The Water Rat of Wanchai

by Ian Hamilton

I had just finished reading Ian Hamilton’s 2021 book, Fortune,  which completes the planned trilogy about Uncle Chow Tung (more about that later) depicting Uncle’s career long before meeting up with brilliant Chinese-Canadian forensic accountant, Ava Lee. But this made me want to go back to the beginning of the Ava Lee series—to the very first book, The Water Rat of Wanchai. This re-reading was tons of fun, and makes me want to read through the whole series again.

Ava burst onto the crime fiction scene in 2011: a remarkable and instantly memorable character. The book won the Crime Writers of Canada Arthur Ellis award for best first crime novel that year, and was one of Amazon.ca’s Top 100 Books of the Year.

Based in Toronto, but with family and business connections in Hong Kong, Ava’s business is acting for victims of large-scale scams and white collar theft, recovering money from the criminals and corrupt officials who stole it. If successful, she and her partner (the elderly and powerful “Uncle” in Hong Kong)  keep 30% of what they recover.  

In Water Rat, she is tracking down $5 million stolen by an unscrupulous international seafood scammer. The chase takes her to Hong Kong, Thailand, Guyana, and British Virgin Islands.

Slim and elegant, deceptively petite and looking younger than her age (early-thirties), Ava has a razor-sharp mind and seems near-fearless. (She’s capable of feeling fear, but leaps into challenges rather than cowering from threats.) She’s also a martial arts practitioner, capable of disarming or even maiming attackers twice her size—which happens more than once in this novel.

I’ll leave you to enjoy the unfolding of this exciting, page-turning plot. I think you’ll love meeting Ava!

In late 2013, after the first four Ava Lee novels appeared, Hamilton brought out a prequel, The Dragon Head of Hong Kong. It takes place ten years before Water Rat and depicts events leading to Ava’s first meeting with Uncle, showing how they became partners. The e-book version of Water Rat that I downloaded (in 2021) paired these two books together, which makes perfect sense: showing us how Ava’s career began, as an introduction to seeing her in full action.

Ian Hamilton is a rather colourful character himself. Born in Wales in 1946, he moved to Canada with his family as a child.  He’s had several careers, each one leading to another. He started out as a journalist, writing for the Regina Leader Post, the Calgary Albertan and the Calgary Herald.  In his twenties he took a job as Director of Communications for The Company of Young Canadians, and his subsequent book about it, The Children’s Crusade, became a Canadian Book of the Month Club selection.

He then worked for several Canadian government departments, eventually rising to senior positions at Fisheries and Oceans and External Affairs. After leaving government, he became an international businessman, running several companies including Seafood Selections and the All Natural Seafood Company. His business life involved a great deal of international travel, particularly in China and southeast Asia. He either has an excellent memory or took very good notes: his novels feature detailed descriptions of exotic venues all over the world, drawn from his own experiences.

In 2010, he had a health scare: an aortic aneurysm which required surgery and could have been fatal. That made him take stock of his life. One thing he’d always wanted to do was write a novel, so he decided to leave the business world and give it a shot. His business partner agreed to buy him out, and Hamilton plunged into writing.

Six weeks later he’d written The Water Rat of Wanchai,  taking Ava Lee to several of the countries and locations he was very familiar with and drawing on his knowledge of the seafood industry.  By the time he’d finished, he already had an idea for a second Ava Lee novel, then a third and fourth: within eight months he’d written all four novels and signed a deal with publisher House of Anansi Press.

He’s now published 14 books in the Ava Lee series, with another (The Timber Sultans of Sarawak) in the works. The books have now been published in seven languages and in more than twenty countries. Hamilton says he’ll write a new one every year until he can’t write any more.

But Uncle, who was already elderly when he first partnered with Ava, died in Book #6, The Two Sisters of Borneo. In my opinion this was a big loss, as none of Ava’s subsequent partners are nearly as interesting. And Hamilton apparently agreed that Uncle was too good a character to abandon: in 2019 he brought out the first book in a new series, subtitled The Lost Years of Uncle Chow Tung. This and two subsequent books portray events in Uncle’s younger years, long before he met Ava.  Hamilton planned this as a trilogy, but now says that he has plans for a fourth and possibly a fifth novel—to enter the Ava Lee years, but from Uncle’s point of view rather than Ava’s.

We can look forward to more adventures springing from Hamilton’s fertile imagination. He lives in Burlington, Ontario, with his wife.

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