Tonia Cowan/The Globe and Mail
Ian Hamilton is the author of the bestselling Ava Lee novels, including The Disciple of Las Vegas, The Two Sisters of Borneo and The Water Rat of Wanchai, which was the winner of the Arthur Ellis Award for Best First Novel in 2012. His books have been published in more than 20 countries around the world and are currently being adapted into a television series by the CBC. The seventh Ava Lee novel, The King of Shanghai, was recently published by House of Anansi Press.
Whose sentences are your favourite, and why?
There is a sentence I use in the Ava Lee novels on a frequent basis: "People always do the right thing for the wrong reason." It is a belief that Ava's mentor, Uncle, often states, and she takes it as her own. It seems to me to be one of the truest things I've ever heard, and I wish I had created it. Instead, I borrowed it from Saul Alinsky, the late, great Chicago-based social activist and community organizer of the 1960s and 70s. Alinsky wrote the line, but I actually heard him speak it 40 years ago. It says something about the power of the sentence that it has stuck with me all that time.
Which fictional character do you wish you'd created?
I am a huge fan of Patrick O'Brian's Napoleonic War naval sagas, and his Jack Aubrey is a phenomenal character that O'Brian somehow kept fresh and growing through 20 novels. The books take Aubrey from midshipman to admiral and mix history and nautical details, and mishap and success, in almost equal measure, but it is Aubrey's character that was the heart of the books and kept me coming back for more. He is a complicated man with as many flaws as virtues, and his life and career don't run in a straight course, but his rather mindless courage, sense of duty and the depth of loyalty he extends and generates in return, make him magnetic.
Which book do you think is under-appreciated?
The Last Supper by Charles McCarry. In fact, the entire early McCarry espionage series featuring Paul Christopher seems to have slipped into oblivion when it should be ranked up there with the early John le Carré novels with George Smiley. I discovered McCarry in the early 1980s when I was living in Boston and was lucky enough to be hanging around writers like George V. Higgins and Robert Parker. I was at lunch with the two of them and the conversation was focused on le Carré – who they both adored – but then Higgins started to talk about McCarry, first as the American equivalent of le Carré and then – as discussion became heated – as his better. I'm not sure I could ever agree with George's final assessment, but I think it's a shame that McCarry's early work is so hard to find and that he's rarely mentioned as a peer to le Carré.
Which books have you reread most in your life?
Le Carré's George Smiley novels, Gore Vidal's Burr and Eric Newby's travel books keep dragging me back to them, but standing alone in that regard is Norman Lewis. I've read Naples '44 and I Came, I Saw countless times, but my favourite book of his is The World, the World. It's part memoir, part travel. Lewis was a moderately successful English novelist – which opened many doors for him – who had a curiosity about the world and a clear-eyed view of it. The World, the World is filled with vignettes that could have become complete novels, but he's able to distill the most remarkable events into a few pages, and capture characters with a few words. In the book, as an example, he recalls a trip he made to Cuba in the 1950s in an attempt to win back the affection of his wife who had left him, but as usual with Lewis there are always complications and side trips. In this case, he weaves a heart-breaking story that encompasses his publisher – Jonathan Cape – Ian Fleming, Fidel Castro and Ernest Hemingway.
What's your favourite word to use in a sentence, and why?
I use the Chinese word guanxi often in my books. It doesn't have a precise definition but can be loosely described as having influence through connections. It is interpersonal networking on the largest human scale, and cuts across every social and economic group and hierarchy in Chinese societies. Ava's mentor, Uncle, and her friend May Ling Wong, both have guanxi and it comes to her aid many times. And, one of the signs that Ava is developing her talents as an operator in Asia is when people start referring to the strength of her guanxi. It makes her quietly proud because it has more to do with respect given and respect earned rather than money or favours being exchanged. There aren't many other words I can think of that carry that much heft.