Richard Lipez
…lthis ethnic-Turk-in-Frankfurt moral scourge is as winning a noirish gumshoe as has swooped onto the mystery scene in some time. I can say "swooped" because Kayankaya is nimble in spite of being "old and fat."
—The Washington Post
Kirkus Reviews
A routine shakedown leads Frankfurt PI Kemal Kayankaya (One Death to Die, 1997, etc.) to a maze of slimy, violent crooks. The Saudade Restaurant doesn't do enough business for Romario, its owner, to pay a protection fee of 6,000 Deutschemarks per month. So after losing his thumb to a pair of tough guys who say they're from the Army of Reason, Romario gets Kayankaya and his buddy Slibulsky-the ice-cream man whose resume includes work as a bouncer and bodyguard-to protect him from the protectors. The result is a bloodbath that doesn't end until the Saudade is reduced to ashes. And it doesn't really end even then, because Kayankaya won't let the case die. Convinced that Dr. Michael Ahrens, the soup king whose BMW was obligingly parked outside the restaurant, is behind the racket, he digs in his heels. So does Ahrens, and there's a stalemate until Kayankaya, who's already got one client whose dog he's being paid to find, takes another, a teenaged refugee named Leila, who wants him to find her mother while Leila perfects her German by reading pornography. Despite the jocular mood, no story involving so many sordid felonies can end happily, and this one doesn't. The plot is full of holes and awkward shifts as Kayankaya hurtles from one nest of vipers to the next. But even apart from the obligatory anti-Turkish episode, the unsavory atmosphere is inimitable.
Jakob Arjouni's Kismet is another of this surprising writer's wonderfully odd crime novels. Amid murders and explosions, for example, it contains this timeless immigrant's refrain:
"…every year I have
to go and beg to be allowed to stay another year. …I sit in that waiting room
with all the other poor fools who've cleaned their shoes and put on clean
shirts…. when your turn finally comes you're just a crumpled, stinking Thing
and you'd almost agree with Herr Muller or Herr Meier if he looked at you as if
to say, what's a pathetic creature like you doing in our lovely country?"
This could be 19th-century
Vienna. It is instead today's Germany, vividly and bleakly depicted in the
latest novel in Arjouni's investigator Kayankaya series.
Arjouni, like Kemal
Kayankaya, his not-so-hardboiled protagonist, is a German of Turkish origin. And
like Kayankaya, he is also a mischievous subversive who delights in confounding
easy assumptions -- xenophobic or liberal -- about his or any other immigrant's
ethnicity. "…the Islamic scholar had picked me from the yellow pages on
account of my name," Kayankaya observes of one German client, "and of
course when we first met she had explained to me at length what the Turks were
like, myself included. Industrious, proud…secret rulers of Asia -- in short, I was
a whole great nation in myself."
Arjouni's tone throughout
the Kayankaya series is breezily cynical and his plots straightforward,
although usually spiked with a subtle twist. In Kismet, the novel in which Arjouni first introduces the detective,
and which is newly available to American readers in this paperback edition from
Melville House, Kayankaya is hired to scare off gangsters who are extorting
protection money from a Brazilian restaurant owner in Frankfurt. When the plan
goes bloodily wrong, Kayankaya finds himself confronting a sinister
organization, "The Army of Reason," that emerged out of the Balkan
wars and that threatens to disrupt Frankfurt's diverse organized crime scene.
"You had the feeling that a kind of criminal Olympic Games was going on in
the Frankfurt station district," Kayankaya observes of the city's
competing international gangs. He must also find a Bosnian woman who has
apparently been kidnapped by the criminal newcomers.
With
its snappy dialogue and rumpled heroes, Arjouni's crime fiction owes an obvious
debt to American noir but it is equally reminiscent of many Eastern European
satirical novels. The plot of Kismet may recall any number of gangster
romps, but the society so caustically depicted here is as recognizable as that
conjured up, for instance, by Jaroslav Hasek in The Good Soldier Schweik. Entering a bar in the dreary town of Offenbach,
for example, the laconic Kayankaya observes of the drinkers, "Most of them
were around fifty and looked as if they had always been, as if they'd always
been hanging around in bars and only went out now and then to get cheap suits
and haircuts." Two killers who are stalking Kayankaya walk with "...those
long, confident everybody-listen strides that Berliners have…"
The violence too, although
occasionally cartoonish, is described with cinematic clarity but often shaded
with rueful afterthoughts. "If two men die and everything's still the same
as before, or worse, then something's wrong." Kayankaya reflects after the
carnage of the novel's opening scene, "Or I could have put it to myself
more simply: I wished I hadn't shot anyone." Neither he, nor his creator
Arjouni, lets this hero off the hook.
--Anna Mundow
