The author of Made to Kill, volume 1 in The LA Trilogy, Christopher is co-writer of The Shield for Dark Circle Comics and author of the official tie-in novels novels based on the hit CBS television show Elementary.
Born in New Zealand, Christopher has lived in Great Britain since 2006.
He applied the Page 69 Test to Made to Kill and reported the following:
Page 69 of Made to Kill has Ray Electromatic mixing with the elite of 1960s Hollywood as he enters a certain exclusive nightclub…Visit Adam Christopher's website, blog, Facebook page, and Twitter perch.The low ceiling was supported by an arcade of pillars that resolved when I got closer into carved bamboo stems that weren’t black but a deep jade green. The overall effect was of being outdoors on an ancient Chinese terrace under an ancient Chinese sky on a warm and foggy night.Page 69 is actually a really great scene-setting page, and a fairly good representation of one side of the story, at least. Here, our hero Ray has wandered into the glamorous and mystery Temple of the Magenta Dragon, an exclusive nightclub catering to Hollywood’s rich and famous. At the moment, Ray has no idea what he is looking for—he’s following a lead that was little more than an address, and while he has his optical circuits scanning for a couple of movie stars, Charle David and Eva McLuckie, whose photographs he saw in a hall of fame at a local ice cream parlor, he’s not sure why these two are important. Well, actually he has a few suspicions about Eva…
The so-called Temple was full of people. The servers were Chinese men and Chinese women, the women dressed in black silk wraps with red trim and with their black hair pulled back into buns skewered into place with long black sticks tipped in red, the men dressed in more or less the male equivalent. They balanced trays and skirted the club patrons with an elegance as smooth as the silk they were wearing.
The patrons were another story altogether. They stood in groups and they sat at any number of small round tables that were scattered across the room.
And they were all rich. I could tell that by the clothes, the hair, the jewels, the jewels, and the jewels. The light and smoke reduced the men to pinky-purple ghosts floating in the room, the white of their shirts and their teeth the only really distinguishable features. But the women glittered—what skin that wasn’t covered by evening wear slung low in the front as well as the back was covered by pearls and diamonds and other treasures that took that pink and white light and did something special to it before shooting it back at my optics like a laser beam. There were a lot of people in the room but I recognized a large chapter by their photos that hung on the wall of the ice cream parlor just a half block away. Not every member of that parade was here in the Temple. I matched a dozen faces and none of them were Charles David’s or Eva McLuckie’s.
I walked forward into the club. People parted. People looked at me and laughed but they laughed in that way that spoke of true happiness only found in those who don’t need to worry about their retirement. People nodded at me and those nods were appreciative, like they were watching the Mona Lisa stretching her legs around the gallery after hours.
The Temple of the Magenta Dragon, Charles, and Eva, all play central roles in the book. Page 69 is in the middle of Chapter 9, a fairly important part of the book where Ray starts to make some real progress in his investigation. A couple of pages later, Ray will meet another key player, Fresco Peterman, who is one of my favorite characters in the book.
--Marshal Zeringue
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