You've said in interviews that most of what goes on in the Ray Sharp series is based on true life events that you've witnessed, written or heard about.  How does that affect your writing? How do you know when and where to draw the line between fiction and true-crime events?

There's the need to disguise some of the characters, places and incidents for legal reasons, but that actually crops up less than I would have thought. In real life, a lot of the types of crimes I write about have one very simple motivation - greed. But that's kind of boring to write about. I want my characters and plots to be more complex than that. So, I have to invent back stories and complicated emotions and relationships to drive the narrative in ways that suck in readers more than the simple desire of someone to make more money, or to do their job. The third book in my series, FLIGHT OF THE HORNBILL, was loosely based on the Bre-X gold fraud in Indonesia in the mid-1990s. It was a fascinating crime and business story, but I wanted to give it the emotional depth and resonance that fiction can provide more easily than fact. I think that even though it takes place in a distant, exotic locale and involves something that most of my readers would never be involved in, it still manages to provide my readers something that they can relate to emotionally, rather than simply intellectually or out of curiosity.

You've said in interviews that you enjoy writing a series around your "everyman" protagonist Ray Sharp, because it allows you to explore real events and issues, while maintaining a sense of continuity and focus for your readers.  Tell us more about what you enjoy when writing a series.  What would be different when writing a standalone? Is it a completely different process?

One of the things I do like about Ray Sharp is that he's no superman. He's just a relatively smart, loyal, tenacious guy with no fabulous special skills. I enjoy working out how to get him into trouble and then how to get him back out of it, since unlike, say, James Bond, he isn't going to be much good in a fight or a shootout or technologically. That, of course, can also land him in hot water that he might not, realistically, be able to get out of. Which happens to him in SHANGHAIED. The thing about Ray is that while he is certainly not me, he isn't unlike me. I enjoy writing him, but I actually prefer writing the other characters, they're more challenging creatively. Although no matter how far from me a character is, I find that there's something of me inside them all, and I enjoy the occasional bouts of introspection that pushes me into.

I enjoy writing the series, but at the moment I'm working on a standalone and it feels good to take a break from what I've been doing for the past four years. The writing is more difficult, which I enjoy. I feel like I'm having to stretch myself. And I'm playing around with different points of view. The Ray Sharp series is all first person, present tense, and the novel I'm currently working on - which is set in 1947 Los Angeles - is third person, multiple points of view and sort of present tense. One of the difficulties of that is that I so much enjoy the multiple points of view that I have had to be careful not to invent too many characters. There was a waitress who I really liked, but then I realized I'd written her needlessly into too many scenes and I had to go back and ruthlessly get rid of most of her.

You've lived and worked as journalist in Asia for eleven years and have set your series there, yet you now live in Los Angeles. Was it a difficult transition (or "culture shock") living and writing in two very different places?
 
It was tough coming back to the U.S. after all that time away. I felt like an outsider, both here, and as an American in Asia I was obviously an outsider there as well. Which was the main reason I came back. I feared I was reaching a point of no return as an expatriate and I wanted to feel like an insider somewhere. It took me a good couple of years and several cross country road trips before I felt fully comfortable back home. (I've never felt that someone can get any real sense of America confining themselves to the coasts, and maybe Chicago.) And, it took a while longer than that before I began to feel that I'd regained enough of a feel for the U.S. that I could begin to write books set here. The standalone I'm working on now is set here, although it's historical. But the next books I have planned - a sort of offshoot of the Ray Sharp series - will be set in Northern Mexico and Southern California and will be contemporary. Although, they will deal with the Asian communities here, which are the largest in the world outside their native countries.

If you had to set another book in a different part of the world (where you could live and do research), where would you go?

There's a lot of places, but I suppose my first choices would be West Africa, particularly Mali. I spent a couple of months there in 1985 and have always wanted to go back. And probably Eastern Europe, especially Hungary. I've also always been intrigued by family run Chinese restaurants in small towns in the U.S. A book having to do with that intrigues me.

What inspired you to become a writer? What continues to inspire you?

I've written stories ever since I learned to write. It feels about as natural as breathing. My mother and father were both great story tellers with a wide ranging curiosity about the world, and I got a lot from them. I'm constantly driven to explore new things, new places. It's a kind of restlessness that drives some of my friends and family a bit crazy at times. I guess you could say I have a promiscuous curiosity about life and the world. There's no way I can ever try, see or do all the things I'd like to before I die. But I can't imagine not working at it.

What is your writing routine? What's your favorite part about the writing process?

I write, or try to, every day for about four hours in the morning. Then I get desperate to meet someone for lunch so that I don't lose human contact. Then in the afternoon I tend to edit, research, take care of business matters. By then my brain is usually too awash in thoughts to do much creative writing. I especially love it when a book reaches the point where its internal logic and momentum begin to dictate to me. Sometimes that causes problems. In FLIGHT OF THE  HORNBILL, I wasn't planning on having one character shoot another, but the story got to a point where it was the only thing that made sense. It kind of took me by surprise and I found that thrilling. There's a very major development in SHANGHAIED where the same thing happened. It completely changed how I had to think about the book and what I was going to do with the book, but it was one of the highlights of my book writing career when it happened.

Describe your path to publication.

