Just the Facts as I Know Them: article by Erik Stone in Web Mystery Magazine, Fall 2005

Just the Facts as I Know Them

There’s a scene in the car chase movie The Fast and the Furious that was shot on a street around the corner from where I live. The cars chase each other down the hill, turn left at the bottom – on Sunset Boulevard – and presto, they’re at the harbor. That drove me nuts. It just yanked me right out of the movie. I couldn’t believe anything in it anymore. In reality, the harbor’s 30 miles away.

I swore I’d never get anything so wrong in my writing. That isn’t to say that I’ve got to have personal experience of everything I write about. But it helps. Experience and/or research are what make the difference between writing that’s believable and writing that isn’t.

My book, The Living Room of the Dead, takes place in Hong Kong, Macau, Zhuhai (China), an island in the South China Sea and Vladivostok, Russia. I lived in Hong Kong for nearly 11 years. I went to Macau at least once a month the whole time I was in Hong Kong – and even did the writing and research for a “tourist guide map of Macau.” I’ve spent time in Zhuhai and on islands in the South China Sea. All of which figure in the book.

I’ve never been to Vladivostok though. At first I was very nervous writing about the city. Thanks to research and having found a couple of email pen pals in Vladivostok, when I showed those chapters to someone who’d spent time there, they were convinced I had too. At one point my character, Ray Sharp, has a truly awful cup of coffee in a greasy burger joint across the street from a newspaper office, down the block from a Russian revolutionary monument. If you’re ever in Vladivostok you can go to that burger joint, although I changed the name. I’ve never been there, but if I ever am I will take the word of my email correspondents and avoid the coffee.

Details and context are what make a book stand out, at least for me. They don’t merely set the scene, but they can be vital to moving along the plot and to understanding the motivations of the characters.

When I was working as a journalist in Asia, it was for business and economics magazines. But those subjects don’t exist in a vacuum. They go hand in hand with everything from politics to sex, the arts to sports. The variety of stories I covered amazed me. The longest thing I ever wrote before writing my first book, was a 12,000 word article (my book is around 100,000 words) on the timber industry in Indonesia. You might be thinking, ‘yawn.’ But I’m basing at least the first three books in my Ray Sharp series on stories I covered. A lot of truly strange stuff I uncovered while doing the story on the timber industry, is going to find its way into the third book of the series.

And it’s not just the plot that benefits from my experience. My first hand knowledge of the region: of its politics, economics, cultures, languages, food, sexual practices, and the whole spectrum of things you learn living somewhere, are a big part of what brings the books to life for the reader.

When Ray Sharp first meets Sasha, one of the main characters in The Living Room of the Dead, he does so in a hostess nightclub based on a place that I have been to on several occasions. I’ve spent hours chatting with Russian prostitutes in that very nightclub – while the meter ticked away in six minute increments; only lawyers are worse.

When Sasha comes to Ray’s table she’s wearing a wedding dress and he pokes a little fun at her about it. I was once taken to a different nightclub by some business associates in Taipei. Two of the hostesses who came to our table were in wedding dresses. The one I sat next to explained to me that many of her customers liked to pretend it was their wedding night.

When Ray walks around Hong Kong as a typhoon approaches; when he walks around the world’s most densely populated neighborhood, when he eats in certain restaurants or the plot takes him to nightclubs, when he chats with the C.I.A. guy in the coffee shop in Macau, when he’s on a fishing boat in the South China Sea; I know all these things first hand.

When Ray spends money, it’s the right amount for what he’s getting and the currency conversions are correct for when the story takes place. Economics affects almost everything anyone does, and I think my background writing about it helps give the books a ring of truth. It also helps me to show the reader what’s making the characters tick.

Some other things I know second hand – Vladivostok, some of the scenes in brothels – but I know them from several different people who know them first hand. My background in journalism makes me want several sources for every fact, even when I use that fact in fiction.

Then of course some of the places in my books are made up. But even those places could exist. They probably even do. One in particular – an island in the South China Sea where women are kept to be tortured by paying customers – is based on rumor. There are islands very much like it that really do exist; although dedicated to straight prostitution, gambling, and the eating of illegal foods such as bear paw, civet cat, endangered turtles, and tiger.

My books aren’t meant to be travelogues, but you probably could get some useful tourist tips out of them. One of my favorite reviews of The Living Room of the Dead comes from the Bangkok Post. In it, Bernard Trink writes: “… the author gives the readers descriptions of Hong Kong, Macau, and Vladivostok on a par with Paul Theroux's travel pieces.”

It’s my familiarity with the details that allows me to keep such good company.

Amazon review (by Carol S. Walker): This book was a great read. Within a few pages, protagonist Ray Sharp feels like a real person. The descriptions of HongKong and Macau never strain for effect, yet they are incredibly vivid (and accurate, based on my modest HK experience).

Eric Stone's books books are available at Amazon.com as well as most bookstores.