Timothy Hallinan is the author of the Simeon Grist, Poke Rafferty and Junior Bender thriller series. His new Junior Bender holiday mystery, Fields Where They Lay, is now on sale.
Your title, at first glance, is
merely a line from The First Noel for
a novel set at Christmastime. However, by the end of the book the title
resonates with a powerful double meaning that takes the story to higher and
more philosophical plane.
Did the title evolve out of the story, or
did the story generate from the title?
I had a handful of titles before I started
writing, as opposed my usual method, which is to have a title before I get much
of anything else. Titles, for some reason, come easily to me. (I wrote an
entire book, King Maybe, to figure out why those words were stuck in my
head.)
So this time around, I was entertaining
half a dozen possibles, and in the very first paragraph, which was
supposed to be nothing but a description of the lumpish, rundown shopping mall
in which most of the book takes place, I found myself writing this: “The lump,
a hulking, windowless, three-story ellipse with a flat roof and stains shaped like dirt icicles running down its outer
walls, was in the center of a field where herds of sheep or cattle might once
have grazed but which was now covered in flat black asphalt, marked in white
diagonal parking lines to create an enormous herringbone pattern.” And it was
evident to me, since 100 words in I was already writing about grazing animals,
that the title was Fields Where They Lay, and from then on the book sort
of adapted itself to that.
And, of course, what happens to the
shepherds in the fields not only announces the birth of a new King but also
brings into the manger the ordinary witnesses, the shepherds, whose eyes in
painting after painting, are glazed with the wonder of what happens there. It's
already mysticism of the highest kind, whether you're a Christian or
not.
In a fun twist, Junior spends much of
the novel prowling around a shopping mall. At one point he goes into a shop
filled with cheap reproductions of famous works of art, but the only thing that
gives him pause are some framed Calvin
and Hobbes cartoons.
It was at this moment that I really began to warm up to Junior. :)
Are you a Calvin and Hobbes fan? And do you envision Junior as having been a
Calvin-like child?
Calvin and Hobbes
was the final enthusiasm of my father's life. He discovered the strip during
his last decade, and after years and years of reading (and complaining about) the
same old comics ―
mostly Peanuts and L'il Abner ― suddenly all he wanted to talk about was Calvin
and Hobbes. He'd had a very Dickensian childhood after his father abandoned
the family, and my guess is that it was way short on fantasy and adventure.
Before he died I got him the first C&H books, and they meant a lot
to him. And although I felt pretty much the same way about them as he did; my
childhood was much more comfortable than his, but I essentially lived in books,
so I understood instinctively the power of the fantasy world Hobbes opened up
for Calvin. So I guess that reference in the art store was sort of a salute to
my father, who was nothing at all like Junior's.
Dickens makes it into the book twice,
once in a reference to Mr. Pickwick, and another with a reference to Scrooge.
Does Christmas make you think of Dickens? Is he a favorite writer?
He is a favorite, although I like
Trollope better because I think Trollope's women are much more convincing than
Dickens'. But Dickens was probably the first great writer in English to
celebrate Christmas in stories, and he's probably still the best. The
Victorians pretty much assembled the modern Christmas (it had been banned under
the Puritans and wasn't even a working person's day off until well into
Victoria's reign) bringing back Father Christmas and replacing the traditional
holly and ivy of pre-Christian celebrations with the Christmas tree, which
Victoria's husband, Prince Albert brought with him from Germany. Dickens wrapped
it all up in a ribbon of wonderful prose and sort of froze it in time for us.
And I think you could even argue that he played a role in putting children at
the center of the holiday.
I am also curious about some of your
existential influences. Junior develops a friendship with a Jewish mall Santa
named Schlomo, who alludes to the crucifixion of Christ when he calls Bender
“the good thief.” But given Junior’s highly existential outlook, I’m wondering
if you were at least partly thinking of Waiting
for Godot, and the famous exchange in which Vladimir wonders about the two
thieves, and why, despite four different versions of the story, the world only
focuses on one: the story of the thief who was saved?
I'm not much of an existentialist. What I
love about the Good Thief is the thing Junior says in the book: that his
do-not-pass-go route to paradise created an awkward exception to the Church's
insistence that they had a monopoly on Heaven because there was no getting
there without a priest.
There was some scrambling in Rome during the 5th
and 6th centuries to make it very clear that this was a unique
one-off, an impulsive and not-to-be-repeated act of mercy on Jesus' part,
rather than a possible short cut to eternity. I'm sure that some cardinal
called for a scriptural rewrite at some point. (I would have loved to have been
in those meetings.) There's a kind of awful comedy here that appeals to me
enormously, rich, fat Italian men of high birth taking charge of the spiritual
legacy of a half-starved Jewish pauper. But I've never been a big Becket fan,
so “Godot” wasn't on my mind when I wrote that part.
