ERIC:

GRAVE IMPORTS. It is a Detective thriller.

ERIC:

I was a journalist in Asia for 11 years, and the book is loosely based on a story that I covered. It’s a novel, but it’s based on the facts of the trade in looted Cambodian antiquities during the mid-1990s when the remnants of the Khmer Rouge were heavily involved in the activity. The action starts in Hong Kong, moves to southern China, then to Thailand and finally the trail of corruption leads to the ancient temples and palaces, and killing fields of Cambodia.

ERIC:

Since I could. My first paid writing job was with a small underground newspaper in Los Angeles in 1968. I worked as a journalist – both a writer and a photographer – from the time I graduated college in 1974 until only recently when I started writing books full time.

ERIC:

The first novel, THE LIVING ROOM OF THE DEAD, came out in 2005. LIVING ROOM was also based on a true story from when I was a journalist in Asia. The story is that a British lawyer living in Hong Kong, fell in love with a Russian prostitute in Macau (which is an hour away by ferry.) They decided to buy her out of her contract with the Russian mafia. That was a very big mistake and big ugliness ensued. The book is fiction, but roughly about that. It’s also generally about the trade in Russian women to Asia.

ERIC:

I was a journalist for most of my life and while there was some detecting and investigation involved, I can’t quite get away with calling that writing mysteries. My first book was non-fiction. It also came out in 2005 and was titled WRONG SIDE OF THE WALL. It’s a sort of true crime/sports biography of a man named Blackie Schwamb. In the 1940s he was a major league baseball player. But in the off season he was a gangster in Los Angeles. In 1949 he committed a murder, was caught and sentenced to life in prison. He became famous playing baseball in San Quentin and Folsom prisons during the 1950s.

ERIC:

Having lived in Asia for 11 years, and having worked in nearly every Asian country during that time, I see the region as a goldmine of fascinating and thrilling stories. I was also there during a time of tremendous transition – 1986 to 1997 – when the old traditions were fighting it out with the forces of modern development, for both good and bad. The contrasts and ironies of daily life were raw and apparent and a perfect setting for thrillers that deal with big issues, but in the guise of telling smaller, more personal stories.

That said, I can’t claim to know Asia, or any one Asian country, as a native of that place would. I was always an outsider and saw things as an outsider. But I think that’s true also in most detective fiction. The detective has something about him or her that sets them apart from the world they are living in. My character, Ray Sharp, starts as a business journalist in the first book. (Which to that extent, is somewhat autobiographical.) In the second book I have him take a job with a corporate investigation firm because that gives him more leeway to actually act on things, rather than simply observe and report on them.

As a character, Ray has a great deal of respect for the cultures in which he operates, but he also has a strongly developed personal sense of right and wrong and sometimes he finds those two things in conflict with each other. He’s dogged and determined and loyal to a fault, but he’s a regular guy, filled with a lot of ordinary confusion and contradictions and misgivings. He kind of stumbles his way to doing the right thing and solving the problems he’s faced with. He’s much more of an everyman, than a superman. Which I find a lot more interesting in a character. I much prefer a flawed character who manages to sometimes do some good, than any sort of perfect human who always does good.

ERIC:

After breathing and eating, it feels like the most natural thing I do. I’ve always done it, since I was a little kid and used to make up stories. I just can’t imagine not doing it. I’ve been very lucky in that I have been able to make a living at it, and lately having been in a position where for a while at least I don’t have to make a living at it. For most of us, writing books is not terribly lucrative. Financially, my future would be a lot more secure if I had a real skill, like plumbing. But even if I had a job that kept me otherwise occupied for 18 hours a day, I’d have to write every day, even if it was only for an hour. It’s a very bad addiction.

ERIC:

Both, but it starts with entertaining the reader. I don’t think anyone is going to take away anything worthwhile from my books if they aren’t initially entertained by them. I like to think that my books deal with big, important, global issues in an intelligent, but entertaining way. I love it when my books make people think, or in a few cases even, act on something. But if they don’t, and all someone gets out of them is a fun read, I’m also glad that I’ve managed to entertain someone.

ERIC:

I write every day. Usually in the morning. By afternoon my brain is swimming with too many other sorts of thoughts, so it’s hard to be as creative. I usually save the afternoons for research and editing.

ERIC:

I don’t outline. I tried it once and didn’t like it. I felt like the outline inhibited my writing. How I’ve written each book has been a little different. THE LIVING ROOM OF THE DEAD was based on a true story with an actual beginning, middle and end, so I knew where it was going and roughly how it was going to get there. I just had to make up a lot of the details to give it context and content and characters – as well as make it fiction. GRAVE IMPORTS on the other hand is based on the facts of something, but I had to make up a story to showcase those facts and to use my ongoing series character. The third book in the series, FLIGHT OF THE HORNBILL, that will be out next Fall, is also based on a true story, but one that didn’t have an ending in real life, so I had to concoct parts of the story and fill in details and all sorts of stuff.

