Interview with Denise Hamilton
 by Jon Jordan
 Denise's Web Site

JON:   How long were you a reporter, and do you still work for the LA Times at all?

DENISE:  I was a staff writer at the LA Times from 1985-95. After that I freelanced for the paper and other publications. I occasionally still write a piece or two for the Times but in the last year have concentrated almost exclusively on fiction. Scribner wants a book a year, and that means writing full-time. I still adore journalism however, and often hear about a good story and feel a slight twinge that I won't be writing it. But after 15 years in journalism, being a novelist beckons. It's new and exciting and I'm having so much fun. There's a sense of fulfillment in picking up a book you wrote and feeling its heft. And also in getting feedback from readers. I'm constantly amazed at the creative process, and how intuitive and subconscious much of it is. It's a whole new world to explore, and I'm just beginning.

JON:   Writing a main character who is a reporter seems like a natural. But as any writer would most likely tell you, it’s not always that easy. What went into developing Eve Diamond?

DENISE:  When I sat down to write my first book, the mantra "write what you know" when through my brain. And I thought, OK, well, I'm a white female LA Times reporter so that's what I'll make my sleuth. And I had spent much of my career in the suburban hinterlands, so that's where I situated my reporter. She roams through many different communities. Eve also takes more risks than I did, gets into more danger, gets romantically involved with sources, does questionable things in pursuit of stories and gets on some pretty shaky ethical ground. But that only makes her more complex and interesting as a character. She has to have ongoing challenges and situations where she must make moral choices. Many of the situations Eve gets herself in are inspired by stories I actually covered for the Times and other publications, but everything has been changed. You have to in fiction, you can't just dump a real-life scenario into a novel, it doesn't work. But many others are purely made up. But I don't think I could have written the series while still on staff at the LA Times. I would have censored myself, wondering what editors thought of Eve, whether they assumed she was me. Once I left the paper formally, I had the psychological distance to create Eve as a fully rounded character and let her rip. In sum, I guess you could call Eve my wilder alter ego.

JON:   All of the things I’ve heard about your books are great. It seems that your strengths as a reporter translate to writing fiction quite well. I’ve noticed that a lot of former reporters turned novelist are really good at the craft. Any thoughts on why this might be?

DENISE:  Actually, I think that writing fiction is the antithesis of writing journalism. Fiction is everything that journalism, with its emphasis on the Who, What, Where, When, Why and How, leaves out. It took me about a year after I left the paper to unlearn everything that had been ingrained in me as a journalist: Just the facts, not a lot of description or humor, and never, ever put in your opinion or feelings, that's verboten. I'm in a fabulous writing group, and when I brought in chapters of my first novel, The Jasmine Trade, my writer colleagues would tell me how much they enjoyed the action and characters but say that I had to add how Eve Diamond, my reporter sleuth, was feeling, and thinking, as a barrage of horrible events, murders, etc happened. And at first I was like, "am I allowed to put my own observations in?" But YES, that's what fiction is all about. Where journalism has helped me a great deal is in giving me disciplined work habits, a streamlined style and a no-nonsense approach to writing. You can't wait for the muse to waft over you, you have to just sit down at the blank screen, start writing, and THEN she will appear, lured by all that clacking of keys. As the mother of two small children, I write when they are in school. They are my de-facto deadlines. When 2:30 rolls around, I have to stop writing to go pick them up, even if I'm in mid-scene. I used to have daily deadlines. Now they're annual. That's the way I see it.

JON:   Your books, while damn fine writing in their own right, also draw a very accurate picture of the society we live in. Is this a conscience decision on your part?

