Guest Blogger, Tim Hallinan: In Limbo

Tim for Jeff—Saturday

I have a terrific treat in store this week for our Murder is Everywhere readers: Tim Hallinan is back!  Yes, one of our founding members has been released from the institution long enough to write a post about the maddeningly creative new book he’s just written, titled PULPED, which went on presale on Amazon yesterday, and will be on sale June 9th. 

For those (few) of you who might not know Tim, he’s one of the most talented, productive, and respected mystery writers out there, with twenty novels to his credit.  He currently writes two highly praised and much honored series, the Junior Bender Mysteries (for which Herbie’s Game won the Lefty for best comic novel) and the Bangkok-based Poke Rafferty series, for which he’s been nominated for practically every award out there (Fool’s River comes out in November). 

Where does the man find all the time? It sort of makes you think some of his characters must be helping him out with his chores…more on that below.

In the interest of full disclosure, I have a confession to make.  Though everyone loves Tim, I can say without hesitation, having read Pulped, I hate him, for he’s written the novel I, and every writer I know, will wish we’d written. It is sheer genius, and I guarantee it will have you looking at reading in an entirely new light. 

For the record, Tim says he lives in Los Angeles and Bangkok and is a proud graduate of the Maharishi Mahesh Very High School in Jabalpur, India, though I think the high school info just might be an alternative fact.

Welcome back, buddy.

—Jeff

I'm thrilled to be back here on MURDER IS EVERYWHERE because I've just had the interesting experience of writing a book in which murder is, essentially, nowhere―or at least nowhere any of us is ever likely to go unless we're fictional. It's called PULPED, it's like nothing I've ever written before, and thanks to “Gentleman Jeff” Siger (as we call him) for lending me his spot this week.

I last wrote about Simeon Grist in 1994. By the end of that year I'd put the Topanga Canyon slacker/private eye in six books, all published to rapturous reviews and zero sales. The reviews were important to me because they compensated for the absolute deluge of indifference from the reading public.

Then came the long cold winter as Simeon and his world made the sad descent from bad sales to no sales to out of print. And then from out of print to the final indignity of being pulped. I always liked old Simeon, so I asked myself, “How must he feel?” This book is my attempt to answer that question.

So here's the curve of a discarded fictional detective. While he's being written, everything is fine. He feels real, he experiences the stories as they happens, even if he sometimes can't figure out why he doesn't think up better dialogue or figure out more quickly who the killer is; but, you know, none of us always live up to our own expectations. So he might not always be totally fulfilled, but he's there. Then, when his writer moves on to the next thing, it's like the character has gone into a coma: no new adventures, no sense of time passing.

But while he blissfully snoozes, the various streams of imagination and attention that powered his world and kept him “alive” are dimming and dying out: his writer isn't writing, his readers grow fewer, bookstores stop stocking him, libraries don't replace their copies. And then one day, the publishers send the last unsold copies of the final book in the series off to be pulped, to make cheap newsprint for those annoying free “shopping papers” that materialize on unwanted on your doormat.

Cheap limbo house

At that moment, pop: He finds himself in a crime fiction limbo, in the house or apartment that was written for him. Living elsewhere in the limbo (geography up there is sort of elastic) are other failed detectives from all ages and genres of crime fiction. Worst of all, he discovers he's fictional and that even that world has come to an end. As he says in the book:

“All those books, those gratifyingly thick copies of me doing the same things over and over again with minor variations and iffy dialogue―ripped apart, shredded, and mixed up any old way with the absolute dregs of literacy: men’s adventure magazines, coupons from Bed Bath & Beyond, instructions for assembling barbecues, faux-Regency romances, and (for a specific kind of fiber) used “facial-quality tissue.” Then the whole glop was bleached . . . mixed it with liquids of questionable origin, and pressed it flat to become huge rolls of newsprint. 

“Me; my girlfriend Eleanor Chan; the irrepressible Dexter Smif; my indispensable cop friend Hammond; plus all the bad guys and girls, momentary love interests, thugs and angels, suppliers of drugs, exposition, and local color . . . all of it, our lives and our world, reduced to pulp to carry classified ads for failing businesses, misrepresented used cars, ads for payday loan companies, life-insurance scams. All the trivial ephemera of dodgy basement-level capitalism.”

If he sounds bitter, it's because he is. It can be a blow to discover you don't actually exist, that you were a figment of the imagination, and it wasn't even your imagination.

On the somewhat brighter side, his house remains forever as it was when it was last described, which means there are always three Singha beers in the refrigerator, no matter how many he's drunk. And he's made friends with other failed detectives; his best friend is Lobelia Twombly, the heroine of a series of cooking cozies, each a tribute to another great fictional detective, each with accompanying recipes. Lobelia is particularly of her tribute to Mickey Spillane, in which she came up with a meat dessert.

But . . . it's a cheap limbo. Things are badly built and ragged at the corners, the special effects (weather, etc.) are on the level of “Plan Nine from Outer Space.” Unlike, naturally, the literary fiction limbo, which, according to those who have visited it, is high-budget all the way. Some of the characters even have theme music.

No-expense-spared special effects

So where does the mystery come in? (Remember, Simeon was a detective.) Well, there's exactly one connection with the world “down here.” When someone opens a book in which you're the main character, you can see the reader; you're looking up through the page at him or her. You can hear, although silently, what he or she is reading.

And that's what Simeon is doing when a big pair of hands circle his reader's throat from behind and, to be poetic, put out the light. When somebody kills your reader, to paraphrase The Maltese Falcon, you're supposed to do something about it.

So he has to figure out how to get down there―the most dangerous thing a character in limbo can do―and solve the mystery. And there's this girl, who'd be perfect for him if she weren't, you know, real. And there's the fact that his fictional gun, down in the real world, says “Bang bang” when he pulls the trigger, which is not only embarrassing but also perilous. And there's―oh, yeah―his writer is mixed up in it somehow . . .

Oh, the hell with it. It was the most fun I've ever had writing a book. I might even go back to limbo for a sequel. Or maybe not. This one took me five years to write.

. . . and thanks, Jeff.

—Tim