Jakob Arjouni (1964–2013)

Hard-boiled prose, lean, clean dialogue, hard bitten as Sam Spade, cynically cool as Philip Marlowe. Kemal Kayankaya is a worthy successor to the great noir characters and hard boiled detectives of the past. This isn't a parody or a cheap imitation, Jakob Arjouni has created the real thing. Beautiful!

Jakob Arjouni tells a tale that could have come off of the mean streets of Chandler's Los Angles or Hammet's San Francisco, or Chicago or New York or Boston but it takes place in Frankfurt, show more Germany - the dullest town in Germany, except it isn't. One Man, One Murder was originally written in 1991 as Ein Mann, ein Mord. Melville International Crime provided me with this Galley of the translation and after reading it, it's jumped to the top of the list of `Best Surprise Book' of the year. In an original voice, Arjouni tells such a true story and he tells it so well, maintaining tension throughout, dialogue that is clever, witty, and sad and an atmosphere that James M. Cain would have been proud of.

Kemal Kayankaya is the orphaned son of a Turkish garbage collector, a German Citizen, born and bred. But, because he is of Turkish extraction he encounters suspicion and racism wherever he goes. He meets them with a smart assed attitude and a cynical, jaded tongue.

This book would have worked so well as just a comic take on the American Hardboiled detective transplanted to Europe in the late 80's; as a cynical updating of Chandler's Philip Marlowe, but Arjouni had loftier goals. And he achieved them in spades. Sam Spades. It is Arjouni's willingness to confront serious social issues and display them in the light of a hardboiled/noir novel, with an avoidance of clichés, intelligent observation, and dialog that is both realistic and dripping with acid-tinged sarcasm. And to do it all without preaching. He kind of reminds me of the great Walter Mosley in that regard.

The protagonist encounters deadly crime bosses, indifferent and crooked cops, violent muscle men, a landlord who wants his money, an illegal immigrant ring that sells the hopefuls fake visas and then disposes of them - the hopefuls, not the visas, a miasma of bureaucratic and social injustice and racial prejudice that mirrors Americas own. The air of contemporary Europe's racial politics and inane nationalism are the maze that Kayankaya navigates in his quest but he is well equipped with a sharp mind, a sharper tongue and meets these challenges with a cynical, smart-assed attitude and an anti-authority front. There are enough seeming dead ends, as almost any detective novel requires, but instead of having them ...dead end, Arjouni has them turn into very interesting `small mysteries' or stories inside the story. Arjouni is a consummate professional. His prose are efficient with a minimalists approach that Hemingway would love, but not so minimalist that he doesn't manage to fully develop the characters without using stock, stereotypes, and he makes them way too real. He also paints scenes both colorful and dark about the underbelly of a city and maintains a pace that lingers just enough in all the right places.

The only criticism I have for this otherwise master work is that it took to damn long to get it translated and released in English. Well, Melville International Crime has fixed that, and thank you very much.

The Dirty Lowdown

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The detective is always an outsider, negotiating between two worlds, whether he is the classic, Sherlock Holmes type or he, sometimes, she, is the hard-boiled detective, the loner fiercely guarding her independence. The detective’s alienation is worse when his race differs from all those around him, and that is the case in the books written by the German-born Turk Jakob Arjouni.
Arjouni’s Frankfurt detective is Kemal Kayankaya, a Turkish-born German who experiences daily prejudice and show more seems to make a specialty of it in his cases. When Arjouni describes Frankfurt from the point of view of his detective, racial friction comes through even the most casual and mundane encounters. Arjouni is not well-known in America, but he has a huge following in Germany; where his books are now routinely filmed and he is considered one of the best crime novelists in the world.
Arjouni was only twenty-one when he published his first detective novel in 1985. Titled Happy, Birthday, Turk, it introduces Kayankaya, whose name and birthplace are Turkish, but who doesn’t speak the language, having been raised by German foster-parents. His appearance is non-Aryan enough to arouse vicious prejudice in the seedy Frankfurt underworld where he spends most of his time. . ''They are 'international' down to their Parisian underwear “ Kayankaya says of his fellow Germans, “but they're not able to recognize a Turk unless he's carrying a garbage can.'' On his twenty-sixth birthday, Kayankaya is hired by the widow of a Turkish immigrant who has been stabbed to death in Frankfurt’s red-light district. The investigation dumps Kayankaya deep into places where German intolerance for the Turks is not even thinly disguised. In a complicated plot he uncovers police corruption and encounters as much violence as any American hard-boiled detective.
What is interesting to me about Arjouni is the combination of his subject matter, his method, and his reception by the Germans. His subject matter in the Kayankaya novels, of which there are now four, is always the tension and resulting violence between cultures. Throughout these books, as Kayankaya uncovers nationalism and racism or feels it in his own person, there is anger but no preaching. For Kayankaya, prejudice is just one part of the whole resistant milieu in which he works, and preaching about it would be, in a sense, as silly as Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade preaching against violence.
The effect of these books is a stark picture of German xenophobia and the many problems of that country, where reunification, the European union, and borders newly opened to former Soviet-bloc nations all happened with a speed no one could have predicted. But German readers and moviegoers, far from being resentful at the mirror Arjouni holds up to them, have made him a phenomenon: Germany’s most popular mystery writer. show less

Private detective Kemal Kayankaya can’t help sticking his nose where things stink. In Jakob Arjouni’s tough and nonstop crime noir tale from 1987, four so-called eco-terrorists in West Germany are accused of murdering the head of a Frankfurt chemical company whose products should, in a just world, get it accused of crimes of its own.