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| Timothy Hallinan (photo: Morgan Schmidt-Feng) |
Busted. I loved how Lovejoy's “gong”
vibrated in his chest in the presence of the real thing. I can say shamelessly
that when—halfway
through the first book, Crashed—I realized that a good burglar needs to
develop a good eye in order, as Junior says, to be able to tell the “stuff from
the duff,” I instantly thought of Lovejoy. I haven't read those books in
probably 25 years, but I thought of them in a hundredth of a second. I also
admired Lovejoy's extremely equivocal moral code. So I didn't have him in mind
originally, but in a scene in which Junior is looking at (I think) some art
deco jewelry, all of a sudden there was old Lovejoy in the room with him,
gonging away.
He's a great character. Junior meets a shop owner named
Bonnie, who sums up Christmas by saying “Everything’s better at Christmas, but
everything’s worse, too.” Why do you think Christmas has evolved into this
binary opposition?
I think it's the enormous gulf between the
event the holiday purports to celebrate―the birth, in a stable, of a desperately poor
child who, for millions of people, heralded God's active interest in the world
he was supposed to have created―and
the way it's celebrated today, a mercantile orgy whose success is measured not
in spirit but on spreadsheets. As I say in the book, the modern Christmas theme
music is a duet for sleigh bells and cash register.
Jesus' parents, if they were alive today, would be in a kind of agony at their inability to afford to give their child
the things the media would tell him he wants and needs. Christ's notion of of
giving has been corrupted into gimme through a global campaign to dangle
desirables in front of millions of children, and that can be hard on families
at virtually all economic levels except the highest. The basic symbolism of
Santa in a shopping mall (how convenient), where canned music stands in
for the heavenly host, and tinsel and blinky lights stand in for the brilliance
of heaven, sums up the problem with a kind of big-league, blunt-force impact.
So well said. These oppositions continue throughout
the novel. On the one hand, Junior is depressed and not convinced about an
overall meaning of life. On the other,
he is clearly open to small moments of joy or grace, as with the singing of a
high school choir or the presence of little children. He says, “It’s impossible
for me to be melancholy around small children. They deserve the effort it takes
us to do better.” Is this because Junior
is a father, or because children are the best representatives of humanity?
Junior has had four rites of passage in
his life: realizing that he wasn't what was wrong with his father―that it was his father's
problem; meeting Herbie and being initiated into burglary; meeting and marrying
Kathy; and the birth of Rina. He hadn't particularly liked himself as a child,
and Rina sort of allows him to start over. He adores her, as he should, and
like so many parents he realizes the extent to which children need, and
deserve, the best that adults can do. If the world is ever going to be a better
place, he thinks, it'll be because it's better to its children. He means literally
the sentence you quoted.
Ultimately, being with Ronnie may prove to
be a fifth rite of passage, but we don't know yet.
Junior extols the value of lists over
emotion: “An emotion is a cloud, but a list is a stairway.” Is this meant to demonstrate that Junior
represses emotion, or that he prefers logos over pathos as a way of getting
through life?
No, he's just a guy. Many guys react to
cloudy circumstances, especially emotionally cloudy circumstances, by
taking refuge in a list. There's something deeply reassuring about a) b) c).
Just listing b) assumes you'll survive a).
That's a great point, although I am the list maker in my family, and my husband and sons avoid any sort of mental organizing.
Despite his sometimes grim worldview,
Junior Bender is very funny. At one point he reveals that “Whole areas of my
mind . . . distrust other areas.” Do you ever feel this way as a writer?
First, a comic view of the world that
can't handle some pessimism and a few reversals won't outlast baby teeth. And
second, I think that humor often arises from internal conflict; you catch
yourself again and again doing something that part of you knows is wrong,
unproductive, self-destructive, or just plain stupid. There's a narrow range of
possible reactions: vowing to learn a lesson that you know from experience
won't last; getting furious with yourself; thinking about suicide; or laughing.
None of the first three reactions is likely to be productive, so you might as
well laugh, even if it does, over the years, give you those annoying wrinkles
at the corners of your eyes.
And there is an absolute iron curtain in
my mind when it comes to writing, which is, after all, how I spend most of my
time. I know that the entire story is somewhere in there,
complete and perfect, before even I type the title. But it reveals itself to me
in bits and pieces, many of them in the wrong order, as if after one part of me
comes up with the whole thing, another part cuts it into jigsaw pieces so it
can be fed to the part that sits there trying to get it down in the most
confusing possible order. I almost never have the feeling I'm making up a
story; I feel like I'm either uncovering something that's already there, like
archaeology, or assembling it. like a puzzle.
What a well-written reflection on the mystery of the creative process!
