Author Eric Stone
Author Eric Stone worked in Asia as a journalist for 11 years, including eight spent in Hong Kong. Now based in Los Angeles, his latest book, “The Living Room Of The Dead” features a detective named Ray Sharp. Scott Murphy talked to him ahead of the Man International Literary Festival.
HK Magazine: Who is Ray Sharp?
Eric Stone: In the first book, he’s a journalist working for a business magazine in Hong Kong. In the second book, he works for a corporate investigations firm, also based in Hong Kong. It’s a little silly for a journalist to always be getting involved in life-and-death issues, so I thought having him work at an investigations firm would be a better excuse for poking his nose into these things. The second book is already written and the third is about two-thirds written. If it does well, I’m happy to do it until the day I die.
HK: How much of Ray Sharp is you?
ES: That’s a question that makes my father nervous. I guess some, certainly. I’m familiar, for better or worse, with a lot of the places he goes to in the book and I was the editor of a business magazine based in Hong Kong. I was pretty careful not to make him entirely biographical. Sharp is, I wouldn’t say typical, but not an unusual American on his own in Asia. He’s comfortable and knows and likes the place a lot. The big part of the first book is his attitude to the sex trade in Asia and his own participation in it. He's trying to come to terms with how he feels about that.
HK: Alert readers will find some similarities between your story and the Gary Alderdice case (the Hong Kong-based lawyer who was killed in Vladivostok in 1994 after falling in love with a Russian prostitute in Macau).
ES: I was in Hong Kong working as a journalist when the whole thing with Gary Alderdice took place. I always thought there were great and horrifying implications associated with the human trade from the former Soviet Union to Asia, and there was also scope to write about general issues showing the economic destruction in the former Soviet Union. I was looking for a subject for my first detective thriller and I thought that was a good one.
HK: Macau has certainly changed since then.
ES: That’s one reason why I set the book in 1995. I moved to Hong Kong in 1986 and left two weeks after the Handover. I went back to Macau in 2000 and it was beginning to change then. I’m afraid to see the Las Vegasization of it.