I do write myself notes sometimes, and I keep an informal running list of characters with some basics about them that help me keep them straight, but it’s pretty loose. By the time I get about halfway through a book it has usually taken on a lot of momentum and the story has developed an internal logic that pretty much dictates what’s going to have to happen next. By the time a book gets to the last third or so, I usually feel like it’s pretty much writing itself and I’m just taking dictation.

ERIC:

I wish I was more of a morning person. As is, I’m usually up by about seven and writing by about 7:30 or eight, but if it wasn’t for the fact that I’m often up reading until one in the morning or later, I’d happily get up around five or six to start writing.

ERIC:

Luckily not at the moment. I’m writing fulltime.

ERIC:

I’ve almost always been paid and published, as a journalist, so in one sense, no. When I decided to start writing books, I found an agent after a mere nine query letters. It then took him 28 rejections before he found a publisher for my first book – the non-fiction one. The first novel was very easy. I sent it to a friend who is a writer to ask his opinion of it. I didn’t know it at the time, but he was also an editor at St. Martins. He made an offer on the book and that was that.

ERIC:

I always read my reviews and I even appreciate the bad ones – if they’re intelligent that is. When LIVING ROOM OF THE DEAD came out, two different reviews, one good and one bad, had the same criticism. They pointed out that something important in the plot was dependent on what they thought was too big of a coincidence. I realized that it was a problem of my knowing too much about the area I was writing about. At one point, the hero gets knocked out and then wakes up on a fishing boat that just so happens to be very near to an island that he has been wanting to get to. The problem was that I know that if someone was thrown onto a fishing boat in the harbor where the scene happened, the most likely place for that boat to end up would, in real life, be right around that island. That’s where the main fishing grounds are. But the reader didn’t know that. They just thought it was a big coincidence. Luckily I was able to add three sentences to the book for the paperback edition that set up the reason for that happening. So a big thank you goes out, even to the guy who wrote me the bad review.

ERIC:

I’m still trying to figure that out. I just try and do as much as I can of every sort of promotion. In October and November I’ll be on a very big book tour – 19 cities – and I actually really enjoy that. I like driving and I drive from place to place. Even if you do an event at a store and no one shows up, it’s still just fun hanging out and talking with the bookstore people, getting to know them. And that in turn leads to them being more likely to help promote your book. I’m always dropping in at bookstores to introduce myself, even when I don’t have an event. It is a partnership between writers, publishers and bookstores, after all. When I do have events I try to make them a little more interesting than just me sitting there reading. I have a PowerPoint presentation of photos from the places I write about, along with strange pop music from those places. I try to find unusual snacks in Asian markets to have at the events as well. I’ve been experimenting with more online activities as well. Other than a publishing company paying for your book to be on one of the display "ladders" at the front of a store though, or maybe an appearance on The Daily Show or Oprah, I don’t know that there is any one thing that is guaranteed to be effective.

ERIC:

It’s a small world story. I was at The Mystery Bookstore in Los Angeles for their annual party. One of the other writers there was Martin Limon, whose books I really like and who I’d always wanted to meet. He was there with his father. His father had grown up in the area of Los Angeles where Blackie Schwamb, the killer baseball player I’d written the biography of, had done a lot of his work as a gangster. We were talking and Martin’s father mentioned that he used to be a bartender at a burlesque house called The Colony Club. He said, "you’re too young, you probably never heard of the place." I told him that, to the contrary, I’d written about it since it was the place where Blackie’s murder victim had met up with the friends of Blackie’s on the night of the murder. Martin’s father and I started working things out, and it became apparent that there is a good chance that Martin’s father served Blackie Schwamb’s murder victim one of the last cocktails he ever had, just an hour or so before he was murdered.

ERIC:

I’m really enjoying writing a series set in Asia and based on true stories. I love the chance to develop a character over time. I’ve already written the third book and it will be out next fall. I’ve also got the basic plots worked out for books four and five and I’m looking forward to that. Especially since it will mean I need to spend a month or so in Shanghai (one of my favorite cities) for research. I’m also working on my first standalone novel, which I hope will be the first of a trilogy of Los Angeles novels. This one is set in 1946 around the jazz clubs along Central Avenue in Southcental L.A. I’m also batting around some more ideas for non-fiction. I’d hate for my journalistic skills to get too rusty.

