STEALING THE DRAGON: AN INTERVIEW WITH TIM MALEENY

Tim Maleeny's first novel, Stealing the Dragon, was published by Midnight Ink this spring. It tells the story of Cape Weathers, a San Francisco PI, and his companion Sally, a trained assassin. Ranging from Chinatown to Hong Kong, the novel combines wry wit with hardboiled style and martial arts adventure with a modern pulp sensibility. The second book in the series, Beating the Babushka, is scheduled for October 2007, and the third book, Greasing the Piñata, for 2008.

Tim was interviewed by James Calder at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco.

What influenced you in your writing?

I grew up reading pulp like Edgar Rice Burroughs, Doc Savage, and the Shadow because both my father and my mother grew up reading it. They were voracious readers. They were surrounded by books, the old original paperbacks with great artwork on the covers. So I always had that sense of an adventure book in the back of my mind. I read a lot of science fiction, but when it came to writing, I found myself gravitating to crime fiction. As I got older, I read crime fiction almost exclusively.

When I finally had a window in my life when I could start writing, I wanted to write a contemporary PI novel. I didn't want to write a police procedural because I felt like I didn't know that world, and I wanted to be a bit irreverent, with a slightly twisted sense of humor. There were a lot of writers I admire out there—Elmore Leonard, Robert Crais, Loren Estleman, Ross Thomas—guys who had a certain amount of courageous wit, guys who'd say things that you might think but you'd never say out loud. I wanted the PI genre to collide with an adventure novel and to write a modern pulp, in a way. As I started the story and the characters started appearing and the martial arts part started getting dialed up, I realized that's where I was coming from. I wanted to be self-aware and I wanted the reader to be in on the joke.

I got that pulp hit in the first few pages. There was a certain amount of ironic self-awareness, but at the same time you were taking your characters and story seriously.

Yes, I wanted everything to be very gripping, very real, very right now. But there's nothing like a bunch of scorpions killing a man to make things a little pulp. Yet I wanted the reader to imagine the character could actually be in that situation.

One thing I thought you did well was to put together a comic sensibility with a more noir feeling. Is that something that just kind of happened, or did you have that in mind from the start?

In a way. I don't outline in the traditional sense. Like a lot of writers, I like to be surprised by what's happening, and I like the reader to be surprised. I had a clear sense of the characters and a clear sense of the story arcs, and I was writing to certain points in the action. I had a feeling for the detective character and his tone of voice: I knew he was going to be irreverent and say things you wish you could say in real life, and there would be humor in that.

I was also aware, from reading Elmore Leonard, how ridiculous and stupid criminal activity can be and how quickly things can go badly. In writing situations that got tense or deadly, I discovered that the counterpoint of humor made those scenes that much more shocking. You might be having fun with a character and then suddenly things will go terribly wrong. It occurred to me after the fact that, in a way, that's how violence happens in real life. You're going along with your day and suddenly you're in a car crash, or someone gets shot on the street. To me, it was easier to dial up the tension because I could make it more abrupt. I realized I had permission as a writer to change the tone very quickly and people would go with you.

I think there are personalities, and for me my detective character is one of these, who use humor as a kind of shield, to deflect a certain amount of intimacy. But it also allows him to deal with morbid situations that any sane person would run away from. There's something that compels him to go forward and his humor helps him do that. I wanted the dialogue to reflect the swings from cynicism and despair to optimism.

I'm curious if you had Cape as a character first, or Sally? Or did you have Chinatown as the background first?

I had a sense of the characters first. I also knew I wanted it to have an international flavor to it. I'd travelled to Hong Kong and was absolutely captivated and mesmerized by the city—I even thought about moving there at one point. My way to go back there without paying the plane fare was to write about it. I was also very interested in Chinatown and how it can be its own world. A lot of people in Chinatown never speak English and never leave the neighborhood. I lived on the edge of it and I was fascinated at how it transformed itself at night into something different from what the tourists see.

The Cape character came to me first. A lot of the characters, including Sally, were an outgrowth of things I wanted to happen in the novel in terms of plot points, but also of things I wanted Cape to have or not have. For example, I didn't want him to be Superman or James Bond, capable of everything. That kind of character can be very exciting, but I wanted someone who was a little more vulnerable, maybe a touch neurotic, and had this drive to do the right thing. I had an idea that real courage is about doing something even though part of you is scared to death to do it—you might realize it's a bad idea, but if you don't do it, no one else will.

At the same time, I wanted some spectacular action sequences. I wanted to twist the genre a little bit, in that there were so many writers I admired and loved but I didn't want to try to write like them, I didn't want to write the same things I'd read, with the same kind of PI character. I wanted the Cape character to be a little more real than the typical PI character, so once I created those vulnerabilities, I needed someone to bolster him. I found it intriguing, with Sally, to have the toughest character in the novel be a petite, five-foot tall woman who'd gone to a girls school. Now, it happened to be a girls school run by the triads, and she happened to a trained assassin whose parents had been killed by the Yakuza. I was reading a book on international drug cartels and it mentioned that sixty percent of the world's professional killers are women, because they can get closer to men. Whether it's true or not, it was a fascinating idea. Wouldn't be great if my detective's partner was a five-foot tall woman who can kick everyone's ass? So I was turning the whole thing on its head and looking to surprise the reader.

