Tim Hallinan - 1942
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San Pedro High School in San Pedro, California
Timothy Hallinan was born in Los Angeles, California. He is the oldest of three children. He is only two years older than his twin brothers Mike and Pat. At the age of ten, his interest was mainly on Asia and he read anything he could get his hands on. He read travel, history, novels, poetry, and biographies. Two years later, however, Raymond Chandler, the author of many mystery novels, was his favorite.
I. Biography
Hallinan grew up in a very different Los Angeles. The air was cleaner, and from his perspective, everybody was white. His view changed once he fell in love with a Mexican girl. Hallinan favors the LA of today, however. He prefers the racially diverse population—mixed with Asians, Latinos, Europeans, and all. During his high school years, Hallinan's primary interests were literature, history, biology, astronomy, and theatre. From high school, Hallinan attended UCLA and the California State University system. He graduated with degrees in English, including a master's degree from UCLA. Hallinan met his wife while attending UCLA. He was guest speaking in one of her classes. She too has a couple of master's degrees and currently does acupressure and Thai yoga massage.
During the sixties, Hallinan lived with a woman in a shack in Echo Park while attending college. He became heavily involved with a class of poet-musicians in the all-night scene in places like the Troubadour. Hallinan, for a few months, slept at the Troubadour, for his relationship with the woman was breaking apart. The Troubadour, however, did not close until around three or four a.m., making bedtime around dawn. He would attend class—when he could get up, and yet, managed to keep his grade high.
Taxi driving in LA was Hallinan's first job. He then moved on to screenplay and lyric writing, public relations at a rock radio station, partnership in the Stone/Hallinan firm, and years later, novel writing. Hallinan currently runs Stone/Hallinan Associates, which does public relations for PBS shows, and Hallinan Consulting, which does education for television shows and other special projects, such as the Space Station; in addition, he writes novels.
II. Literary Works
The Incinerator is the fourth in a series of six murder mysteries. This book deals with a serial killer who feels that he is doing humanity a favor by drenching homeless victims with gasoline and then throwing a match on them. He calls himself the Incinerator. He makes a mistake, however, when he kills a man he could not afford to kill. It turns out that this "homeless" man is actually a very wealthy old man who is suffering from Alzheimer's. The man's daughter then asks Simon Grist, a professor-turned private eye, to help find her father's slayer. Grist is then led on a chase through the streets of Los Angeles, where dead bodies are turning up all over the place. The book is full of suspense and grotesque detail. It is very appealing and we would definitely recommend it.
Everything but the Squeal gives a view of society's most vulnerable members: the street youth of Los Angeles. These youngsters are corrupt from the adults, pimps, drug dealers, and the keepers of street orphans that are involved in their lives. Simon Grist is hired to find a lost teen before she ends up raped, beaten or dead in gutter. Grist is aided by a friend's daughter, who is on the verge of falling into the deadly game of the streets, and a short order cook who goes by the name of Mountain that works at a diner for the homeless.
The Man with No Time is about two young children who become targets of a Chinatown kidnapping. Simon Grist is drawn into a culture that is completely incomprehensible to anybody who is not familiar with it. The parents refuse to inform the police of their missing children for fear that Vietnamese hitmen will do them in. Grist has a dead body, two missing children, an unsolved crime, and the unwanted attention of Vietnamese guns-for-hire in store for him.
The Bone Polisher is the ancient Chinese name for a murderer who returns his dead to their homes. There is a serial killer stalking the gay community of Los Angles and Simon Grist is once again the man for the job. This private eye races against time to solve these murders and catch the bone polisher before he strikes again.
III. Los Angeles California and Timothy Hallinan
Timothy Hallinan was born in Los Angeles and all of his Simon Grist mystery novels take place in LA. Here are a few places mentioned by Hallinan in the Incinerator.
Bel Air Hotel: Extremely luxurious hotel mainly for the very wealthy. Rooms are stocked with Chinese antiques, hand-carved, rosewood furniture, and, in some cases, baby grand pianos. It is the hotel where Annabelle Winston stayed during her father's murder investigation.
The Red-Dog: A bar that is popular for law enforcement when off-duty. It is on a lonely block of Hollywood Blvd.
UCLA: One of the top universities in the country, but we think it is second in southern California only to the University of Southern California. UCLA is the college where Simon Grist once taught English and also the college where the famous Grant Farley attended school.
USC: Top college in southern California, home of the Trojans and County USC hospital where Annabelle's father was before being transferred.
Little Tokyo: Small Japanese community in downtown Los Angeles, home to many of the less fortunate and spot where nine victims had been "materialized."
IV. Literary Works
The Four Last Things (1989)
Everything But the Sequel (1990)
Skin Deep (1991)
Incinerator (1992)
The Man With no Time (1993)
The Bone Polisher (1995)
The Million-Dollar Minute (1998)
Bangkok Tango (1999)
V. Questions for Tim Hallinan
What and/or whom inspired you to write your first book?
"I wrote a mystery because it's a genre I like to read, and I think the first piece of advice to a would-be writer is to write something you would actually like to read. I know many
people who read thrillers and science fiction but when they sit down at the keyboard, they try to produce the Great American Novel. Some of them wouldn't read the Great American
Novel if it materialized next to their coffee-cup in the morning, but they're trying to write it."
Why are so many of your works of gruesome scenes and mystery?
I write mysteries, which are a genre, and gruesome scenes are part of the genre. Mysteries are all about the restoration of order: something is broken, and the detective or protagonist
finds out what it is and, to the extent that it is possible, fixes it. Mysteries are also interesting because (a) the detective is classless—he can talk to everybody, rich and poor
alike, and (b) the detective novel allows you to create a character whose only function is to ask questions. That allows you to look at relatively serious issues in a relatively unserious, by which I mean entertaining, way.
The books are gruesome, when they are, because they're not "cozies." For years the classical mystery novelists—Agatha Christie, for example—kept all the violence offstage. In these writers' books, which were called "cozies," Professor Mustard would be found in the library, apparently pecked to death by a stuffed owl (I'm making this up, but it's not completely far-fetched), and only the detective would be smart enough to know that the owl was the symbol of Artemis, the goddess of wisdom, and therefore the murderer was a scholarly rival of Professor Mustard's.
Dashiell Hammett, who wrote mysteries in the 20s and 30s, changed all that. As our greatest mystery writer, Raymond Chandler said, Hammett "Gave murder back to the people who commit it." Evil acts are committed by people who are behaving evilly, and some of these people may actually BE evil. Hammett put them back on the page. That's the genre I write.
Did your perspective of reality influence you somewhat to write such books?
I'm perplexed by evil. It exists, although most of the time we pretend it doesn't. I've met
and talked with people who have done enormous evil—torturers and murderers from Pol Pot's regime in Cambodia, for example, and they seem like everybody else, although for
years they methodically tortured to death men, women and children who had done nothing wrong.
Well, what's that about? How is it possible? Why does it happen? How come there's never a shortage of monsters when a Hitler or a Milosovic or a Pol Pot needs them? There weren't a lot of unfilled jobs in the concentration camps. How come? How do human beings get to the place where they can do such things? And how are we supposed to deal with them?
I'm interested in all that.
VI. Contact:
Letters addressed to publishers take months to reach writers.
PO Box 4400
Venice, CA 90294
VII. Sources
http://www.barnesandnoble.comhttp://www.amazon.com
This essay was submitted by a student of Grant Farley, a teacher at San Pedro High School in San Pedro California.