Junior spends a couple of pages
discussing keys as things of beauty. I had never thought about them this way,
so this was fascinating, especially when he notes that people in the ancient
world once wore keys as status symbols.
Did they do this because the keys were
physically beautiful, or because of the idea that the keys could open things
forbidden to all others?
I think it was partly the Louis Vuitton
Syndrome. We all know that Vuitton stuff is actually ugly, but lots of people
like to flash it around because of what it's supposed to say: I'm rich, worldly,
and I have stuff you don't have.
Keys were the same, on one level. A key
implies a lock, and a lock implies that the owner has something that's valuable
enough to be locked away. In other words, I have stuff you don't have.
But in an age when metallurgy was a rough
art, fine, graceful keys also had an aesthetic appeal. And finally, they were a
badge of tank and trust: certain keys were entrusted only to specific members
of the household.
Back to the existential for a moment:
Christmastime is in many ways a perfect setting for a crisis of belief.
Consider the words of Junior in these passages:
--“I felt a pang for
them, for everyone working here, selling their precious hours for small change,
sealed away from daylight and moonlight, grubbing in a till, taking money from people who often couldn’t afford to spend it, and running mental addition
and subtraction all day on their own bank balances, the strength or weakness of
their family ties, the holes in their lives, now that the holidays were upon
them. Tis the season.”
--“Christmas has always
seemed to me to be an empty box, a broken promise . . . the last letdown before
the theoretically Happy New Year.”
--“The
edge of sorrow is especially sharp in what is supposed to be a season of joy."
--“It’s where we all
lived . . . . we’re out there in that darkness whether we’re alone or with someone.”
Despite all Junior’s
moments of darkness, there is an implied waiting
for the light, and Junior does experience the corresponding light in
several ways. Do you think that one
needs to identify the darkness before they can see its opposite?
I'm kind of surprised
that this particular book prompts these questions―when I wrote it, I was thinking mainly about the characters
and trying to hold the reader's interest and, once in a while, make her laugh.
But reading those passages sort of gets my attention. Yikes.
There's a lot of “Wasteland” and “Prufrock” sentiment in
that, the mermaids not singing for us, and so forth, but at the center of it
are, I think, two things. First is the reality that, for many people, both
Christmas and New Year are emotionally complicated holidays. Second is the fact
that we no longer live in the age of angels singing in the sky and kings
following a star to divinity – and how much easier belief would be if we did.
Toward the end of the book, Junior drives up into the hills and thinks about
what he's been through.
“The breeze was quite cool—chilly, even—but the hood of my
car was warm, and that was where I was reclining with my back propped up on the
windshield, looking at the little points of fire in the broad cold expanse of
the heavens."
“Must have been something to have been a shepherd, seeing
that star. The angels, I remembered, were in Matthew and the star was in Luke.
Dividing up the miracles, I supposed. I wondered how it felt to believe fully
and unquestioningly in all that extravagant divinity.”
So there may be a little envy there, maybe a feeling that
it's not fair to spill miracle after miracle across the earth in a short thirty-year
period and then let us sit in the dark for 2100 years. This is, of course, a
personal opinion, not an attempt at theology.
It's a starkly beautiful sentiment. Speaking of darkness and light, we just had a momentous election which, depending on how things go, could
plunge the United States into a moral and spiritual darkness. For whom would Junior Bender vote? Would he
write in Calvin or Hobbes as a protest?
Junior gave good money―not even stolen money―to Bernie Sanders in the
hope that our electoral process would be returned to us. In the absence of
Bernie, he would have voted for Clinton. Without a second thought. And in this
particular election, he would regard a write-in or a third-party vote as being
the equivalent of memorizing the Constitution and the complete election laws of
the state of California, then getting a ballot, researching the candidates and
the propositions, meticulously filling it in, and then using it to polish his
car.
Would that Junior had some more influence on the voters.
There are many loved ones in Junior’s
life, including his daughter, his ex-wife, and his girlfriend. However, he
bemoans the fact that he really does not know his girlfriend at all. Can we
fall in love with people we don’t know?
I'm the wrong person to ask, I fell in
love with my wife in about ninety minutes. And--three decades later--so far, so good.
How wonderful and refreshing. Do you plan to write more books in
the Junior Bender series?
God willing. There's a story to tell that
begins in the last scene of Fields Where They Lay that I'd love to
write. Also, I've figured out some extremely cool ways to steal stuff and I
have several dozen really, ummmm, interesting crooks in mind.
Good to know!! Junior fans will be thrilled. Where can readers find out more about
you and your work?
I almost never do anything to it, but my
website is www.timothyhallinan.com,
and it's got a REALLY good section on how to finish the novel you begin.
Thank you again, Tim, for this well-written, funny and
thought-provoking holiday mystery!