The other thing about Sally is that because of her background—trained to see men as targets and having a broad disdain for the male gender—there was not going to be a romantic complication with Cape. I didn't want that kind of obvious outcome. I wanted to ask, what if someone very, very close to you is missing, how far will you go, if it's not a romantic relationship, to find that person? I like that she's there for him but unimpressed by him in an emotional sense. For me, Sally is a woman who ended up on the right side of a moral compass we all have despite being completely betrayed by the people she trusted most. She knows that Cape, in spite of all his flaws, will do what he says he'll do. For her, it's probably the first real friendship she's ever had in her life, except for a woman she was very close to whom she lost. When I started writing the book I didn't realize their relationship would be so profound, but it became very emotional by the end of the book.

The fact that they think so highly of each other makes each of them more attractive. I loved Sally—she's a compelling character. You spend a lot of time on her backstory and how she wound up in San Francisco. I'm interested if you're going to fill in more of her story, particularly how she and Cape came to be so close after she left Hong Kong?

You won't see that in the second book, but you'll see it in subsequent books. You'll see some of it in the third book, which I'm working on now. They are, in many respects, two sides of the same coin. One of the things I was interested in as a writer was the way in which different characters might reflect different points of view that I have. With Sally and Cape, the emphasis on each of them varies by book. In the second book, Beating the Babushka, Sally doesn't show up until about page 100. But there's anticipation of her arrival, and she arrives in spectacular fashion. From then on she's with Cape every step and her role as his conscience and protector is pretty profound. But the first part of the book will be about his work and how he came to do what he does. This book has to do with the Russian Mafia and its involvement with the movie business. It's more of a real-time straight shot that goes at pretty high velocity through to the end of the book.

How far ahead have you thought in the series?

I've finished the second one, which is coming out in October. The title is Beating the Babushka, which is a title that's meant to make you smile. The third book is called Greasing the Piñata. I'm halfway through it, and it should come out in 2008. I have the fourth book mapped out in my head, but I haven't done the research yet. In terms of the story arcs of the characters, I have a sense of where they're going to go through book five. But it can always change, because you learn so much about the character from writing the books. Some of the other secondary characters will come to the fore in future books. The Linda Katz character, the one with the scary hair, came out of the fact that Sally was saying things that didn't sound like her, so I realized there had to be a new character, which turned out to be Linda. My agent loved the character and I probably doubled her stage time in the first book. She'll become more important in subsequent books.

Are there any real-life models for Cape or Sally?

Not really. They're all voices I hear in my head. I think good writers are neurotic and great writers are schizophrenic. I'm starting to hear voices, so I'm going with that, I'm writing them down. Writing is my form of therapy. There's a lot of me in all my characters because they get to say and do things you wish you could say or do. The other characters—the political figures, like the mayor and the mayoral candidate—are amalgamations of San Francisco personalities over the years, personalities and behavior that in any other city would seem absurd, but that we see routinely around here.

How did you start writing?

I was always interested in writing when I was younger. I'd write short stories and the dreaded teenage poetry, but I never pursued it. I went off to college and discovered girls and got distracted, then got a job. Life took over and I let writing fall by the wayside. But in the back of my mind it was always there. I always read voraciously. Then my wife got pregnant and, like a lot of pregnant women, started going to bed early. So I had this window of opportunity in my life to read more books, see more movies. And I thought if I don't start writing now, I'm never going to get this done. So I stayed up late after she went to sleep and wrote stories and started shopping them around. I had the good fortune that one of them got picked up as the title story for the MWA anthology Harlan Coben edited last year, Death Do Us Part.

I'm very lucky that my wife Kathryn is an incredible reader and incredible editor. I've been able to show her chapters as I finish them. I had that motivation of having to finish the book because I can't keep her hanging, I have to let my wife know what happens next.

What kind of research did you do about the triads, Chinatown, and martial arts?

I took judo and tae kwon do when I was younger, and was always interested in martial arts. I was also very interested in Asian culture, and I studied Taoism and Buddhism in college. Because of the cultural overlap that you see in Chinatown in San Francisco, I thought that was a great place to go in the first novel with the Cape and Sally characters. In terms of research, it was sort of a balance between making things up, getting your facts straight, and finding a rhythm between them, so that you don't spend all your time doing research and never get around to writing the book. So often I start a story, then stop when I have to figure something out, then quickly go back to the book and check my facts later and modify the story if I need to.

In terms of sheer depth, the fusion of legend, history, moral philosophy, discipline, and physical training in the martial arts is fascinating. If you look at the samurai and the triads and their origins, the original triad societies were political organizations that trace their roots back to the Shaolin monks. That heroic legend is now tied up with all this modern criminal activity. So, just as in The Godfather and some of the better tales of the Italian Mafia, it was much more of a Robin Hood protector role meets corrupt criminal organization in the 20th century than it was that they were simply bad guys. I wanted the villains to be on a certain scale, with a certain character, and I found if you mixed what was real about the triads with these characters, it made for some fascinating motivations and behavior.

Find out more about Tim's books at timmaleeny.com.