her debut novel, ROCK PAPER TIGER, set on the fringes of the Chinese art world, made several “Best of 2010″ lists, including Amazon’s Top 100 Novels and Top 10 Mystery/Thrillers, and was nominated for the Strand Magazine Critics Award for Best First Novel. Her second novel, GETAWAY, won the Los Angeles Book Festival Grand Prize and was nominated for the T. Jefferson Parker SCIBA award. Her third novel, HOUR OF THE RAT, “a light-hearted romp through environmental apocalypse,” features the return of ROCK PAPER TIGER’s Ellie McEnroe and a few other old friends (foes?) from ROCK PAPER TIGER.

Timothy Hallinan is the author of three fabulous series: the P.I. Poke Rafferty Thrillers, set in Thailand, the Simeon Grist mysteries, set in Los Angeles, and the Junior Bender comic mysteries, featuring a burglar who works as an investigator for other crooks. Hallinan, who has lived, on and off, in Southeast Asia for more than 25 years, began writing books while enjoying a successful career in the television industry. He wrote songs and sang in a rock band while in college, and many of his songs were recorded by by well-known artists, including the platinum-selling group Bread. For years he has taught a course on “Finishing the Novel” with great results—more than half his students complete their first novel and go on to a second, and several have been, or are about to be, published. Tim currently maintains a house in Santa Monica, California, and apartments in Bangkok, Thailand; and Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

Tuesday, July 10, 2012

Timothy Hallinan: Half-Cocked Hitchcock

Timothy Hallinan is the Edgar and Macavity nominated author of nine widely praised books: eight novels—including the Bangkok Poke Rafferty thrillers, the Los Angeles Simeon Grist Mysteries, and the Junior Bender comic Mysteries, as well as works of non-fiction. 
Tim Hallinan has lived, on and off in Southeast Asia for more than 25 years. He began writing books while enjoying a successful career in the television industry. He wrote songs and sang in a rock band while in college, and many of his songs were recorded by by well-known artists who included the platinum-selling group Bread. For years he has taught a course on “Finishing the Novel.” Tim currently splits his time between Los Angeles and Southeast Asia. 

TIM HALLINAN: HALF-COCKED HITCHCOCK

In the interest of full disclosure let me say that I don't really believe my new book, THE FEAR ARTIST, is half-cocked anything. Instead, it's fully-cocked me, the best book I could write at the time I wrote it, and it's gotten starred reviews all over the place, so it seems to be okay, even if it's not “Rear Window.”

But I did consciously model the story on some of the classic Hitchcock tropes, beginning with the one so brilliantly used in “North By Northwest” and elsewhere—the total innocent thrown mistakenly into the maw of something evil, which he has to defeat somehow. In the first sentence in the book, my hero, travel writer Poke Rafferty, is backing out of a Bangkok paint store, having just bought four gallons of paint to brighten up his apartment.

In the fifth sentence, a very large American man, running at full speed, bumps into Poke and brings him to the pavement. By the end of the third page, the man has been shot to death from sniper distance while on top of Poke, and cops have materialized from nowhere to insist that no shots were fired.

It's all downhill from there. Because the man speaks three words to Rafferty—meaningless to him—several people who are active in the War on Terror in Thailand are afraid those words are very bad news for them, and they'll do anything to put Poke out of commission.

So it's a Hitchcock setup and I go on to develop it with some proven Hitchcock story and suspense mechanics (he discusses these things very generously in his book of interviews with FranÒ«ois Truffaut). But, of course, Hitchcock had several things going for him that I don't.

First, he was Hitchcock. Nothing I can do about that.

Second, he had actors. Despite his famous scorn for actors, Hitchcock worked with the best. His stars were nonpareil, but it was the casting of the small parts where he really stood out. He used great character actors: Norman Lloyd, Martin Balsam, Leo G. Carroll, Jessie Mae Landis, Lurene Tuttle, Robert Ellenstein, Alan Mobray, and on and on—look any of these people up, and you'll recognize them at a glance if you like old movies. These performers could give you an entire character in two lines of dialogue, and then remain vivid in the audience's minds throughout the film. In their absence I have to make do with little black marks on a white page that look the same for the hero as for the villain, so it's up to me to try to make up the loss of those actors by finding other ways to make my minor characters as distinctive and as memorable as possible.

This can be done partly through a good physical description, but it's mostly how they think and talk. You can only describe a character so many times, but dialogue is a description of a different kind; its rhythms, its imagery, the view of the world it suggests, all tell us something about the character. Sometimes, early in a book, I'll go through an exercise in which I have all my characters describe the same thing—say, the front of a hotel—and see how differently they can do it. Once I'm comfortable with the various ways they approach that, I'm more secure in their dialogue.

Here's another thing Hitchcock had that I don't: great cinematographers. I can't take you to Bangkok as vividly as Hitch took his audiences to Monte Carlo or that midwestern cornfield where the crop spraying plane tried to gun down Cary Grant.

What I have instead is the ability to go inside my characters' heads and show the reader Bangkok as they experience it. I've come to believe, in fact, that a place that's just externally described in a book (“Jack looked up at the Tower of Pisa and then checked his watch.”) is essentially scenery, while setting is the relationship between the characters and the place. So while I can't show you Hitchcock's Bangkok (if he had ever filmed Bangkok) I can show you Poke Rafferty's Bangkok. And I can show you other characters' Bangkok, too.

In the end, of course, books and movies are probably different in more ways than they're similar. Perhaps the filmmaker's greatest advantage is that his or her story will be told in a couple hours' time and that the audience comes to it having set aside the interruptions of real life. We, or course, have to seduce the reader over and over again, beckon them back to the book while more important things conspire to interrupt them. I think that makes it all the more important that we learn what we can from Hitchcock and other masters of the various storytelling media. We may be fighting for the reader's attention, but we want them to return to our story eagerly. Reading should be an oasis, not a tug-of-war.