The mystery genre—and readers—embrace myriad voices. We can have 10 different authors writing about Los Angeles or New York City or Chicago and each will have a different take on that city.
That also applies to authors writing about Asia.
Timothy Hallinan, at left, has lived, on and off, in Southeast Asia for more than 25 years. His series include five novels about rough-travel writer Philip ("Poke") Rafferty, including The Fear Artist and The Queen of Patpong, and three comic capers about burglar-detective Junior Bender, including Little Elvises, Crashed, and The Fame Thief. He also edited Shaken, a collection of short stories with proceeds going to earthquake relief in Japan.
Lisa Brackmann’s debut novel Rock Paper Tiger set on the fringes of the Chinese art world, made several “Best of 2010″ lists. Brackmann, at right, followed that with Getaway, which won the Los Angeles Book Festival Grand Prize and was nominated for the T. Jefferson Parker SCIBA award. Her latest is Hour of the Rat.
Hallinan recently interviewed Brackmann about her travels and stint living in China and how those experiences influenced Hour of the Rat.
Hallinan: How and why did you choose China as the setting and how did Ellie McEnroe, a very individualistic heroine, come to you?
Brackmann: I’d already written a fair amount of stuff, but to be honest it was mostly pretty weird. I finally told myself I had to write something that someone might actually want to buy. I decided to draw on my background living in contemporary China. I hadn’t seen modern China as a setting in much western fiction, and I thought it would be an awesome location for a suspense novel. Plus, I just wanted to share a little something of the country that I found so endlessly fascinating.
As for Ellie, another essential element in my novels is some issue, or issues, that I’m passionate about. At the time I wrote Rock Paper Tiger that was the Iraq War and the larger War on Terror.
So, I came up with Ellie McEnroe. Brought up by a single mother, a “good Christian girl” who joined the National Guard because she needed money for a potential college education and/or health insurance and finds herself in the middle of a war she’d never intended to fight. I saw Ellie as a person who hadn’t had a lot of formal education but who is smart, and has a strong sense of right and wrong. She’s always struggling with not wanted to get involved but her now deeply rooted need for justice, and anger at injustice, tends to put her in the middle of messes.
Hallinan: In Rock Paper Tiger more than Hour of the Rat, the present-day Chinese art scene is an important element. What is it about it that most fascinates you?
Brackmann: I’d briefly been an art major at UCSD, which is known for its conceptual art orientation, and I have a very dear friend who was deeply involved in the contemporary art scene and who was a gallery director in Los Angeles. So I got to sort of eavesdrop on that world a lot. My first time in China coincided with the Democracy Wall movement, and that I actually saw the groundbreaking Star Star Exhibit there—very briefly, and I had no real idea what it meant. After I returned to the U.S., I followed stories about China, particularly about the rapidly developing contemporary art scene there. I was fascinated by the combination of a repressive government and performance art and other kinds of art with clear political subtexts. In recent years, the Chinese contemporary art market has boomed, with works by Chinese artists selling for a lot of money. The political content has remained in many cases, with various degrees of interference from the authorities. This juxtaposition fascinated me.
Hallinan: How would you describe Ellie?
Brackmann: She definitely knows all the best places to get good, cheap dumplings and she can steer you toward interesting art openings and underground parties. She’s also a good person to have around if you’re traveling in China—she knows all the ins and outs. However, if she invites you out for a late night bar crawl, or tells you that she heard this place is “interesting,” but there’s “absolutely nothing to worry about” —I’d maybe think twice. She doesn’t mean to get into trouble. She’d tell you that the last thing she wants is trouble. But she’s kind of a trouble magnet.
Ellie is a person who covers up a great deal of sensitivity and moral outrage with snark and a hard shell. She’s smart and observant. And yes, she does swear a lot. Part of that “hard shell covering up a sensitive core,” and also, true to her experiences as an accidental soldier and war vet.
