Gay sleuth heroine hailed
Likened to Lizbeth Salander
Ask Canadian thriller writer Ian Hamilton about the number of countries selling his books, and he admits he can’t keep count.
“I know we’re in seven or eight languages,” he says cautiously. “So I would think we’re in 20 or 30 countries.”
Meanwhile, the international accolades keep rolling in. Britain’s Stylist magazine, for example, has fallen in love with Ava Lee, the gay Chinese-Canadian investigator who literally sprang out of Hamilton’s subconscious and who continues as the irrepressible and irresistible protagonist of his sixth novel, The Two Sisters of Borneo, published this week by Anansi.
The Stylist critic noted that few heroines are as “feisty” as The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo’s Lizabeth Salander, but said “Ian Hamilton’s Ava Lee could give her a run for her money.”
Hamilton’s international success has been rapid, given that the first book, the awardwinning Water Rat of Wanchai, wasn’t published until 2011. Furthermore, a career as a novelist certainly wasn’t on Hamilton’s horizon when he was working as a young reporter at the Calgary Herald in the 1960s. But the pleasures of writing seem entrenched in his DNA.
He was still in his 20s when he produced The Children’s Crusade, a history of the short-lived Company of Young Canadians, a controversial federal youth program inspired by the U.S. Peace Corps.
That book would be his last for four decades. Over his next 40 years in both business and government, Hamilton continued to write — “but just for my own amusement by and large.”
So how did the Ava Lee books happen? Call it the workings of fate — or rather the aftermath of a lifethreatening illness.
In June 2009, the 63-yearold Hamilton was rushed to hospital with an aortic aneurysm. When he returned home after surgery, he wanted a change of direction. Two days later, Ava Lee, his formidable globe-trotting heroine, was being born.
“I came out of hospital and for some reason her name came to me out of nowhere,” he says by phone from his home in Burlington. “I had a sort of rough plot idea, and I just started to write.”
Six weeks later, he had finished the first draft of The Water Rat of Wanchai.
“I gave it to my wife, which you’re not supposed to do. She read it, and said: ‘You know what? This ain’t bad.’ And from there I just kept on.”
Within eight months the first four novels in the series were completed. By that time, Hamilton had secured a four-book deal from his publishers even before they had read the last two.
Now with this month’s The Two Sisters of Borneo, another tale of international financial skulduggery, the count is up to six. The seventh thriller, The King of Shanghai, is ready for publication in 2015, and Hamilton has just sent Anansi synopses of the next three.
He has a unique gift for concocting sizzling thrillers out of financial misdoing. And he has created a unique heroine in the diminutive five-foot-three, 115-pound Ava Lee. She’s a forensic accountant by profession, but that dry description doesn’t really prepare the reader for the determined kick-ass investigator of these books.
Her association with her shadowy mentor, Uncle, may raise questions about her readiness to operate on the fringes of the law, but that’s another reason why Ava has emerged as such an original.
In The Two Sisters of Borneo, she’s a partner in an investment company which faces multi-million dollar losses because of a swindle involving a Borneo furniture firm owned by two sisters. Ava’s investigation takes her from Hong Kong to Amsterdam, back to her home in Toronto, and finally to Borneo where her relentless sleuthing lands her in the hands of a gang of vicious thugs.
Few thriller writers can boast Hamilton’s kind of background. After journalism, he went into government — first with the Company of Young Canadians, then with Information Canada, Consumer and Corporate Affairs, Fisheries and Oceans (where he was director-general) and finally External Affairs which led him to a stint as Canadian consul and trade commissioner for New England.
Then it was into private business — product development and manufacturing, including involvement in the creation of several President’s Choice products. In the process, Hamilton became spectacularly welltravelled, which accounts for is success in evoking a strong sense of “place” in his novels.