The Queen of Patpong (35 page)

Author’s Note

T
his is a work of fiction, but it also isn’t.

On the fiction front, the picture of U.S. defense contractors presented by Howard Horner and John Bohnert is absolutely not meant to be representative. I personally know a couple of people who are serving in Afghanistan right now, and they’re motivated primarily by patriotism and belief in their mission. But anyone who has served with any of the companies who contract out this work will tell you that weeding out psychopaths is a constant, and not always achievable, priority.

On the nonfiction side, what Rose goes through in her transformation from village girl to sex worker is commonplace. Somewhere in some northeastern village, a young girl from a poor family takes the first steps on that path almost every day of the year. Particulars vary, but each of these women will endure a long process of change, leaving behind the names and the attitudes that once defined them and becoming someone almost completely new. The scene in which Teacher Suttikul and Mr. Pattison come to Rose’s house to confront her father is based on an actual event. In that case, I’m happy to say, the girl was able to remain in school, although it might just as easily have gone the other way. And it often does.

There’s a tendency in male-written novels about Bangkok to idealize bar workers or, in some cases, to demonize them: They’re lost innocents on the one hand and flint-hearted gold diggers on the other. The only thing I’m trying to say about them in this book is that every Nit and Noi and Fon is a real person who has been given a very narrow range of choices. I think that most of them cope with their difficult situation with a certain amount of grace.

I don’t know that we can ask much more of anyone.

Acknowledgments

I
had a lot of help with this book—from individuals, from the restaurants and coffeehouses where I was taken care of while I wrote it, and from the artists who emerged from my iPod to get me through the process of envisioning the story and putting it into words (those are two very different things).

My previous editor at William Morrow, Peggy Hageman, gave the first draft of the manuscript the most sympathetic possible reading and made a number of suggestions that tightened and improved it, especially the last chapters. My agent, Bob Mecoy, put his finger on the book’s potentially fatal weak spot at first reading, confirming the instinct that had me wincing every time I read certain passages. My wife, Munyin Choy, listened to the whole thing in its roughest, most raggedy form, and helped me sort wheat from chaff. There was a
lot
of chaff.

My current editor, Gabe Robinson, gave me the book’s title over my wrongheaded objections, and supervised the development of the jacket and the page design.

I wrote the book in Los Angeles, Bangkok, and Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Thanks to the people at BB Cafe in Los Angeles and the Novel Café in Santa Monica, who kept me caffeinated during the American stretches of the work. In Bangkok I fueled at Coffee World; and in Phnom Penh at Corner 33, K-Coffee, and the famous Foreign Correspondents Club, which overlooks the river just around the corner from my apartment there.

If coffee is one of my fuels, music is the other. This time around I was carried along by James McMurtry (yeah, “Choctaw Bingo”!), Bob Dylan (I must have listened to “Brownsville Girl” thirty times), Vince Gill, the perpetually beautiful Emmylou Harris, Mindy Smith, Eliot Smith, The Smiths, Pete/Peter Doherty, Van Morrison, the Soweto Gospel Choir, Randy Newman, Vienna Teng, Elvis Costello, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Delbert McClinton (as always), Calexico, Franz Ferdinand, Aimee Mann, and a hundred others.

The long central section of the book, which is pretty much all women, was written almost exclusively to Tegan and Sara. I made a playlist of fifty-four Tegan and Sara cuts and just repeated it over and over. Almost the only exception is the chapter when Rose is in the water, which was written mostly to Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand, a piece of music that’s got dark water running all the way through it.

Finally, several times when my courage flagged during the writing of the book, a reader sent a nice note to my Web site. Heartfelt thanks to all of you who did so. And let me urge readers who have that impulse from time to time to yield to it. You have no idea how much it can mean to a writer who feels like he or she is drowning and no longer has any idea which way is up.

About the Author

TIMOTHY HALLINAN
is the author of nine widely praised books: eight novels—including the Bangkok thrillers featuring Poke Rafferty,
A Nail Through the Heart, The Fourth Watcher
, and
Breathing Water
—and a work of nonfiction. Along with his wife, Munyin Choy, he divides his time equally between Los Angeles, California, and Southeast Asia.

www.timothyhallinan.com

Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

Copyright

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

THE QUEEN OF PATPONG.
Copyright © 2010 by Timothy Hallinan. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

FIRST EDITION

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hallinan, Timothy
    The queen of Patpong : a Poke Rafferty thriller / Timothy Hallinan. — 1st ed.
        p. cm.
    ISBN 978-0-06-167226-2
    1.—Bangkok (Thailand)—Fiction. I—Title.

PS3558.A3923Q44 2010
813’.54—dc22

2010002112

EPub Edition © 2010 ISBN: 9780062006905

10  11  12  13  14    
OV/RRD
    10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1