DENISE:  I drove around Los Angeles for 15 years as I reporter, covering tragic, funny, awful, demented and surreal stories. A lot of what I saw couldn't make it into the stories, just because of the nature of journalism. But I realized when I started writing fiction that everything I had observed and witnessed and been a part of was lodged inside me, and it was a wonderful relief to let it out in the fiction. My novels are about the unseen LA, far from the glitz and glamor of Hollywood and Malibu (though occasionally there's a character, like Venus DellaViglia Langdon, who does come from that priveleged world.) But for me, it's much more interesting to plumb the fascinating and often surreal suburbs, to focus on the nexus where the First World and the Third World collide, where people across class and race and geography meet, often to share secrets that lead to murder. This is the unsung LA, where you scratch the surface and find incredible tales of survival, tragedy and hope. I read a lot of Raymond Chandler when I was first writing, not because I wanted to write like a middle-aged white man in Hollywood in the middle of the 20th century. My LA is not Chandler's LA. But I loved his noir vibe and wanted to transpose that to contemporary, multicultural Los Angeles, told through the perspective of a young female journalist.

JON:   Do you think writing crime/mystery fiction is more challenging than straight fiction? I’m thinking that having to resolve the mystery and do so in a logical manner would make it a bit more rigid than regular fiction which has less boundaries.

DENISE:  When I first set out to write fiction, I settled on mysteries because I liked the rigidity of the genre. I felt it gave me a blueprint, or an outline. Consider that in a mystery, someone dies or goes missing in the first chapter and there are clues and red herrings in each subsequent chapter and things are resolved in a messy or neat fashion by the final pages. So there was my outline. I felt that all I had to do was fill in the blanks. It's a lot more complex than that, obviously, but with such a road map in hand, I felt more confident. Unlike if I were to write, say, a 700-page novel about family disfunction. You could take a very wrong turn at page 200 on such an endeavor and never find your way out. Mysteries have to be tightly plotted, with the action propelling the plot along. The urgency of that kind of writing has something journalistic about it, which felt comfortable and familiar. The challenge for me was to develop my characters while not sacrificing the plot.

JON:   Is it difficult to write and still maintain a normal life? Do you find yourself keeping strange hours sometimes?

DENISE:  All I do is write and take care of my kids. With my husband, that is. I don't watch TV. We don't go out much. (I'm too tired and they wake up at 6 am). At this stage in my life, I live vicariously through my plots and through Eve Diamond, my character. It's a good thing I traveled and had so many adventures when I was younger and unencumbered. Because now I'm quite content to spin tales at my computer, which is located in our bedroom, in a converted closet. I can't think of anything I'd rather be doing, or any profession that would give me so much creative gratification and allow me the flexibility to spend a lot of time with my children, who are 5 and 7. As my deadlines approach, I do work odd hours - it's amazing what a cup of coffee can do for me in the evening - but my brain is freshest and most creative in the morning, so that's when I try to write.

JON:   Is it hard to look at your own work objectively when you do re-writes, or are you able to cut and add as needs demand?

DENISE:  I am very lucky to have come to fiction from the profession of reporting. I was on staff for the Los Angeles Times for 10 years and then freelanced for another five years. Journalism is excellent training for fiction, because it teaches you to meet deadlines, banish writers' block, write whether you feel like it or not and trim ruthlessly as needed. (And not take it personally when your editor suggests trims, changes etc.) With journalism, you pretty much have to leave your ego at the door. Your copy constantly gets rewritten and changed and slashed. Some of this is due to the profession. You can spend two hours crafting a killer lead, and then an hour later, the suspect in the homicide gets caught, and you have to rewrite the sucker in five minutes to meet deadline. So there's that. And you've constantly got editors scrutinizing the tops of your stories, telling you to write faster, to change this, to restructure the angle, so you get adept at moving words and paragraphs around, and deft at cutting. I used to like to trim my stories myself whenever possible, because some editor downtown would solve the space problem by just lopping off the last five paragraphs. This has been great training for me, because I tend to write long anyway, then go back and cut and refine. And I also layer, adding details and background once I've done the first draft. Kind of like layering the phyllo dough when you make spanikopita, one of my favorite dishes. While I write on a computer, I edit on hard copy, preferably propped up in bed with a cat nearby, and several sharpened pencils at the ready.

