Welcome, Denise! Tell us about yourself.

I am a former Los Angeles Times reporter turned novelist. During my 10 years at the Times, I covered the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe, the break-up of the Soviet Union and youth movements in Japan. But the bulk of my career was spent in the suburbs of Los Angeles, especially the San Gabriel Valley, an area east of downtown that has become a port of entry for the growing immigrant Asian communities, especially the Overseas Chinese. Inspiration for my novel The Jasmine Trade came from a Page 1 Times story about "parachute kids" - the middle and upper class Asian teens who live in LA, often on their own, while their parents stay behind to run businesses in Asia. As a freelance journalist, I continue to write for the Los Angeles Times and have also been published in Wired, Cosmopolitan, Der Spiegel and New Times, Los Angeles.

I'm a Los Angeles native who grew up here and have watched it evolve into a First as well as Third World Capital, and it's the space where those two meet that fascinates me. I have an bachelor's in economics from Loyola Marymount University and a master's degree in journalism from Cal State Northridge. I am also a Fulbright Scholar who lived and taught in former Yugoslavia during the Bosnian War (in the now trouble-plagued former republic of Macedonia).

I've done consulting for New York University's Institute for War, Peace Reporting and Washington, D.C.-based Search for Common Ground; written a handbook on multi-ethnic reporting and led workshops in the Balkans where I helped reporters of Albanian, Turkish and Macedonian ethnicity work cooperatively to produce a monthlong newspaper series.

I now live in the foothills of a Los Angeles suburb with my husband and two young children.

Are you now writing full-time?

I am still a working journalist. I am now trying to balance journalism and fiction writing.

Tell us about your road to publication.

Around 1995, I joined a writing group, and at first I brought in a bunch of travel writing from all my trips. Then, realizing I had to plunge into fiction and, having always had fantasies about writing a novel, I started thinking about what I could write.

Back in 1993 when I was still at the Times and reporting in the San Gabriel Valley , I had written a front page story about "parachute kids" that was reprinted around the world. The topic fascinated me, it was so complex and dramatic and poignant and psychologically rich and layered, and to me it perfectly illustrated the changing face of contemporary, multicultural LA and the cultural clashes faced by immigrants. And I knew I couldn't do the topic justice in the LA Times, not even in a 75-inch newspaper story. I wondered what happened to these kids after I left them at night, the next weekend, the next year. Did they get into good colleges, become model citizens? Did they carry a lot of psychological baggage and how did that affect their lives? OR did they slip into anomie, gangs, fractured relationships.

As a reporter, even if you get months to work on a story, at some point, you always have to put it to bed and then run off to start the next one. But with this topic, I knew I wanted to dig deeper. I kept thinking about these teenagers with hormones running amok, caught between two cultures, torn between filial piety and rebellion, being vulnerable and seeking emotional connections with people, trying to make up for what they lacked at home. I imagined the thin filament on which they dangled, in this new world of America, while trying to maintain traditional Chinese values. So I knew I had to write about parachute kids. They had taken up residence inside my head, for better or for worse. I also recalled another reporter in our bureau writing about a young girl who had been murdered in a car-jacking. And I started imagining...what if that girl had been a parachute kid? And what if there was more to the story than a random act of violence.

As to who my protagonist would be, well they always say write what you know, and I'm a white female journalist who spent a long time in the LA suburbs, often covering different ethnic groups and cultural clashes and how immigration was reshaping the landscape in almost every conceivable way - from finance to real estate to schools to crime to social service agency needs.

Anyway, so I made my character a single, Chandleresque dame who drinks too much, is ambivalent about her job and makes some unwise choices. But she's also someone the mainstream can relate too. I wanted the novel and the readers to move through the kaleidescopic landscape of contemporary LA with this reporter, feeling a bit surreal and unmoored and learning along with her. Reporters, just like cops and PI's, have via their notepads a bona-fide passport to move through all levels of society - from the richest and most powerful to the homeless street kid and everyone in between. Reporters observe and remark and learn, and that's what I wanted my character Eve to do and hopefully the reader as well.

So I wrote the first chapter of The Jasmine Trade and brought it in to my writing group. They were all excited, they were seeing a window into a cultural phenomenon and world they had never imagined before, (but which I took for granted since I had researched it for so long). They thought Eve was saucy and interesting, they liked her voice, and they wondered what would happen next. So then I had to run to the computer and write chapter two. I wrote the novel almost in serial installments or "stories" for the eight women in my writing group. It felt less daunting somehow, than thinking that I was embarking on a N-O-V-E-L.

My take on LA was this: With all apologies to Ridley Scott's Blade Runner and Philip K. Dick, I believe the future of Los Angeles does not lie in the teeming vertical claustrophobia of decaying urban centers. Rather, it is under construction today in quiet hillside suburbs where the last empty spaces of the Wild, Wild West are meeting and fusing with an even wilder East. Here, big American developers wouldn't dream of breaking ground until their feng shui consultants have vetted the land and signed off on blueprints. Here, every blond-haired, blue-eyed sales agent in the new master-planned communities knows why the phone number on her business card ends in a triple eight - that's the luckiest number in Chinese numerology. Here, Latino workmen have become adept at installing built-in woks and storage cupboards for 50-lb. bags of rice.

