You can check out the full list of of past 9mm interviewees here. What a line-up! With lots more fun to come. Thanks everyone. If you've got a favourite crime or thriller writer who hasn't yet been part of the 9mm series, please let me know, and now I'm back on deck more fully, I'll look to make that happen for you. We've got several interviews with cool crime and thriller writers from several different countries 'already in the can' that will be published soon, so lots to look forward to in the coming weeks and months.
Today I'm very pleased to welcome to 9mm an exciting newer voice in crime writing, Ajay Chowdhury, a tech entrepreneur and theatre director who was born in India and now lives in London where he builds digital businesses, cooks experimental dishes for his wife and daughters and writes through the night.
Chowdhury won the first Harvill Secker-Bloody Scotland prize (effectively a search for new, underrepresented voices in British crime writing), for the beginnings of what became The Waiter. Disgraced former Kolkata detective Kamil Rahman is waiting tables at a Brick Lane restaurant owned by family friends. When a birthday party for his boss’s friend ends in murder, Kamil is arm-twisted into an unofficial investigation alongside Anjoli, his boss’s precocious daughter.
The series, which is in development for television, continued with The Cook, which delved into homelessness, The Detective, entwined with government surveillance and AI, and most recently The Spy. But for now, Ajay Chowdhury becomes the latest author to stare down the barrel of 9mm.
Who is your favourite recurring crime fiction hero/detective?
Probably Bernie Gunther, from the Philip Kerr series. I just think following his life from mid 1930s Germany to the 1950s how he changes, everything he's been through, it's absolutely fantastic. And that was kind of my inspiration for when I knew I was going to get to do a second or third Kamil Rahman book, is, you know, I'd love to be able to follow the guy's life.
What was the very first book you remember reading and really loving, and why?
I read a huge amount when I was a kid, and certainly the Enid Blyton books are the ones that absolutely grabbed me, the Famous Five. But the one that really showed me good writing was PG Woodhouse. I mean his language, I'd read nothing like it. Anyone who can write a line like "he wasn't disgruntled, but neither was he gruntled", that is really good, right?
Before your debut crime novel, what else had you written (if anything) unpublished manuscripts, short stories, articles?
I was very lucky to have written a children's novel which got published in 2016, Ayesha and the Firefish. I'd been telling my kids that little story at bedtime, and I wrote it, then a friend of mine said, I know a publisher, an editor at Penguin. I just got lucky there as well. They sent it, and this was Penguin India, and they said, Yeah, we'll publish it. Then later it got adapted to become a musical in LA and San Francisco - though I didn't write the musical.
Outside of writing and writing-related activities (book events, publicity), what do you really like to do, leisure and activity-wise?
I'm a huge bridge player. So I play bridge three times a week online. Weekends I'm normally playing a competition online. So I absolutely love playing bridge and then the usual other stuff, you know, travel, eating, cooking.
What is one thing that visitors to your hometown should do, that isn't in the tourist brochures, or perhaps they wouldn’t initially consider?
I would count Calcutta [now Kolkata] and Bombay [Mumbai] as my hometowns, as I lived in both places. But if I take Bombay, where I have some great memories, this is going to sound a weird thing to say, but visit Dharavi, the biggest slum in the world. My next book is about it, but I went for the first time in January with my wife, and it's an extraordinary place. It's a million people, in pretty much one square mile. And it's factories, it's people living there. It's a complete ecosystem. And it's an extraordinary place to visit, and they do tours of it, which make me feel a little bit bad, because it feels slightly like poverty tourism, but it's an extraordinary place. And the tour guide we took, all the money goes back into the community.
I'm a five foot, two inch Indian guy from Mumbai, so I think it would have to be the guy who plays Jack Reacher in the Netflix show [Alan Ritchson]. It'd be pure wish fulfilment. Not Tom Cruise though, that'd be too easy for him to do. But it would be cool to be played by someone six foot six with arms like potato sacks. That's my dream.
Of your writings, which is your favourite or a bit special to you for some particular reason, and why?
Well, it would have to be The Waiter, because it's completely changed the direction of my life. So, winning the competition and then having them say that, listen, we want more of these books, completely changed my life. I mean, I would not be sitting here next to you at this crime writing festival, Chiltern Kills, if I hadn't won that competition. So yeah, it would have to be that.
What was your initial reaction, and how did you celebrate, when you were first accepted for publication? Or when you first saw your debut story in book form on a bookseller’s shelf?
So, seeing in a bookshop for the first time. We didn't celebrate it as such, but my wife and I were in Daunt Books in Hampstead, and The Waiter was sitting not on the shelf, they actually had it displayed on a table. And so my wife photographed me in front of it, and then she sneakily took it to the window and put it in the window, photographed me in front of the window, then put it back. So that was very special. The one thing that's never happened so far, and hopefully will sometime, is I have seen someone reading any of my books in the wild, yeah, that would be cool, I'm still waiting for that.
What is the strangest or most unusual experience you have had at a book signing, author event, or literary festival?
Well, I mean, a guy came up to me today in the book signing after our panel saying he just finished reading The Detective and how much he absolutely hated the female character [ed note: Kamil's ex-fiancé Maliha, not Anjoli] ... he told me how much he hated her, how he felt she was completely unnecessary, and didn't understand why I put her in the book. So that was a bit controversial, and a story that quickly comes to mind!
Kia ora, Ajay, we appreciate you having a chat with Crime Watch.
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