Reclining on a beige-tinted sofa chair in his cozy home study, Randall Peffer, Instructor in English, looks the very image of an accomplished man always striving for more. On Saturday, May 20, his second murder mystery and fourthnovel, Provincetown Follies, Bangkok Blues, will be launched in Washington D.C. at the BookExpo America. The following Thursday, he will hold a public reading at the Andover Bookstore. Hailed by the Library Journal Review as “a seductive tale that…will appeal to those willing to cross over to the dark side” and by Crimespree Magazine Review as “a fresh, original, and wonderfully character driven novel”, Provincetown Follies, Bangkok Blues takes the reader into the mysterious world of drag queens, mobsters, and charming “white-knight” lawyers. Peffer’s publisher, Benjamin LeRoy, said, “It’s dark. I mean dark. It’s unlike everything I’ve read before, and the language is art.” The protagonist, Tuki Aparecio, is a stunningly beautiful half Vietnamese, half African-American transsexual drag queen, who is arrested in Provincetown, a large gay resort, for arson and the murder of her mobster lover. Tuki, the love child of a Saigon bar girl and American marine, had escaped from Vietnam and been picked up with other drag queens by the Thai mafia and brought to the “infamous tenderloin district of Bangkok…[where] love is for sale, any kind, any way.” The case is assigned to Michael DeCastro, a Portuguese “white knight” type; it is his first major case as the head public defender and he is torn between choosing the easy way out by plea-bargaining, or unlocking the secrets of Tuki’s past. Mr. Peffer first came upon such abstract characters in a dream. He woke up with Tuki’s story, and he said he just had to stick her in a murder mystery to see what followed. “She’s a sort of cross between Halle Berry and Vanessa Williams,” said Mr. Peffer. “She lies by omission…and has a widely checkered past…There’s so many layers…you have to unravel the onion.” Much of his description is based on experience: he spent the majority of his sabbatical in the 1990s living in South East Asia, Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore, and even learned the Thai language. In an effort to bring to life his characters, he often has Tuki speak in her native tongue. Mr. Peffer has nurtured a passion for writing ever since he was in high school. “I knew I wanted to be a writer, but I also knew that living as one was pretty chancy,” he said. He chose instead to balance writing with teaching at Phillips Academy. He teaches early in the morning and late in the afternoon, leaving a block of time before lunch to devote to serious writing. Mr. Peffer’s published literary work ranges from exposé’s to his own memoirs. He was a contract writer for National Geographic, as well as for the Smithsonian, Reader’s Digest, and Sail Magazine. He has served as a travel writer for The New York Times, Boston Globe, The San Francisco Examiner, Chicago Tribune, and Miami Herald, and traveling has often inspires his novels. He is also the author of a number of travel guides, especially for National Geographic and the Lonely Planet series. His first murder mystery, Killing Neptune’s Daughter was published in 2004. A brutal murder takes place in contemporary New York and the body of a dead woman is brought home to a fishing village where she grew up. The men of the town see the traces of a violent death and know that it was one of them. Layer by layer, repressed past feelings are uncovered until the shocking climax. Mr. Peffer said that much of the back-story for his novels is rooted in his personal experience. “I had a really wild childhood,” Mr. Peffer said pensively. While the publication process is difficult for all author hopefuls, Mr. Peffer reflected that he has been very lucky and persistent. “You get used to rejection,” he said. Nevertheless he has had a great response, and his last novel gave him “a lot of street-cred.” He is currently working on two other novels, Listen to the Dead and The Poe-House Murders. Like his previous published work, Provincetown Follies, Bangkok Blues promises not to disappoint. Written in the present tense, with short but descriptive sentences, Peffer’s murder mystery leads the reader deep into a fast-paced almost supernatural world. The book raises issues about prejudice and misunderstanding from stereotypes, and the nature of gender and race. Tuki can appear black or Asian depending on how she wears her hair, and she has a Whitney Houston, Janet Jackson, and Tia Carrera act. The issue of homosexuality also has an underlying presence, with Tuki as a transvestite and DeCastro as slightly homophobic. “People love drag,” said Mr. Peffer. “It took a lot of work to get it right and splice the parallel narratives to make the book engaging…I’m pretty driven. If I don’t write every day, I feel nasty. Fiction is like therapy…and my imagination is always cooking,” he said. “Characters take on lives of their own…somebody will say something…and it’s like ‘Woah!.’” Mr. Peffer will be reading from his new novel at 7:00 PM on Thursday, May 25, at the Andover Bookstore downtown.
