Download The Red Pole of Macau
Ontario author Ian Hamilton on a roll with his Ava Lee series
Ian Hamilton burst onto the Canadian crime fiction scene in 2011 with The Water Rat of Wanchai. The novel introduced readers to Ava Lee, a jetsetting — and crime-solving — forensic accountant. Since then, he’s published three more Ava Lee novels, the most recent of which, The Red Pole of Macau, was published in September. With another instalment arriving just after Christmas — and Hamilton about to enter the U.S. market — Postmedia’s Mark Medley recently spoke to the Burlington, Ont., author about exotic locales, the evolution of his characters and what comes next. Q: You have first-hand experience with many of the cities and countries you’ve previously written about in the series. (Macau) was recently the subject of a lengthy profile in The New Yorker. It painted the city as seedy, corrupt, and crime-ridden. A: I actually have first-hand experience with all of the cities and countries I have written about, and Macau is a place I have been to at least 10 times over the years — spanning the period from when it was still a colony of Portugal and all of its then rather grubby casinos were controlled by Stanley Ho, to now as part of the People’s Republic of China and its emergence, with the help of various Las Vegas tycoons, as a place where, with one-quarter of Vegas’s casinos, it does double Vegas’s business. In the pre-handover days, Macau was visibly seedy, and the crime was just as apparent. There were gun wars on the streets, people killed on the front steps of the Mandarin Oriental, moneylenders in the casinos and an array of prostitutes from around the world, with Russians being a particular favourite. The new Macau isn’t as much in-your-face, but when you get past the glitz of The Venetian and Wynn’s — both exact duplicates of the structures in Vegas — it becomes apparent that people have spent a lot of money dressing up an old whore. In The Red Pole, I try to capture the flavour of both the old and the new Macau, and Ava has to cope with the corruption and crime that The New Yorker highlighted. Q: These books have touched down in Las Vegas, Denmark, Hong Kong, New York and Guyana, among other places. How do you choose your settings? A: The settings, to an extent, choose themselves, although some are related to experiences I had in particular cities and countries. For example, in The Water Rat of Wanchai it was natural enough to involve Thailand and Guyana in a story about a seafood scam, and Las Vegas in the book about online gambling. The Wild Beasts of Wuhan journeyed to Skagen in northern Denmark and the Faroe Islands — and in both places I actually bought paintings from artists that I broadly depict in the book. The fifth book in the series, The Scottish Banker of Surabaya, is a bit of a departure because I just wanted to write about Indonesia — a country I’ve visited many times and find fascinating. Likewise Borneo — which will be the primary setting for the sixth book. Q: Now that you’ve been writing about them for several years, do you look at your characters any differently? Do you still have the same affinity for them, or does it ever grow tiring writing about the same people again and again? A: If anything, I have even more affinity for my characters now from when I started. But then I made two very conscious decisions when I started to write this series. The first was not to load up the first book with every detail about my characters’ lives. I wanted to gradually expose and expand them, to keep them growing. So, for example, the question of whether Uncle was Triad or not isn’t resolved until the fourth book. Ava’s feelings about her father and his other families become increasingly apparent in each book and climax somewhat in the sixth. Her relationship with Maria Gonzalez follows a similar path. The second decision I made was not to become committed to continuing characters. Ava is an obvious exception to this, but everyone else is completely expendable, and I wanted the freedom to introduce major new characters such as May Ling Wong and Amanda Yee and Xu as I saw fit. So I’m not writing about the same people over and over again, and no, I don’t grow tired of my continuing characters because they keep growing and changing. Q: This is the fourth Ava Lee novel to appear in the past two years; how have you kept up a twice-a-year schedule? A: First of all, I don’t have a schedule. I love what I do, and it is a sheer joy for me to sit at my desk and write — and get paid for it. I write nearly every day without any pre-planned word or page count. What comes, comes. The thing is, though, I have never thought of the books as single entities and maybe that’s why I have found it relatively easy to keep going. The Ava Lee series is in my mind just one very long continuing story. … I was halfway through the second book when the plot lines for the next four came to me. After that, it was simply a matter of getting them on paper. Q: The fifth instalment in the series comes out in February. What should readers expect? A: The Scottish Banker of Surabaya has an absolutely terrific plot, and is the longest, the most complex, and the richest in terms of character development of all the books. It is also a bit of a game changer. I hesitate to say it is my favourite, but it is. I tend to be selfcritical, and I find it tough to re-read the first four books in the series without finding a lot of things I’d like to improve. The Banker is different. I am — up to now, anyway — very happy with it. Q: Is it true you’re now taking a bit of a break before publishing the sixth novel in the series? A: I’m actually not taking a break. The decision to postpone publishing the sixth book until February 2014 was a marketing one and not a writing one. The sixth book is finished, and I’ve almost completed the seventh. The decision to postpone was one that House of Anansi and I agreed upon. Our feeling was — and the sales numbers bear this out — that there are still a lot of people discovering Ava Lee through the Water Rat. We wanted to give everyone a chance to get caught up … and perhaps build a greater sense of anticipation for the sixth. Q: Is the end of the series on the horizon, or do you think you can keep writing these for years to come? A: There is no end to the series in sight. After the seventh, my intent is to write a prequel … and then continue documenting Ava’s life and times. When the time comes that I am just rehashing the same story over and over again, I hope I have the judgment to recognize it and stop.