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Just before the 2008 Nobel Prizes were announced, the secretary of the Swedish Academy put US writers on notice that none of them should anticipate being named for literature. Mr. Engdahl argued that American authors are too insular to deserve consideration. After finishing this murder mystery, I reflect that he could even more justifiably have accused American readers (and publishers) of being too provincial. I assume the British translation must accurately depict at least some aspects of contemporary life in Istanbul. If so, it forces me to ponder just how uninformed and naive my assumptions about gay life in the Mideast are. I clearly need more information than that provided by a week's joyful visit to Cairo and a causal viewing of Ferzan Ozpetek's film Hamam. THE PROPHET MURDERS takes us into the demimonde of Istanbul cross-dressers: The unnamed narrator is part owner of a club catering to pre-operative transsexuals and gay men in drag. The narrator himself, though he self-identifies totally as a gay male, likes to dress as a woman, partly for the erotic value, partly for the shock effect. He also feels quite protective of his "girls." Thus when he realizes that a serial killer is targeting his customers, he at once calls upon an old boyhood friend in the police department, Commissioner Selçuk Tanyer, for help. But swiftly the narrator decides to investigate on his own. He is a computer expert; his daytime job in fact is creating virus-and-hacker-safe computer programs. His attention initially focuses on a frequent intruder into gay chatrooms who signs himself as Jihad2000 and who leaves behind threatening messages prophesying destruction to all perverts. The narrator suspects that he is dealing with a conflicted closet case and pays extra attention to the intruder after he seems to know details about the death of the first transvestite. Upon meeting the young man in actuality the crippled and masochistic computer genius Kemal Barutçu and learning more about a whole raft of recent deaths, all of transvestites whose male names were those of Muslim prophets, the narrator shifts his focus entirely to the young heir of a supermarket chain: Adem Yildiz. Adem comes to the narrator's club and is clearly mesmerized by the sight of its habitues. At the same time, the narrator observes: "A mixture of loathing and desire was registered on his face. I supposed it was natural for someone raised by such a conservative family." There are others in Adem's circle upon whom suspicion could also fall. The actor Ahmet Kuyu is with him the evening of his visit to the club. Then there is one of Adem's employees, Fehmi S,enyürek, who lives in the apartment complex where one of the cross-dressers died. But quickly thenarrator's suspicions narrow to the one man: "I was convinced of Adem Yildiz's guilt. That much was certain. But there wasn't a shred of evidence to implicate him. He was a piece of filth, a real pervert. So what did that prove? And that was the problem in a nutshell." We learn a lot about the narrator's personal life. He ends up taking in Ponpon, whose male name is Zekeriya, Zechariah, in order to protect her. The bulk of the investigation, however, is taken up with the narrator's attempt to prove Adem's guilt. Finally in desperation, he chooses a young cross-dresser, recently arrived in Istanbul, assigns her the fake name of another one of the prophets, and sets out to entrap Adem. On the cover the novel is identified as "a Hop-Çiki-Yaka thriller." In an interview with Chris Wiegand for The Guardian (May 14, 2008), Somer explains that "Hop-Çiki-Yaya was a cheerleading chant from Turkish colleges in the early 1960s, and it came to be used in comedy shows to mean gays. If somebody was queenish, then they'd say 'Oh, he's Hop-Çiki-Yaya.' By the 70s, it wasn't being used anymore so I brought it back." The translation reads quite smoothly. Only once did I feel that something vital had been left out. At the beginning of the book there is provided a helpful list of Muslim prophets along with their English spellings (Yusuf one discovers, for example, corresponds to Joseph). The reader also finds upon finishing the novel, when the information is no longer very useful, that all along on page 235 there has been a glossary of untranslated Turkish words. It would have been nice had someone also provided a cast of characters to help readers who become confused by unfamiliar Turkish names. I admit that, when Hüseyin and Hasan are put side by side, they do not resemble each other much, but during the course of reading several times I would have liked to verify quickly that Hüseyin is indeed the recurring taxi driver while Hasan is the gossipy waiter. And though it may be my fault, I kept forgetting who Cengiz is, even though he is all important to the storyline. Though the case is unusual, the novel provides a satisfying read just as a mystery. But it is even more interesting as a view of a different culture, a different religion, written by someone who one suspects is simultaneously an insider and an outsider. What is so extraordinary is the way the work first seems so strange to Western eyes and yet ultimately comes across as so mundanely ordinary. The second novel in the series, THE KISS MURDER, is scheduled for late December 2008.
Reviewed by Drewey Wayne Gunn, November 2008
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