Timothy Hallinan is the author of nine published novels, most recently the highly praised Bangkok thrillers featuring “rough-travel” writer Poke Rafferty and his cobbled-together Thai family. Hallinan also wrote a series of six private-eye novels set in Los Angeles during the 1990s. The current Bangkok book is THE FOURTH WATCHER. Coming next is MISDIRECTION (working title) which takes place against the perilously fast-changing backdrop of the Thai political scene. Hallinan divides his time between Los Angeles and Southeast Asia.

Ah, the perils of the topical thriller.

My Bangkok novels, A Nail Through the Heart and The Fourth Watcher, are written in present tense (I can hear muttering out there already), but I just pushed the envelope in a way that might bring me to even greater grief. For book number three, currently called Misdirection, I moved the story into the present tense, too, which is to say into the actual, perilous, nailbiting, moment-by-moment uncertainty of today’s Thai political scene.

Here’s what happened.

Thailand has been a kingdom for centuries. It’s a constitutional monarchy now, but the King still wields great power, as do a number of families, all Thai-Chinese, who have been around for generations. (Some of them actually loaned money to King Rama I to fund the building of Bangkok back in the 1780s.) They’ve run the country their way forever and skimmed off billions of dollars doing it.

And then a recent prime minister came to power by buying the votes of the rural poor, and the whole landscape changed. The poor suddenly felt their power, and in the past few years, we’ve had a military coup, the overthrow of a second elected prime minister, and now the party representing the poor is talking about putting another popularly elected prime minister in power, which could provoke another coup, ad possibly infinitum.

And, this being Thailand, it’s not like there’s a good side and a bad side. The politicians claiming to represent the poor are just as corrupt as the inside circle they’re trying to replace.

Both sides are dangerous because there’s so much at stake. Members of the ruling group get to dip their scoops into billions of dollars in graft every year, and they do it enthusiastically. In Misdirection, my protagonist, an American “rough travel” writer named Poke Rafferty who now lives in Bangkok, wins in a late-night card game the right to write the biography of a controversial and somewhat shady Thai billionaire who has come up from poverty himself, and who has the potential to become a political powerhouse, assuming, of course that he’d survive a run for office. At nine o’clock the next morning, Poke learns that his life and the lives of his wife and adopted daughter are at stake if he writes the book, and at ten o’clock, he’s informed that those same lives are in danger if he doesn’t write the book.

And behind all these threats are the faceless powerful – people who are virtually unaccountable for their actions. So to whom can Poke turn for help? To the city’s least powerful, and most invisible residents, the poorest of the poor: street kids. (His adopted daughter was a street child when he met her.)

So far, so good, I guess – but since I’ve finished the book I check the news from Thailand literally daily. For all I know, by the time the book comes out in July of this year, the Kingdom will be a military dictatorship and the whole story will be a quaint anachronism. I’m reduced to hoping that no one at my publishing company is interested in Southeast Asian current events.

I know that I’m being selfish; this is all much more important to the Kingdom’s 65 million inhabitants than it is to some writer who’s just got a book at stake. And at least I’ve learned something. When a book is, as they say, “ripped from the headlines,” there’s also a chance the headlines will rip the book. Never again.