The four suspects had sabotaged the company’s chemical plant, but they deny murdering anyone. A fifth man was seen at the crime, yet no one in authority show more seems willing to find him. In a tight spot, the defendants’ lawyer hires Kayankaya to track down the missing fifth suspect.

If private detectives are outsiders in fiction, Kayankaya is doubly so. Born in Turkey but raised in West Germany, Kayankaya gets hit with ignorance, cruel insults and outright assault as he chips away at the case no one wants. In the 1960s, West Germany had invited Turks to come help the country rebuild and flourish, but now it doesn’t want to know about Turks in its midst. It even seems to resent them for it. If this was set in America, it would be (in a simplistic analogy) as if our hardboiled detective was black or Mexican and operating in a far less tolerant era.

Kayankaya can take the slurs and blows after a lifetime of both. He fires back with a sharp wit, yet it’s not only the dialogue that keeps us following our Turk PI. We aren’t told a lot about him so we learn a lot through how he acts and reacts. He’ll shout and insult back and go to the fist if need be; he’ll wear it on his sleeve but he’ll leave it on yours. To those with wealth, reputation and career to protect even when it’s a stranglehold, Kayankaya appears to be a lazy, uncaring problem child — and a dire threat. Yet he’s the only one who cares, in his way, and he’s willing to keep after the truth.

In this translation from Anselm Hollo, few words do a ton of work. This isn’t literary fiction disguised as crime noir. In one passage, Kayankaya fails to address a suspect named Schmidi as “Mister.”

Schmidi shoots back: “Mr. Schmidi. I don’t call you rat-Turk.”

Kayankaya: “So that’s what you want to get off your chest all this time?”

“You better leave while the going is good.”

“Yes, I might just give in to the urge to beat the name of that fifth guy out of you.”

Some of it may come through as clunky in translation, but it always moves the story along.

The eco-terrorism threat is a ruse used by the forces of complacency and corruption, Kayankaya learns. A sad and thorny love scandal holds the real crime. There are shades of Chinatown here, though without the imposing Noah Cross figure. The staid Establishment in the West German state of Hessia fills that role, arrogant and entitled and getting a little jumpy.

One passage hits at the futility of the little guy versus ruthless power — Kayankaya’s small-time dealer sidekick, Slibulsky, comments on the real possibility of getting killed for their efforts:

“And who would give a f*ck? Some little dealer from the railroad station, and a Turkish snooper. That doesn’t even rate a mention on the morning news. They’d just plow us under in a hurry. So you risk your life for something you believe is justice, and end up in the compost heap. What’s justice, anyway? It doesn’t exist, not today, not tomorrow. And you won’t bring it about, either. You’re doing the same scheiss-work as any cop ... you won’t change a thing about the fact that it’s always the same guys who do something, who get caught — not a thing, because the rules are set up that way.”

Supporting characters like Slibulsky and the grim Frankfurt settings are superbly drawn, and they deliver details that surprise. Who knew that arsenic was capable of improving one’s beauty in the right doses, even as it’s causing death?

I had few complaints. We know little about Kayankaya other than that he was born a Turk but raised by German parents. I wanted to know why and how he’s fallen so low. Usually I don’t need such background in a hardboiled tale, but Kayankaya’s unique background left me wanting to know. Also, the journalist Carla Reedermann seems underdeveloped, disappearing for much of the story.

Kayankaya doesn’t need her help in the end. He makes enough waves on his own, whether it’s in a sea of foul muck or too many liters of beer.

A longer version of this review ran originally in the blog Noir Journal. show less

An Excellent Novella

This was an excellent introduction to Kemal Kayankaya a German Turkish detective, and like all good detectives a complete outside. This is the first time this novel has been translated from German into English and it is easy to see why Jakob Arjouni was such a revered writer in Germany.

The premise of the book is quite simple; Kayankaya is hired to find the 16 year old daughter of Valerie de Chavannes who lives in the diplomatic quarter in Frankfurt. He has been hired as show more he us Turkish and maybe able to move in the circles required to find her. On the way to liberating the kidnapped child, Kayankaya stumbles over a dead body of a pervert, drugs and the nephew of an important Imam in Frankfurt.

Once he has finished with one case he is hired to protect a Muslim writer who has written a controversial book and will be at the famous Frankfurt Book fair. What he doesn’t count on is that the two cases will merge in to one through abduction. He is able to finally clear both cases as long as the police do not look too closely.

This is an excellent book and a very welcome translation in the popular series of Kayankaya series. It is a shame that there will be no new books due to the untimely and early death of writer Jakob Arjouni. This is a magnificent book well worth reading and very enjoyable, fast moving and doesn’t hang around. Written in the first person we see the world through Kayankaya eyes.

I recommend this book whole heartedly as it brings northern European crime novels through a true outsiders eyes to the conscience. Have a read and I am sure you will be buying the rest of the books in the series. show less