This is a world that is only now seeping into American letters and cinema. It is too nascent, too unformed. Yet while unique to Southern California, it also transcends time and place the way our favorite parables always have. If Raymond Chandler were writing today, he'd send Philip Marlowe to investigate the disappearance of a Hong Kong businessman with a beautiful young wife whose El Monte computer chip factory was robbed of silicon-encrusted chips worth their weight in gold. The Midwestern extras who yearned for Hollywood oblivion in Nathanael West's Day of the Locust would be recast today as survivors of Pol Pot's killing fields now living above a Vietnamese noodle shop in Alhambra. And instead of chronicling white hippie culture in San Francisco, Joan Didion might hunker down in a Monterey Park nightclub with Hong Kong's "golden youth," whose parents have shipped them across the Pacific for safekeeping in advance of the British Crown Colony's return to Mainland China.

So what I strive for is the purity of vision of the old LA, but brought into contemporary times to reflect all the changes. I'm now 150 pages into the sequel - which is called Sugar Skull - and I'm still juggling fiction and journalism. I find that the cross-pollination between journalism and fiction to be very helpful. Interviewing people and hearing stories gives me ideas for future novels. And now that I"m a novelist, I am even more on the lookout for that telling phrase, the sprightly dialouge, those little details, the pacing and narrative drive of good magazine journalism that has to hook readers in at the beginning and proceed to a middle and an end, much like a good novel.

What led you to write mysteries?

I chose to write a mystery because its parameters appealed to me. There was a clearly established blueprint to follow, a structure. Someone gets killed in Chapter One. In each of the subsequent chapters, the sleuth discovers clues and meets people who help push the narrative along. At the end, you find out who did it and things get tied up somewhat, albeit often in a messy and true-to-life way.

This appealed to me a lot. When I thought about sitting at the computer, trying to write The Great American Novel, I just didn't have a clue where to begin. And I thought of all the byways and tributaries where I could get stuck. But a mystery, now there was a pure and distilled form. Plus, I've always been a fan of Raymond Chandler and Ross McDonald and Walter Mosley and love how they navigate the reader through an unknown world. I wanted The Jasmine Trade to update that genre, bring it into the present, and show you contemporary multicultural LA. I set out to make LA a character in my novel, but not the LA of Chandler, but parts much further east and less white.

I found I loved the noirish voice I developed, and how I could comment about LA and race and class and even my ambivalence about journalism. I realized that after driving around interviewing people for all those years, I had a lot to say, observations that would never have been appropriate for a newspaper story, but that were perfect for fiction. It took me a year to unlearn how to write like a journalist, to use the inner voice, to wisecrack and make personal comments, to not attribute everything, to get away from the facts and into the nuances. Also, I don't think I could have ever written this novel if I had still been at the Times. I needed the psychological distance to be able to write freely and not wonder what editors at the paper thought about my fictional character reflecting parts of my own personality.

What kind of research was involved for your first book?

My "research" was conducted during my 10 years as a Times Staff Writer and in the six subsequent years as a freelance journalist. I have so many stories and interesting characters floating around in my head that I could write a dozen books. And I hope to!

What do you find to be the most challenging/difficult part of writing a book?

For me, as the mother of two young children, and as a working journalist, by far the most difficult thing is finding the time to write.

How are you promoting your new release?

I am doing a book tour along the West Coast (see web site for details) and will be at Bouchercon in NOvember. My Web site is www.denisehamilton.com and I am trying to keep it updated and add information but I'm a newbie at this so please bear with me.

Who are your influences as a writer?

I read widely, and not just in mysteries, but in biographies and history. I can't think of anyone who has been a huge influence, except perhaps Raymond Chandler, and that in only the broadest possible sense. I love Susan Straight, the unfinished memoir by Albert Camus, Lost in Translation by Nicole Mones, The Balkan Trilogy by Olivia Manning, anything by Dame Edith Durham, who wrote the most fabulous travel literature about early 20th century Albania, Paul Bowles, My Traitor's Heart by Rian Malan, which delves into apartheid in South Africa, King Leopold's Ghost by Adam Hochschild about the exploitation of the Belgian Congo, Joan Didion, Robert Stone, oh so many many different authors.

What does your family think of having a mystery author in their midst?

They are surprised. After reading the book, my husband told me, "that was pretty hard-boiled." Most people are using to seeing me as a journalist, or as the kindergarten mom fumbling with a grocery list in one hand a toddler in the other.

Tell us about plans for future books.

I am about 150 pages into the sequel, called Sugar Skull. I hope to finish it and turn it into my agent by the end of the year. So that means it might come out in 2003.

How can readers get in touch with you?

They can contact me at denise@denisehamilton.com. I also have a website at www.denisehamilton.com

Denise, thanks for joining us, and best of luck! Readers, we have a review of The Jasmine Trade on our Suspense page.

September 30, 2001