My first book was non-fiction, a biography of a major league baseball player in the 1940s - Blackie Schwamb - who was a gangster in the off-season, committed a murder in 1949 and became famous playing ball in prison. That was an outgrowth of a long interview I had done with Schwamb, hoping to sell a magazine story. Before that, I didn't have any idea I could write a whole book. I found an agent by sending out a bunch of queries, and he sold the book to the 29th publisher who saw it. That gave me the confidence to try and write a novel, which I'd always wanted to do. I wrote the first novel in about three months and sent it to a friend - a writer with a dozen or so books published - for his opinion. He liked it and told me he could probably make an offer on it for Tor-Forge. That was a surprise, I had no idea he was an editor for St. Martins. He did, I ran it through my agent, and the Ray Sharp series was born. (The first book, THE LIVING ROOM OF THE DEAD, was published in hardback by Forge. Since then, Bleak House Books has published the series.)

How many more in the Ray Sharp series? Would you consider starting another series? Do you have any plans for future stand-alones?

I'm not certain. Bleak House has an option on the next book in the series, and after that, who knows? I actually have two ideas for books in the Ray Sharp series that take place before the first book in the series, so we'll see what comes of those. I have an idea for an offshoot series centered on Wen Lei Yue, who Ray meets and starts to work with in GRAVE IMPORTS, the second book in the series, and who figures very significantly into SHANGHAIED. That's the series that would be set in Northern Mexico and Southern California. And I'm envisioning the standalone that I'm currently working on as the first in a trilogy (though not actually a series) of books set in Los Angeles.

Out of all of the stories in the global headlines today, as a journalist, which would you find most interesting to cover?  Are there any that you would work into future novels?

The continuing economic development of China and the ways it is reaching into every little nook and cranny around the world and the impact that has culturally, socially, politically and in crime. I think there's a lifetime of both fiction and non-fiction to be got out of that.

You mentioned that your in your first book in this series, you based Ray Sharp a bit on yourself.  You have also said that many of the events in your books are inspired by true life. In this most recent book, Shangheid, you include your usual coterie of business moguls, hookers, friends and foes.  Do any of your friends get worried that a version of themselves will end up in one of your books someday?

Most of them seem to hope they do. Although I did have a somewhat uncomfortable email exchange with someone who thought he recognized himself in the first book and wasn't happy about the depiction. There's a scene in FLIGHT OF THE HORNBILL that is pretty much exactly how I met an old girlfriend of mine. She was pleased by that, and remembered it the same way. My father, who doesn't read much fiction and who I don't think really understands what fiction is, worries that Ray Sharp is too much like me. He's a little embarrassed to have some of his friends read my books. Colin Cotterill, who's a good friend, gave my name to the corpse of an American pilot in one of his books. So in SHANGHAIED I've given his name to a British, Hong Kong cop who is retiring to open a brothel in the Philippines. I think Colin got the better deal out of that exchange.

What book is on your nightstand right now? What current authors do you read?

At the moment I'm reading INTO THE BEAUTIFUL NORTH, by Luis Alberto Urrea. I read most of the authors who set their books in Asia, Colin Cotterill, Martin Limon, Timothy Hallinan, Qiu Xiaolong. I loved SJ Rozan's new book, SHANGHAI MOON. There's a Chinese writer who I particularly love named Ma Jian, his most recent book is BEIJING COMA and it is utterly brilliant, although relentlessly grim and depressing (it's not a crime novel or thriller.) There's a bunch of other crime and thriller writers I love reading, too many to list here. In the non-crime and thriller category I'll read anything and everything by William T Vollmann.

What would you do if you weren't a journalist or writer of any kind? What other careers interest you?

Hard to imagine, but I suppose I'd want to be some sort of anthropologist. That would give me the same sort of excuse that writing does to poke my nose into other people's business.

Does life in Los Angeles nurture your creative spirit more than the time you spent living in Asia?
 
There isn't much difference. In Asia I had the constant stimulation of something new and different. In Los Angeles I have the constant stimulation of remarkable diversity. One of the things I've really grown to appreciate about being back in Los Angeles is that the whole world is here. Bangkok is a fantastic place, but it's 99% Thai. Los Angeles has the largest Thai community in the world outside of Thailand, but it also has the same for Japan, Korea, China, the Philippines, Cambodia, Vietnam, Iran, Armenia, pretty much every Latin American country and other places as well. Within a 20 minute drive of my house I can travel the world. Not that living here has stopped me from wanting to travel the world that is beyond my driving abilities.

What makes Shanghaied the perfect thrilling summer read?

It's very fast paced, if I do say so myself. It's got suspense, humor, sex, violence, drugs and nearly the full range of human emotions. It's got characters you'll love, characters you'll hate, characters you'll get turned on and turned off by. You'll find out what really happened to the world's largest fireworks display. It's got swearing in four languages. There's a dumpling accident, a subway chase scene and the reason the Dalai Lama eats meat. It will transport you to exotic locales, some of which you might rather go to in the pages of a book than live and in person, but you can rest assured in the knowledge that I've been to them for you.

For more information on Eric Stone and SHANGHAIED, visit his website at www.ericstone.com.

Megan Kelley Hall's second novel, THE LOST SISTER (Kensington, Aug. 2009), is a sequel to her debut YA suspense thriller Sisters of Misery and comes out this August. For more information, go to www.megankelleyhall.com.