JON:   Who is the first person to read your work when you are done?

DENISE:  Well, I'm in a writing group so my colleagues read and critique chapters as I go along. But with my one-book-a-year deadline now, my writing has outpaced the ability of the group to critique it. So I write most of it in isolation, here in my walk-in-bedroom closet, and then give the manuscript to two trusted "readers" and friends who are also authors, editors and literary critics. I'm always on pins and needles until I hear back to learn whether I've just wasted an entire year of my life. So far I'm lucky, they haven't sent me back to the drawing board. There is that critical juncture you come to as a novelist when you've got a draft, and you don't trust your own opinions anymore, you have utterly no distance from it by that time, you've been living with it for a year and have no idea if it's a lump of steaming horseshit or a lump of gold or something in between. It's a very soul-terrifying moment when you jump over the abyss and hand it to someone for their appraisal. You can only do this with people for whom you have deep trust and confidence in as critics. As much as I adore and respect my husband and admire his intelligence and wit, I don't go to him with the finished manuscript to seek his feedback on it (at this stage, at least). It's because he's not a writer (he's a college librarian) and he doesn't read mysteries and he actually reads a lot more non-fiction than fiction. So he is not the best sounding board for what I do. Once I get the initial feedback and make the changes, then I let him read it and am curious and interested in his take on it. But only then.

JON:   Is there anything you weren't prepared for when you decided to write novels? Maybe the response from readers, or what is involved with the promotion of them?

DENISE:  Again, having been a journalist for so long, I'm used to the public calling up after a story runs to complain, praise, tell me how I got it completely wrong and threaten lawsuits. So that part of it I knew pretty well, though I have to say that readers usually get in touch when they like a book of mine, and newspaper readers usually only wrote or called when they had a bone to pick. The thing that has flabbergasted me, even though other authors warned me of it, is the need to promote your own work. My publisher Scribner does a great job of sending me on tour, mailing out books, doing all the major things. But there are so many other levels to explore. A lot of this is grassroots outreach, radiating out from where you live. I speak at a lot of libraries, colleges, women's groups, charity events, book groups, etc. And if my publisher is sending me to Chicago, I'll try to hit other cities that are a couple hours away to fill in the tour. But promotion can be a bottomless pit too. You can spend 40 hours a week just calling and e-mailing people and arranging talks. At some point I have to pull back and spend more time writing. It's somewhat cyclical.

JON:   What's the strangest story you were ever involved with as a reporter?

DENISE:  Ah, there are so many, I could go on for days, and most of the memorable ones will eventually surface in the Eve Diamond books. One was certainly the parachute kids, which form the locus of "The Jasmine Trade." They are the wealthy immigrant Asian kids who live by themselves in big houses in LA and other U.S. cities going to school while their parents are back in Asia, working at family businesses. In "Jasmine," a parachute kid is killed, which is how Eve learns about this whole subculture and starts to investigate it. One of the L.A. Times editors downtown thought the story sounded too sensational to be true. She called up my editor and wanted to know if anyone had checked my sources, to make sure I wasn't inventing it, a la Jayson Blair, Stephen Glass and so many other of my esteemable colleagues. But my theory is that whatever weird, surreal, perverse thing you can imagine, it's out there, a reporter just has to go out there and dig and they'll find it.

