While other German crime novelists such as Bernhard Schlink and Christian von Ditfurth have been drawn to confront the country’s Nazi past, the much missed Jakob Arjouni (1964-2013), pseudonym of Jakob Michelsen, took on the travails of ordinary men and women as well as the complex issues of multiculturalism. Indeed, his work could be seen as supporting Angela Merkel’s remark earlier this year that multiculturalism doesn’t work – though he himself would probably have seen that as an asinine over-simplification.
Arjouni wrote fiction outside the crime genre, but he is best known both in his home country and abroad for the five Kemal Kayankaya novels: Happy Birthday, Turk, More Beer, One Man, One Murder (winner of the German Crime Fiction prize), Kismet and Brother Kemal. They were published between 1985, when he was only 20, and 2012 in Germany, while No Exit Press are to be congratulated for bringing them out in the UK between 1994 and 2013. The series has sold over a million copies worldwide.
What is it that makes the seedy private investigator Kayankaya such a compelling character? Although he was born in Turkey to Turkish parents, he was raised in Germany and brought up by a German couple. He doesn’t even speak Turkish, but his looks and name mean that he suffers casual and deliberate racism throughout the series. This gives him the gumshoe’s essential quality of being an outsider in his own society. Arjouni makes use of several other classic Chandlerian tropes – Kemal smokes and drinks to excess, has a shabby office (which is eventually blown up), initially has an unstable love life and describes his life in the first person, with caustic wit. In addition, he is sympathetic because he has an eye for the underdog – a Turkish widow, prostitutes, ecologists, a teenage Bosnian girl – and often puts himself in danger on their behalf.
On the other hand, Kemal has many traits of European hardboiled fiction. Along with Chandler, Georges Simenon was Arjouni’s hero. I imagine he preferred the psychologically damaged characters of the romans durs rather than the more run-of-the-mill Maigret novels. This applies both to Kemal himself and to the violent criminals and corrupt cops he has to handle. Kayankaya has a unique, bull-in-a-china-shop approach to crime solving. He often impersonates policemen and other authority figures, making (and bringing to justice) enemies in high places. He also puts his body on the line so regularly that it’s a surprise he’s still going after one novel, let alone five. This, of course, only makes him more of a hero.
A well described urban locale is indispensable for the best PI fiction. Arjouni’s Frankfurt, particularly the red light district that Kemal knows so well, is the scuzziest backdrop I’ve come across. The food – usually sausages and sauerkraut – is vile, the beer frequently watered down and the streets littered with detritus, human and otherwise. This is an important sociopolitical statement: the financial centre of Europe’s most successful economy is a run-down hell hole, where many kinds of abuse are perpetrated. And by no means all the criminals are immigrants, although Albanian, Croatian and Muslim gangs are never far from the scene; the main offenders are German – no wriggle-room there, Frau Merkel.
The Anglo-Saxon crime writing tradition generally eschews political and social issues, preferring to concentrate on individuals and their problems. By contrast, the European model is much more committed to uncovering the depths of man – and womankind’s vileness in the context of the societies they live in. Kemal’s frequent bouts of the blues are not only caused by the insults and physical damage dealt to him, but by the perception that Germany is fundamentally rotten. This is particularly clear in his treatment of industrialists and the rich. In the masterly Brother Kemal, Valerie de Chavannes, whose daughter goes missing, lives in the exclusive diplomatic area of the city, in – wait for it – Zeppelinallee. Like the Prussian aristocracy of the past, the rich are seen to be no less shady than the poor, without the latter’s justifications.
There are several aspects of Kayankaya’s fictional make-up that go beyond the hardboiled template. His occasional sidekick Slibulsky runs an ice cream concession – eat your heart out, Dr Watson. Kemal himself doesn’t only fall in love with a hooker, Deborah, who has Jewish blood – she moves on to run a restaurant and ends up pregnant, though the detective’s crack about who the father is on the last page of the last book in the series goes down like a lead zeppelin. So, too, his tender care of the prematurely hardened fourteen-year-old Leila in Kismet is not something you can imagine Philip Marlowe of the Continental Op managing.
In the final analysis, it is Arjouni’s particular humour, well translated by Anthea Bell, that makes Kemal stand out from the mass of PIs. In Brother Kemal, the detective is hired to protect a Muslim author from religious zealots. This gives Arjouni the perfect opportunity to lay into the Frankfurt Book Fair. He may be biting the hand that feeds him but he’s painfully accurate, describing a publisher as ‘more like an estate agent or a fat cat banker, with a Prada suit, a chunky watch, hair slightly too long and a little too carefully tousled…’
Jakob Arjouni died from pancreatic cancer at the age of 48. It will, I hope, be some consolation to his wife and three children that Kemal Kayankaya is already one of crime fiction’s immortals.
