The Ottoman Sherlock
now that's some serious serialized fun
I once published an article on the first Ottoman detective novel, Esrar-ı Cinayat (The Mystery of Murders, 1883) by Ahmet Midhat Efendi (1844-1912). Back then, I was a Ph.D. student at USC, working hard but thankfully under the California sun, sipping lattes in the shady patios of their reddish Romanesque Revival buildings.
At our program, each student was assigned a track of studies. One great thing about mine (Comparative Literature) was that you needed to write a substantial essay of 40-50 pages on a literary tradition different than that of your dissertation. For me, this became late-nineteenth century Ottoman literature.
I had first come across Midhat’s novel while doing research for another course. I think I was googling idly, which sometimes oddly yields the most amazing finds. In that course we studied what is sometimes called the “metaphysical detective fiction,” a subset of stories and novels that play with the conventions of detective stories to explore philosophical questions about the nature of reality, knowledge, and literature, and anything in between. To my mind, The City of Glass from the late Paul Auster’s “The New York Trilogy” is its finest example. After receiving a mysterious call, an author of detective novels becomes a private investigator and basically descends into madness: he is lost among ever-proliferating signs, which never seem to yield the elusive truth behind them.
The Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges, of course, wrote some great stories in this fashion—his “Death and the Compass,” “The Garden of Forking Paths,” and “Ibn-Hakam al-Bokhari, Murdered in His Labyrinth” form another trilogy—that might have inspired Auster. The Nobel-laureate Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book is another fascinating specimen, where the protagonist’s search for his disappeared wife Rüya (‘dream’ in Turkish) turns into a quest for identity, authenticity, and authorship. Think underground tunnels, eerie mannequins perserving gestures erased by American films, mystical Islamic traditions identifying and deciphering letters on the human face.
As a nineteenth-century author, Midhat wouldn’t want any of that, of course. In the early examples of detective fiction (think, for example, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories), we might be at first puzzled by the devious crimes, but the truth always comes out in the end. As readers, we are left safe and sound, our confidence reassured in the powers of observation, interrogation, and analytical thinking.
A year before publishing Esrar-ı Cinayat, Midhat translated one of the finest examples of the genre, the French author Émile Gaboriau’s Le crime d’Orcival. Fascinating figure himself, Midhat. He was by far the most-read author of late-nineteenth century Istanbul. A self-taught man, he wrote the first examples of many Western genres in Turkish literature, each time creating his reading public along the way, instructing them how to read and even what to feel through his chatty narrators. In a famous article, the critic Franco Moretti groups his fiction with that of Machado de Assis, the subject of my previous post, and it actually makes a lot of sense. Both have gregarious narrators who would be, at least for me, rather insufferable in real life. By the time the first worm sank its teeth into his cold flesh, Midhat had published 40 novels, dozens of stories and plays, and essays on almost every aspect of modern life.
Now, this popular and prolific author was a supporter of Sultan Abdulhamid II, the Ottoman sultan notorious for repressing any type of political dissidence and creating a vast espionage network, among other things. He was also an avid reader of detective novels, and his translation office set up at the Yıldız Palace brought several French and English works into Turkish.
Midhat wrote his novel to praise Abdulhamid’s reform of the juridical system, which had brought the empire’s secular Nizamiye courts its first public prosecutors. He sets his detective novel at a time before these reforms to show how difficult it was to attain justice back then, especially against a man of power and influence (Or if the kadı didn’t like you for some reason. A popular adage of the day went “Davacı kadı olursa, yardımcı Allah olsun”—if the plaintiff is the judge, may Allah be of help).
In the novel, the dead body of a young Muslim girl is found together with those of two Greek men at a rock formation near the entrance of the Bosphorus. Our hero Osman Sabri and his sidekick Köse Necmi are assigned to solve this “curious” case. Along the way, they unearth the illicit relation between an Ottoman lady and the Beyoğlu governor and a counterfeit money scheme. To attain justice, the dynamic duo has to work around the system: they use the newspaper to misguide the corrupt Beyoğlu governor, who is protecting one of the suspects, and keep the public attention alive about the case. At one point, Köse Necmi, whose title köse translates to “beardless,” even dresses up as a female peddler to spy on the Ottoman lady.
Now, this novel first appeared in Midhat’s newspaper Tercüman-ı Hakikat (The Interpreter of Truths) in installments. Last week, I attended a book talk at Harvard for Amy Wright’s Serial Mexico, which explores how such serialized novels, radio theater, and television soap operas comment on questions of Mexican national identity. Especially in the case of novels, publishing in installments gives the author a versatility only minimal in traditional book publishing, and virtually non-existent in academic books (by the time we publish about grapes, they either become wine or vinegar): while writing each installment, the author can respond to the latest events and developments. Midhat was known to chat with his readers over ferry rides, sometimes deciding on the fate of his characters based on these conversations. And then telling about this to his readers in the next installment.
Esrar-ı Cinayat, however, seems to have pulled off something far more impressive: Midhat used his novel to expose and take down a real person, the real-life governor of Beyoğlu, a prominent district of Istanbul part of any touristic trip to the city. In the novel, the heinous villain is introduced in this way:
The Beyoğlu governor back then was a man called Mecdeddin Pasha who was neither better nor worse than the previous ones, but the kind of man one thinks of when someone says “the Beyoğlu governor!”
It seems that the novel and what it revealed about the governor caused such a scandal that the latter felt the need to flee to Europe. And once that took place, Midhat used his continuing serialized novel to, you know, really rub it in: he first makes his villain escape the country like his real-life counterpart, and then adds some chastising sermon on being a righteous civil servant.
Art imitates life, changes it, and then incorporates that change back into itself to comment on it.
Now that’s some serious serialized fun.