ERIC:

None really. I admire ordinary people who from time to time achieve extraordinary things. And I also admire ordinary people who just go about living their lives the best they can, doing what they need to do to make life better for the people around them; a hardworking mom and dad, an immigrant doing a crummy job and sending money home to their family. Those are the sorts of people I think of as heroic.

ERIC:

Only one? Hmmmmm. Emma Goldman, I suppose. She was probably the most modern, far-sighted person of the late 1800s and early 1900s, and everything I’ve read about her makes me think she’d be great to sit around and talk with.

ERIC:

I probably read more non-fiction than fiction. A lot of 20th Century history and biography, also economics and some of those science for those of us who can’t do math type books. In fiction, I read a lot of crime novels. I guess they’d mostly be noir or hardboiled. I’m always interested in books set in Asia because it’s a particular interest of mine. My all time favorite book is Moby Dick and I reread it about every ten years or so.

ERIC:

I take a lot of pictures. In the past I’ve worked as a photographer, but since I don’t do it professionally anymore I guess it qualifies as a hobby. I love to cook, especially different types of Asian food, and I love discovering new ethnic markets to do my shopping at and unusual restaurants to try. I’m an inveterate urban explorer. I spend way more time than is a good idea – what with global warming and all – simply driving around and poking my nose into new and different neighborhoods in whatever city I find myself in. I love to travel, preferably to places where they don’t speak English so that I can practice my other than linguistic communication skills.

ERIC:

My tastes are pretty eclectic. Among my favorite movies are: Battle of Algiers, King Kong (the original), Ali – Fear Eats the Soul, The Killer (the John Woo, Chow Yun Fat movie), Painted Faces (another HK movie), Christine, The Big Heat, Badlands, Once Upon a Time in America and a slew of others. On TV that I currently like are: Weeds, Big Love, Dexter, Lucky Louie. In the past: NYPD Blue, The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, Prime Suspect (all of them), another BBC crime drama called The Vice.

ERIC:

We had a huge cat named Loki. He died a couple of years ago. Now I like to think of the raccoons, coyotes, possums and skunks that inhabit our backyard as my low-maintenance pets. I can enjoy watching them, but I don’t have to feed them or anything.

ERIC:

I live with Eva. We’ve lived together for nine years. We were both married once before and got divorced, so we haven’t bothered getting married so far, but it feels like the same to us. We don’t have kids, but we cherish our role as everybody’s favorite eccentric aunt and uncle.

ERIC:

Los Angeles, in a hilly neighborhood between downtown and Hollywood, called Silverlake.

ERIC:

WRITE! It might seem obvious, but you just have to sit down, every single day if you can – and if you can’t, then on some other consistent basis – and write, even if it’s only an hour a day. Even if what you write on any given day is terrible and you hate it. You still have to do it. You need to make it a job, an addiction, a habit.

And you also need to know when to stop. The real enemy of new writers is tweaking. They always seem to think that they can make everything, just this one paragraph, or that sentence, perfect before they send it off into the world. Make it as good as you can, but know when to stop and let someone else look it over. It’s never going to be perfect anyhow, no matter who you are, no matter how good a writer you are, if you are a real writer, the next book, article, poem, whatever is always going to be better. Or at least that’s what you need to keep telling yourself.

Write what you want. If you try to write what you think other people are going to want, it won’t be as good. And know what you’re writing. You don’t have to know it when you start, but you have to do your research so that it’s obvious you know it by the time you finish.

And, find a good agent. Someone you enjoy working with. I’ve had one very big name, super well known agent and he and I didn’t get along very well. So we couldn’t do each other much good. I now have a smaller-fry of an agent and we get along famously and are doing each other plenty of good.

ERIC:

ERIC:

At most good, local bookstores. If they don’t have it, have them order it for you. Most mystery bookstores online also carry my books, as do Barnes & Noble and Borders, both online and in some of their stores. As does Amazon. In order of preference, I prefer that people buy my books from: their local, independent bookstore; a mystery or other independent bookstore online; their nearest Barnes & Noble or Borders or other chain bookstore; and lastly Amazon. (I like Amazon. I buy books from them myself sometimes, but smaller, local bookstores are struggling to survive and need our help.)

ERIC:

I drink espresso, usually doubles, sometimes triples. I have a great French espresso machine at home — the brand name is Francis Francis — which never ceases to amuse me. I tried all sorts of fancy, fresh roasted, organic this and that brands of coffee to use in it. Finally I just asked my favorite Cuban restaurant what coffee they use for their espresso — because it's my favorite in Los Angeles (a Cuban restaurant on Sunset Blvd. in Silverlake called El Cochinito.) They use plain old, canned La Llave coffee that you can find cheap in almost any supermarket. I started using it and it works perfectly.