Book Review of Timothy Hallinan's The Fear Artist

The Fear Artist by Timothy Hallinan

Trouble is Poke Rafferty's expertise. Before he arrived in Thailand, he had written two off-the-beaten-path travel books, Looking for Trouble in the Philippines and Looking for Trouble in Indonesia. But Poke doesn't need to look for trouble in Bangkok. It has no trouble finding him. In Timothy Hallinan's The Fear Artist, trouble runs him down outside a Bangkok paint store.

Poke's wife Rose, a beautiful former Patpong dancer, and their adopted 12-year-old daughter Miaow have left Bangkok to visit Rose's family. While they're gone, Poke is going to paint their apartment. Apricot Cream for Rose; Urban Decay for Miaow. He is walking out of the store carrying the paint when some pedestrians run past. A "once-tough" American or German man in his sixties knocks him down. Poke hears noises like the cracks of a bat hitting a ball. Before they can stand up, the man whispers three words and dies. Almost instantly, policemen and a TV crew appear. The police hustle Poke away. The blood is just a nosebleed, they say. The man will be fine. Right.

Poke is interrogated by a suspicious Major Shen of Thai security, who alludes to Poke's past brushes with trouble. Shen demands to know Poke's relationship with the man outside the paint store and what he heard. Poke remembers that it was a woman's name and a city, but he can't recall it exactly. After Shen reluctantly releases him, Poke kicks in a door to see his observers behind the surveillance mirror and discovers a familiar American Secret Service agent, Richard Elson, who looks frightened. Poke doesn't recognize the older American in the room, "a ball of fat topped by a thatch of unruly reddish-gray hair that's been slapped any old way on top of a fat red face.... Protruding from each nostril is a tuft of red hair so substantial that Rafferty imagines himself grabbing them in his fists and chinning himself on them." It's Haskell Murphy, formerly associated with the infamous Phoenix Program, designed to fight terror with terror in Vietnam. In no way is he a good man for Poke to cross.

In predominantly Muslim southern Thailand, Buddhists are being beheaded, run over, and bombed on a weekly basis. The response of the government to this terror and the riots it has spawned has been as ineffective as its muddled and contradictory response to Thailand's worst monsoon season in 60 years. In fact, the weather is the perfect metaphor for Poke's situation: if the city drowns, or if Poke is killed by the Americans or the Thais, it's just collateral damage. Poke needs to run.

Poke looks for help from a colorful assortment of characters that includes his 17-year-old half-sister Ming Li; Arthit, a Thai cop and Poke's best friend; Dr. Ratt, who runs a mobile clinic of doctor-nurse teams in Toyota Corollas; and an unreliable former Russian agent named Vladimir, whose voice is "liquid and heavy and saturated with melancholy," as he fondly recalls a CIA friend of Poke's, "I try to kill him many, many time." Vladimir is not sanguine about Poke's chances. If a snake tells Poke he's a horse, Poke will probably look for a saddle, Vladimir scolds.

When Poke arrived in Bangkok, it was "just one jaw-dropper after another."

But Poke is less naïve than Vladimir thinks. Poke has spent years in the company of powerless people who do what they say they do, but he recognizes the evil that happens in the dark, when the rich and powerful's acts don't match their words. The danger of the "Age of the Spook" is a theme of The Fear Artist, as well as the responsibility a parent has to a child and how that parent shapes a child. Various parent/child relationships are examined: the longing Poke has for the absent Miaow, who's going through a normal phase of rebellion; the unsettling attention Murphy bestows on his troubled 12-year-old daughter Treasure; the skills Poke's father Frank, who once worked for a Chinese Triad, taught Ming Li; the conflicted relationship Poke has with Frank; and the formality of the love between Miaow's best friend Andrew and his Vietnamese diplomat father. Children and women––young, blind, deaf, working the sex trade or addicted to drugs––are shown as both vulnerable and resourceful.

Timothy Hallinan

Like writers Colin Cotterill and John Burdett, Hallinan sets his series in an exotic foreign location and then writes with insight, style, and wit. Hallinan has a gift for creating memorable characters, a turn of phrase, dialogue, and descriptions that merit re-reading. (Faces in a dark bar patronized by spies are "pasteurized by the gloom," and "the bartender lifts his chin in a silent query, as though the sound of his voice is classified.") There are some disturbing scenes of torture appropriate to the plot. Suspense builds to a clever ending.

The Fear Artist is the fifth book in the Edgar- and Macavity-nominated Poke Rafferty series. It's not necessary to read previous books before reading this one, because author Hallinan divulges enough to bring a reader up to speed without ruining earlier plots. That said, you'll probably want to read the others; the first is 2007's A Nail through the Heart. Simply put, this is a first-rate series, and The Fear Artist is a superlative read.

Note: I received a free digital copy of Timothy Hallinan's The Fear Artist. It was published in July 2012 by Soho Crime.