Another really sad and horrifyingly compelling story that inspired my upcoming book "Last Lullaby" (Scribner April 2004) was about a three-year-old Thai boy with HIV who was sold by his heroin-addicted prostitute mother in Bangkok to a criminal syndicate who used him as a decoy to smuggle prostitutes into the U.S. The smugglers would dress the kid up in nice clothes with fancy toys, drug him for the flight over and pretend they were a wealthy Asian family on vacation, when in reality the kid was a decoy, the "mom" was a whore and the "dad" was the smuggler. The kid had already made several trips when they got caught by U.S. Customs at LAX. The adults were sent back to Thailand but no one knew where the kid belonged and they coulnd't ship him back because he was so sick. And all his documents were fake. Then some wonderful and brave Thai activists in LA got involved and tried to get asylum for the kid. The INS wanted to ship him back and so did the Thai consultate. The story has a happy ending, the good guys prevailed and the kids is now on anti-viral drugs and has been adopted by a family in Los Angeles. But was that a twisted one, and I was the first reporter to uncover all this and tell the kid's story.

JON:   What's the hardest part of working on a series as opposed to single stand alone books?

DENISE:  I'm only on my fourth Eve Diamond book and I'm still full of ideas about plot and character development. I've got a lot more to say in this series and can't imagine getting tired of writing it, though I assume it will eventually run its natural course. But I can also see the appeal of a stand-alone and I am getting the craving to try that too. I would like to do both actually, and toggle back and forth between series and stand-alones. The series both buoys you up and gives you much of the framework for the next book (cuz you've got your main character already) and it limits you in terms of your POV, your character's past, her personality, the general thrust and themes of the series. I guess I could have Eve quit the paper and become an exotic dancer, but it might be weird. And my books are in first person, so all the action has to take place onstage. Sometimes I'd like to do multiple POVs, and get inside the heads of other people. Sounds like I'm well on the way to writing a stand-alone.

JON:   Have you had any crazy ideas for your work that you thought for just a minute or two might be great but later vetoed?

DENISE:  I wanted to set the sequel to The Jasmine Trade in the Balkans. During the Bosnian War, I got a Fulbright Fellowship and lived in former Yugoslavia and traveled all around and had lots of interesting adventures, including visiting Albania, one of the more odd and surreal little places on earth. So I thought I'd have Eve win a Fulbright and head off there for some John Le Carre-type adventures in the post Cold War power vaccuum and regional wars of the Balkans. My agent and editor almost immediately nixed that, saying Eve had to stay in LA and establish herself there. In retrospect, that was wise, especially in the start of a series, it would be too great of a segue. But I was intrigued to see that Dan Fesperman's books are set in the Balkans and have received high praise. They're both utterly fabulous by the way, intelligent plotting, evocative writing, great characters, especially Vlado Petric the Sarajevo homicide detective in "Lie in the Dark," who returns in "A Small Boat of Great Sorrow" as a War Crimes Tribunal investigator. So I'm mildly envious that Dan proposed that character and setting for his first book and got the green light. His books have also won awards and deserve all the praise they get. Mine would be very different. But one day I'll write that Balkans novel, because I've done about 100 pages and it's inside of me, itching to come out. And maybe the character won't be Eve, but someone else.

JON:   Is there anything about you that readers would be surprised to learn?

DENISE:  I don't know if this is a surprise but I don't watch TV. About 5 times a year I'll sit down with my husband and watch a video. But with two kids and a full-time writing career, I don't have time, and frankly when the day is done I'd much rather curl up in bed with a book. I find that way more relaxing. For years my kids thought that TV was videos that you shoved in. They didn't realize there was live TV too (and I was in no hurry to enlighten them). When 9/11 happened, I was driving back from taking the kids to school and I turned on NPR and heard the news. When I got home, I ran to the kitchen and turned on our kitchen radio to listen in, horrified. It was only after about 10 minutes of crouching there, trembling with horror, that I realized, oh my God, we have a TV, I should just turn that on, I bet they have PICTURES!!! But then I couldn't figure out how to do it. I had to call my husband at work, and he walked me through how to turn on the TV in my own home. So perhaps that is weird, or freaky. But I do keep up with what's on TV and the media in general, because I read the paper pretty carefully each day.

JON:   Who is your favorite character in fiction?

