From A Nail through the Heart to Street Music: Thirteen Years of the Poke Rafferty Novels by Timothy Hallinan

“You can buy diaper?” This is an unlikely end to a series of detective novels that brought Poke Rafferty to life. An Irish-Filipino American travel writer, Rafferty emerged in Bangkok, “the world capital of instant gratification,” in A Nail through the Heart.  He’s a family man, happy with his beautiful soon-to-be wife Rose who was once the Queen of Patpong and his adopted daughter Miaow who spent her early years selling packs of gum on the city streets, a small girl who was fostered by a pack of feral children. 

Rose and Miaow are the core of Rafferty’s life, with its periphery buttressed by his friend Arthit, a policeman with an  expensive British education that’s left him with a highly developed sense of irony, and a motley collection of rapidly aging Western men who hang out at the Expat Bar, each of them what Rafferty “doesn’t want to be when he grows up.” Through a denizen of this bar, Rafferty becomes unwillingly involved in tracking down a missing Australian. This accidental detour from his contented domestic existence leads him into nine detective thrillers written over the span of thirteen years, and through worlds that would be the stuff of nightmares, were they not based upon reality.

Rafferty comes up against monsters immediately, ones that challenge readers to keep turning the pages. A dowager who once was one of the chief torturers in the Khmer Rouge prison of Tuol Sleng and who has lost none of her edge in old age and a man who does his best to destroy children in his thirst for pornography are as unforgettable as they are unspeakable. In the novels that follow Rafferty confronts a business empire based upon North Korean counterfeiters whose products range from fake medicines to nearly-perfect dollar bills, the byzantine labyrinths of Thai politics, a syndicate that exploits a vast army of beggars, Western mercenaries whose stock-in-trade is unbridled cruelty, and the involvement of Homeland Security in countries far from the United States.

Through Rafferty, Hallinan comes close to the bone in many of these novels, to the point that two of his underlying topics aren’t available through Google searches. The AT series that he refers to when discussing child pornograpy in an author’s note to A Nail Through the Heart doesn’t come up on Google and the Phoenix Program, the band of mercenaries who did the CIA’s dirtiest work during the Vietnam War and are introduced in The Fear Artist, appear only on Youtube clips and in Douglas Valentine’s book, The Phoenix Program, (which reputedly the CIA did its best to suppress and is now available only as an e-book). Hallinan’s third novel, Breathing Water, is a tutorial in modern-day Thai politics and the power of that country’s nouveau riche, and through all nine of his books runs the inescapable and highly lucrative connection between Thailand’s wealthiest men and the bargirls who draw thousands of men and their money to Bangkok and other Thai cities every year. 

Through the midst of the horror and the violence that Rafferty moves through, Rose and Miaow shine like beacons, bringing extraordinary life to what would otherwise be ordinary (although very well-written) thrillers. Eventually the two of them, especially Miaow, take over the hearts and minds of readers as thoroughly as they have Rafferty’s.

This series is launched with quips worthy of Raymond Chandler, all of them crisp and clever: a room “with the cosmetic appeal of a fever blister,” a drinker who rapidly “puts a pint of Singha into the past tense,” a woman of “40, clinging grimly to 28,” a man who looks as though he “watches colon surgery for laughs.” Cinematic descriptions of Bangkok--its weather, its street markets, its bar scene--are vivid and evocative. But what begins as classic noir deepens into something quite different.

Gradually a theme emerges with the panoply of daughters who shine through the darkness: Rose, whose father was on the verge of selling her into the flesh trade before she escaped into it on her own; Rafferty’s half-sister Ming Li who’s been carefully molded into a dangerous spy by their father; Treasure, a child with a monstrous father who is distorting her into his own image; and Miaow, the child who, Hallinan admits in his note to The Hot Countries, is the one he would choose if he could write about only one of his characters. As he ends the series with Street Music, he elaborates upon that. “Miaow, who on that very first page, was little more than a prop...became, for me, the heart of the series.” A child who was tethered to a bench and abandoned by her parents when she was four or five survives on the streets until she and Rafferty find each other three years later. Her character is fully formed by that time and as she gains the vocabulary, security, and confidence to express it, she takes center stage in the novels as confidently as she does on the stage of her elite school’s drama department. Through the prism of Miaow’s character, Hallinan finds depth and truth in other stories of the neglected and rejected figures of Thai society--the bargirls, the old sexpats, the ladyboys, and the street people--even the one who had abandoned her daughter by tying Miaow to that bench.

Hallinan leaves Rafferty where he found the man in the first place, with his family which has expanded to make Poke a floundering first-time father. Through the years, they’ve been through a lot together, author and character, guided by Bangkok residents like the curmudgeonly, kindly author Jerry Hopkins and are rumored to have become enshrined in a guidebook of their own, The Poke Rafferty Book by Everett Kaser (which is also untraceable online). In the legendary Patpong bar, the Madrid; in streets that are gentrified  and those that are slums; in the dubious street stalls of Bangkok’s Indian section and in the thinly disguised school for street children run in real life by Father Joe Maier in the slums of Klong Toei; in Bangkok’s answer to Central Park, the green and graceful oasis of Lumpini Park which at night is a sanctuary for those who have no other home--these are all places that Rafferty and Hallinan have made their own and have passed on to the rest of us. 

For thirteen years, readers around the world have looked forward to the next book in this series. Now that the last one is in bookstores, the only choice left for us is to go on our own and find Rafferty’s world in all of its grimness and glory. Bon voyage to us all.~Janet Brown