Pass Me the Good Books and Mashed Potatoes, Please

My kitchen desk is a cascade of notes written with ever-increasing numbers of exclamation marks and capital letters. The notes reflect this week's chaos as my family counts down the minutes to our Thanksgiving trip to Grandma and Grandpa's house. My husband's parents live in Florida and it seems odd to me to visit them at this time of year. For me, fall is fires in the fireplace, piles of leaves to shuffle through, the honking of wild geese as they fly south and seeing my breath when I go outside. More than those things, however, the holiday of Thanksgiving is a time for being grateful, sharing with others and getting together with family and friends. Today, let's look briefly at books that examine ties that bind families and friends within the context of their larger societies.

From the first sentence in Assassins of Athens ("Andreas Kaldis once read or heard somewhere that the chatter never stopped in Athens."), we're taken into the mysterious social network of powerful old families and their influential friends who control Greece. The body of a teenage boy from a wealthy Athens family is discovered in a dumpster behind a nightclub. The investigations of homicide detective Kaldis take him to the heights of Athens society as well as its shadowy underworld and he finds friends in unlikely places. This is the second of an outstanding three-book series set in Greece written by Jeffrey Siger. It's even more fun if you've begun with Murder on Mykonos, although it isn't necessary. 

American writer Poke Rafferty has married his Rose. The "they-lived-happily-ever-after" ending for them and their adopted daughter, Miaow, whom Poke saved from life on the streets, is threatened by the appearance of a very bad man from Rose's past as a Patpong bar dancer, in Timothy Hallinan's The Queen of Patpong. This is a sumptuous literary thriller and the fourth book in a series set in Bangkok, Thailand. You don't have to read the series in order, but you'll deny yourself a treat if you don't. The first book is A Nail Through the Heart, in which we meet these characters and learn about Thailand through Poke's eyes.

When the eccentrically groomed and dressed Lucy Bellringer walks into the office of Chief Inspector Tom Barnaby, he is reminded of a beautiful but tattered old bird of prey. Miss Bellringer insists that the death of her dear friend, retired school teacher Emily Simpson, could not result from natural causes and she's right. Barnaby and his sidekick, Sergeant Troy, put their noses to the trail and discover the relationships and events that led to this homicide. The Killings at Badger's Drift by Caroline Graham is the first book in a well-written traditional English mystery/police procedural series and is a fine book to read in a chair by the fire.

Eliot Pattison is a wonderful writer with three mystery/historical fiction series, all of which provide good reading. In the first Duncan McCallum book, Bone Rattler: A Mystery of Colonial America, McCallum's friend Adam Munroe is one victim in a series of killings onboard the Ramsey Company ship transporting indentured prisoners to colonial America. Because of his medical training, McCallum is asked to examine the evidence, but the crimes remain unsolved when the ship reaches America. McCallum's efforts continue against the background of the French and Indian War. This is a masterful book that depicts the struggles of individuals and conflicting cultures in the New World.

Gabriel Du Pré is of Métis ancestry (Cree, French and English) and he works as a Montana cattle brand inspector in a series written by Peter Bowen. In Coyote Wind, the first book of the series, Du Pré assumes the sheriff's role when the sheriff is shot in a case involving a long-ago homicide. This book is enjoyable due to Bowen's unforgettable characters and his knowledge of Cree culture and rural Montana. Du Pré is a warm and honorable man who doesn't break stride dealing with his lover and his two daughters, each more than a handful. Compared to Du Pré's friends and family, dealing with criminals is easy.

Helen Simonson's 2010 debut, Major Pettigrew's Last Stand, is not a mystery but it is such a good book I'll mention it anyway. I read it at the suggestion of Sister Mary Murderous. When Major Ernest Pettigrew's younger brother dies, the 68-year-old Major develops a friendship with Mrs. Jasmina Ali, a Pakistani shopkeeper. Their small English village, Edgecombe St. Mary, buzzes at the unsuitability of this relationship between two widowed citizens. The Major and Mrs. Ali are dignified, insightful, and completely endearing as they interact with their problematic families, the villagers and each other. I'd like to meet them in person, but meeting them on the page was a joy, in part because they both love books and have interesting things to say about them.

American Visa by Juan de Recacoechea Saénz  has been termed "sweet noir" by some of its readers. Mario Alvarez, an unemployed English teacher, arrives at the rundown Hotel California in La Paz, Bolivia, with a roundtrip airline ticket to the US, furnished by his adult son, who lives in Miami. Unfortunately, Alvarez has no visa and it's clear it won't be easy to get one. Fortunately, Alvarez is familiar with the enterprising characters of noir fiction so maybe that visa won't be impossible to obtain after all. I'm reading this book now and enjoying it very much. This is a creative writer who is new to me and I hope to find his other books available in English.

It's always a pleasure to share good books with family members and friends who love to read. In the spirit of Thanksgiving, do you have a book you could share?