DENISE:  I don't have one overriding fave. It is often based on the last great book I read. I loved Harriet, the 11 year old protagonist of Donna Tartt's, The Little Friend. I love the Helen Mirren character in the BBC productions of "Prime Suspect." (Yes I did rent those videos!). Villains can be fascinating too. Rashkolnikov in Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. Or flawed characters like the young Russian-American slacker in The Russian Debutante's Handbook and the young translator in Nicole Mones' Lost in Translation. (no relation to the Sophia Coppola movie). I see Philip Marlowe as more of an archetype than a character, though I love him, and also Walter Mosley's characters. I just read Purple Cane Road and I think James Lee Burke's Dave Robicheaux is pretty cool. I guess I lean toward flawed characters who are struggling to keep it together.

JON:   Coffee, tea, or caffeine free?

DENISE:  Caffeine all the way! It's a powerful drug and I love it. I'm very sensitive to caffeine and can't drink too much or it becomes counter-productive and also it keeps me from getting to sleep. But with two cups of coffee in the morning, I'm good to go for about four hours. I also time my caffeine intake carefully while on the road. A cup an hour before a reading offers a great pick-me-up for jet-lag and general exhaustion. Timed right, it wears off by the time I hit the hotel bed. Sometimes I feel like one of those Dutch traders in the 17th century sitting around the coffee houses, like in David Liss's book, and discovering its magical powers. I feel very creative and alive, almost manic, after a cup or two of coffee. It definitely makes me write and be industrious in general. The thoughts just pop, the energy crackles. You can hear the plants grow. I guess I'm just a legal speed freak.

JON:   What's the last movie you saw and what did you think of it?

DENISE:  "Dirty Pretty Things" by Stephen Frears. It's set in multicultural London and involves desperate immigrants and the black market organ trade. It's the dirty underbelly of the big city. He's doing for London the same time of thing I'm trying to evoke for Los Angeles. Both are global megalopolises where the Third World rubs up against the First World, often with explosive results. It's a world that the average citizen has never seen and might not even know exists, but as a reporter I was plunged into it almost daily, and it's fascinating, it's like being shot up with recombinant DNA, it's molding us all in ways we can't even imagine. His movie has gotten a great buzz and I'm glad, I think he's a pretty fearless director and has always tackled interesting and tough subjects.

JON:   Did you enjoy doing some signings with Julia Spencer Fleming?

DENISE:  I LOVED signing with Julia, she's smart and funny and a character and we just yak the whole time and have a blast. We also see eye to eye on promotion and the need to get out there in this big US of A and meet people. It's also so nice to have a companion on the road, as it does get exhausting and disorienting. This way, one of us can drive and the other can navigate. And at night we're both on the phone, talking to husbands and kids and missing them. Also, I am a big fan of hers so I can introduce her and rave and then she can do the same for me and we don't feel like schmos who are touting our own novels. We're going to tour again a bit in Spring 2004 and I'm really looking forward to it. I've got two little kids and she's got three so we're calling it the "murdering mommies tour."

JON:   As you are becoming more a part of the mystery community, do you find your self owning more books than you thought you would?

DENISE:  Ah, yes indeed, there are books in every room of my house and I'm constantly buying bookcases to store the new ones. This is a bit of a dangerous profession for me, honestly. I find that I especially want to buy signed copies of authors I know or have met or have toured with or just generally swoon for.

JON:   Would you consider letting your books become movies?

DENISE:  Absolutely. But a lot of stars would have to come into alignment, and I don't mean movie stars.

JON:   What's the one thing always in your refrigerator?

DENISE:  Hmm, I guess I should say some kind of exotic vodka made from organic Siberian potatoes flavored with fennel pollen that I sip at midnight under a full moon while writing some new adventure for Eve, but the plain truth is that the one thing that's always in my fridge is a carton of milk. The kids and I drink it with every meal. I started drinking non-fat when I was pregnant and find it's a good way to get protein quickly. And with women there's that calcium thang