I don’t normally read detective fiction but I have long enjoyed the work of independent novelist David Chacko. So I picked up (digitally, on my Kindle) his 2008 Devil’s Feathers about a gruesome murder in a tourist town on Turkey’s Aegean coast.
I was rewarded, as always with David, with another good story superbly told and happy to see that the main character, Istanbul Police Inspector Onur Levent, is the subject of a series. That’s worthwhile because of my other reason for reading: to hear from David/Onur about Turkey’s unfortunate slide from Western sophistication to Eastern fundamentalism. It seems to be only skin-deep.
The modern Islamic state, which supplanted the older secular regime I knew as a teenager living in Ankara in 1961-63 (though it can still be glimpsed, at least in the novel, in the occasional framed office photograph of reformer Ataturk in evening dress) is worth understanding because its fundamentalist Islam has turned it from ally to antagonist of Israel and, by extension, of the Big Satan as well.
The turn-around, like the Islamic parties themselves, Levent informs us, are the result of the political rise of the rural village, where misogynistic (and presumably anti-Semitic) tradition has been reinforced by Koranic injunction. But the fundies still put up with teeny bikinis at the seaside for the foreign currency to supplement their older smuggling of drugs and etc. Thus Levent and his wife Emine represent the secular Turkey that still survives, clinging to what’s left of sophistication while taking care not to go too far. As such they are good guides to the new reality.
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 