‘Hotel Bosphorus’ by Esmahan Aykol

Fiction – paperback; Bitter Lemon Press; 246 pages; 2011. Translated by Ruth Whitehouse.

I like crime novels and translated fiction so I thought this book, a murder mystery written by a Turkish writer, would be just my thing.

Hotel Bosphorus is set, as the title would suggest, in Istanbul. Billed as “the first Kati Hirschel murder mystery” it introduces us to the ballsy heroine who is the star of the series. (There are three written so far, but this is the first to be translated into English.)

Kati is 43 years old and single. Her heritage is German, but she has lived in Turkey “first for seven years, then for 13”, which is shorthand for a much longer story: she was born in Istanbul, spent the first seven years of her life there, then moved away with her parents, only to return as a 30-year-old, where she has remained ever since.

What most readers will probably find most appealing about Kati is her profession: she is the proud owner of Istanbul’s only crime bookshop. But whether you find it believable that her love of crime fiction means she has the ability to tackle a real-life crime investigation is another thing. For me, I found this a leap of faith too far. Indeed, I found it fairly preposterous but was prepared to give Aykol some leeway. It’s fiction after all.

The crime occurs in a hotel where Kati’s long-lost friend, Petra, is staying. Petra is a German movie star in town to begin work on a new film. The victim is the little-known German director of the film. There is deep suspicion that Petra murdered him because they were rumoured to have been romantically linked, but Petra denies any involvement — both in the murder and the romance.

While Kati’s not exactly sure whether Petra is telling the truth, she’s determined to get to the bottom of what happened. Along the way, she strikes up a friendship with the local police inspector, who turns out to be the least professional policeman I’ve ever come across in fiction — he not only shares details of the investigation with Kati, he tries to have sex with her on two separate occasions! She also meets journalists and various members of the movie’s production crew, and she even has a run-in with a gangland boss. But it is a chance encounter with a suave Turkish lawyer that helps her solve the case. Yes, all rather ridiculous, I have to say.

However, I did enjoy the humour in this novel. Kati is an expert at delivering some terrific one-liners:

Also, from experience, I’ve learned that you can’t take revenge on someone who doesn’t care about you, whereas it’s easy to take revenge on someone who loves you — all you have to do is commit suicide.

And her wry observations about the differences between Germans and Turks are also very good. While those cultural differences might not exactly dispel racial stereotypes, Kati is allowed to make them because:

In my experience only those who have lived abroad have what it takes to criticize their own people, especially in the case of Germans.

Of course, she also tends to criticize Turkish people — for instance, the taxi drivers who don’t know where they are going — but leaps to their defence whenever she hears others put them down.

The only place in the world where I feel at home is Istanbul. Maybe that’s because Istanbul  is the only place that has no objection to me being myself… After a while, people don’t distinguish between which experiences they have selected for themselves and which have been dished out to them. I have a bona fide Turkish passport, yet in Turkey I’m a German. A German who speaks good Turkish. And when I’m in Germany, despite having a German passport and the fact that my mother’s a Roman Catholic, I’m a Jew.

But there were many things about this book which annoyed me, in particular, Aykol’s emphasis on telling instead of showing. For instance:

To pass the time, I looked at the shop-window displays in the lobby. What strange things they were selling.

What were these “things”? Apples and handbags? Goatskin shoes and tacky snow globes? The author never bothers to tell us. Perhaps I’m being harsh, but Hotel Bosphorus is filled with sentences like this, and while I understand it’s a crime novel and not literary fiction this lack of attention to detail at the expense of moving the narrative forward feels shoddy. Indeed, most of the prose feels flat and limp.

The book certainly has its strengths, but on the whole, I felt the story was clumsily written and the crime aspect was far too simplified for my tastes. It reminded me very much of Alexander McCall Smith’s The No. 1 Ladies‘ Detective Agency, which, frankly, I hated. It’s fair to say I probably won’t be bothering with the rest of the Kati Herschel series when they eventually get translated, but that’s not to say you won’t enjoy them if you like whimsical murder mysteries set in foreign cities.