Though, in fairness, this is something of a twist on something I did a few times back in 2014-2015, where I and other crime critics discussed the first appearances of some of our favourite crime fiction series characters. We may revisit some of those characters (eg Longmire, Miss Marple, Tom Thorne) along with fresh looks at both the first appearances of other series characters I love in crime fiction, or just debut novels of other authors, series or not.
Today, we're kicking things off by revisiting the recent beginnings of a fresh and exciting new voice and very welcome addition to our crime and thriller landscape, with The Waiter, the first novel in the Kamil Rahman series from India-born tech entrepreneur and London theatre director turned crime novelist Ajay Chowdhury.
Before I dive into the storyline and my thoughts on The Waiter, a wee bit of background. I originally became aware of Chowdhury and his first crime novel after he won the first Harvill Secker-Bloody Scotland prize, which was effectively a search for new, underrepresented voices in British crime writing. The competition, open to BAME authors (Black, Asian, and minority ethnicity), required Chowdhury and others to submit 10,000 words of a manuscript and a synopsis of the whole novel.
As I discovered, when I interviewed him for a feature in the Weekend Herald (my home country's biggest newspaper - paywalled, sorry) ahead of his debut's publication, the idea of someone in a London curry house solving crimes had niggled at Chowdhury for many years, though it evolved from Miss Marple-like cosy amateur sleuthing by a Bangladeshi chef to a grittier tale involving a disgraced Kolkata detective, Kamil Rahman, effectively exiled from his homeland and working as a waiter in Brick Lane, while Chowdhury was entering for the Harvill Secker-Bloody Scotland prize.
Chowdhury, a tech entrepreneur who’s been founder or CEO of several massively successful start-ups (whose values grew to nine-plus figures and were sold to the likes of Apple and Microsoft), including Shazam, thinks the idea behind The Waiter stuck with him for more than a decade, for two reasons.
“One was the feeling that in a restaurant, as a waiter or chef, you get to see so many people,” he told me back in early 2021. “When you see people in a restaurant, you’re often seeing very unguarded moments: people who’ve had an argument, who are on a second date, who are conducting business. Or people getting drunk at nine. I liked the idea of someone really observant watching all of this then thinking about what the lives of these people were really like. It wasn’t a big jump to that’s kind of what a detective does too, picking up clues and thinking about people and their motivations.”
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| Ajay Chowdhury (left) at the recent Bute Noir festival alongside Trevor Wood, Tim Sullivan and myself, where we discussed Kamil Rahman in a 'Detectives Overcoming Obstacles' panel |
The other reason that he could never get the idea behind The Waiter out of his head, was he really wanted to write about London's East End. “I grew up in Calcutta, and you know Brick Lane, that whole area, I thought was just ripe fodder for a fantastic crime novel. I wanted to see a detective who was a bit more like me. I’d been a fish out of water in London when I first came here, although that was a long time ago. Someone who missed home, who missed the food in Calcutta; all those things came together.”
The result is a truly tasty feast.
In The Waiter, former Kolkata detective Kamil Rahman is looking for a fresh start, and is waiting tables at the Indian restaurant owned by family friends. Delivering plates of curry to Brick Lane diners and scrubbing away his fall-from-grace. 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. Their sleuthing brings up bad memories of the Bollywood murder case that ended his career, and Kamil soon finds that while he may have tried to forget his past, it hasn’t forgotten him. Dangerously so.
A fresh and exciting voice on the British crime writing scene, Chowdhury tantalises readers of The Waiter with fascinating characters, intriguing action, and vivid scene-setting; not to mention some mouth-watering food references. Seriously, you’re going to get hungry while reading this book! The debut author deftly juggles dual timelines as murder cases present and past unfold in London and Kolkata, delivering a really delicious debut that certainly left me very keen for seconds!
Fortunately the series has continued with The Cook, The Detective, and earlier this year, The Spy.
Have you read The Waiter, or the Kamil Rahman series in general? Do you have any favourite Indian-Bengali dishes that are mentioned in the series? Please share in the comments.
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