Herbie's Game

by Timothy Hallinan

  “Yes,” I said. “He was.”

  “Very well. Please go out the front door. I don’t want the neighbors thinking I have young men creeping in and out of the place.”

  “May I tell you something?”

  “But of course.”

  I said, “You need better locks.”

  This book began life as Liberation Jewelry, a novella of (theoretically) 30,000 words, which I undertook in response to a request from the folks at Soho that I “knock one out” during an otherwise idle week or two. Problem is, it’s harder for me to write short than it is to write long, and the more-than 100,000-word book you’re holding is evidence of that fact. Also, Wattles barged in, and that complicated things.

  The first thing I wrote was the burglary that opens the book, the scene in which Junior nicks the two brooches, the Cartier and the amateurish one. When I wrote it, I had no idea where the second brooch came from or why it was there. I’m embarrassed to say that I do this kind of thing all the time. It’s a part of my process that I indulge on faith, without understanding it. I think of planting these open questions as a kind of mystery for myself, something I have to solve before I get to the end of the book. Almost invariably, these things not only get worked out, but they also become important to the story.

  In this case, there was virtually no suspense about whether the mystery brooch would work out because about eight days into the writing of the book, I mentioned the two brooches to my agent, Bob Mecoy, and he instantly came up with the explanation that you probably just read. When I hung up the phone, I felt like I’d tripped over a ten-pound emerald. That piece of information shaped about half of the book, so thanks, Bob.

  It may be disappointing to some of you to know those handcrafted liberation brooches didn’t actually exist. The Cartier version did, though, and it was both sold and worn under the noses of the Nazis, which was pretty gutsy in itself.

  In this book I killed off some peripheral characters (as a favor to those of you who skip to notes like these without reading the story first, I won’t name them). One of the things that happens when you write a series is that you gradually accumulate a small army of peripheral characters, and they all want to get into every book. It’s hard enough to make up a story without a platoon of underemployed characters standing just offstage, shifting impatiently from foot to foot as they wait to be called into the light, so I’ve thinned them out a bit. Two of them are gone for good (and I already regret one of them) and the other is in that peculiar fictional dusk where I don’t know whether he’s alive or dead and probably won’t until he lurches through some doorway when I least want him.

  Lots of good music went into the writing of Herbie’s Game. I made a playlist of about nine hundred songs by reasonably new-to-me artists such as MS/MR, Jack’s Mannequin (and its frontman, Andrew McMahon), The Boxer Rebellion, passEnger, Amanda Shires (“Detroit or Buffalo” became Ronnie’s theme song), John Fulbright, Langhorne Slim, and Alabama Shakes. Also on call were more familiar names: The Hold Steady (and its frontman, Craig Finn), John Hiatt, Neko Case, Tegan and Sara, The National, Steve Earle (burning the Walmart down!), Jon Fratelli, Vampire Weekend, The Dodos, Over the Rhine, Arctic Monkeys, Franz Ferdinand (a new album after only four years!), and a bunch of reasonably obscure Rolling Stones songs from their first three albums.

  And this is a good place to say thank you to all the people who have written to suggest new music to me. I listen to all of it, even if it doesn’t make it into a writing playlist. Send more! And finally, thanks to all of you who have said such nice things about Junior.

  Please continue to let me know what’s up via my website, www.timothyhallinan.com. As far as I know, I’ve responded to every piece of reader mail in the past couple of years. And who knows? You might write something that would lift my spirits on one of the three days a week, on average, that writing is less fun, and less productive, than doing my own dental work. More than one book has been saved by a letter—and this is true not only of me, but also of most of the writers I know.

  While I’m thanking people, I want to start a round of applause for the people at Soho Crime for breaking every rule in the publisher’s playbook to put out the first three Junior Bender novels in seven months, while going to the wall in their support. So let’s hear it for publisher Bronwen Hruska; my indefatigable if occasionally fractious editor, Juliet Grames; marketing marvel (and all-around well-read guy) Paul Oliver; and gifted enablers Meredith Barnes and Amara Hoshijo. And, of course, cover artist Katherine Grames, whose jacket design for this book was the first one I ever saw that I didn’t want changed in any way, however minuscule. Gratitude also goes to three tireless beta readers, Everett Kaser, Alan Katz, and Ellie Korn, who caught dozens of errors.

  As always, thanks to Munyin.