She’s also pretty funny. I think these books could get a little didactic without a good dose of humor, and Ellie definitely has a well-developed sense of the absurd. Even in the middle of great outrage she tends to find the humor and absurdity.
Hallinan: Tell us a little about how the plots arrive
Brackmann: The key is looking for connections between seemingly disparate things. I am way more a pantser than a plotter—a lot of the story happens when central character runs into that chainsaw (usually not literally, because that could get messy), though generally I have a few emotional high points and major incidents that I’m aiming to get to. Creating suspense can be a matter of both narrative trickery and creating tension throughout. Tension doesn’t have to mean action on every page—instead, I think of it a pulling that narrative thread tight as I can and, I hope, pulling my reader along with it.
Hallinan: Tell us about the emotional arc of your first year as a published novelist
Brackmann: To be honest, I really didn’t expect much to happen with the book. When things actually started going well, it took me by surprise. The first time it really sunk in was when I went to Murder by the Book, in Houston, for my first real book event. I was on a panel with Victor Gischler and Dwayne Swierczynski; I hadn’t slept due to the crazed red-eye I flew in on, and we just had a really great time. Later, the store owners, McKenna Jordan and David Thompson, took us all out to dinner, and I was sitting there with these great people, and it suddenly occurred to me, “Oh, this is what I do now. I’m an author.” It felt really good.
Hallinan: When you wrote Rock Paper Tiger, were you thinking that Ellie might wind up the central character in a series?
Brackmann: I had no intention of making Ellie a series character. Rock Paper Tiger was this kind of weird book, with a lot of emotional intensity in the writing, a lot of issues I was grappling with, and when I wrote “End,” I’d said the things that I wanted to say.
That said, after taking a break from Ellie and her world, I started thinking, Hmmm, maybe there are still more stories to tell. I’d had to cut a lot of backstory about Ellie’s mother from Rock Paper Tiger, for example. I was interested in exploring how Ellie might have grown from the last book—how she changed from facing some of her demons, and if not defeating them, at least enduring them. I also felt that I’d barely scratched the complexity that is modern China. I particularly wanted to deal with environmental issues, which I’m passionate about, and which are central in the contradictions and challenges that today’s China faces.
Hallinan: Your second series about an American woman named Michelle who tangles with the drug cartels in Puerto Vallarta was launched last year with Getaway. How is Michelle different from Ellie?”
Brackmann: Michelle is older than Ellie, fortyish, and her younger days weren’t full of the kinds of traumas and challenges that Ellie faced. Instead she went through life taking the path of least resistance, seeking a comfortable lifestyle. Which to me is pretty realistic—it’s what most of us do. I certainly have at many points in my life.
She gets into a situation in Mexico where she’s completely in over her head and things go terribly wrong and she has to adjust to an entirely new reality. Although Michelle may be a little naïve at first and inexperienced, she’s pretty tough and resilient. Like Ellie, Michelle’s a sharp observer. Unlike Ellie, she has more of a talent for fitting in, or seeming to.
Hallinan: What is it about Asia that holds you?
Brackmann: I think a lot of it has to do with my living in China at a young age, shortly after the Cultural Revolution. My personality was still pretty fluid, and all of a sudden, was blasted to bits by this series of intense experiences in a culture that was completely alien from the one I’d been brought up in. The whole experience completely altered the course of my life, in so many ways that I can’t even imagine who I would have been if I hadn’t gone.
Then, going back, for all of the tremendous changes in China, for all the negative aspects of my initial experience there—living in a police state among a population traumatized by what was essentially a low level civil war—there was something about it that felt like home. I’ve said before that going back to China felt like excavating my own past, helping me to understand who I was and how I got there. I think that’s true. I think that a part of me will always be in China, and that China will always be “home” to me – maybe not my only home, or the place where I want to live. But I’ll always remember that first time, hanging out with a trio of college students who were struggling with the restrictions that governed their lives, and one of them said to me, “Remember us. Tell others about our lives, what it’s like for us here.”
I’m trying.
