The Japan Times
Sunday, Sept. 17, 2006
Take a wild ride on the Orient Express
By MARK SCHREIBER
THE OTTOMAN CAGE by Barbara Nadel. New York: Thomas
Dunne Books, 2005, 312 pp., $ 23.95 (cloth).
DRAGON FIRE by William S. Cohen. New York: Tom Doherty
Associates, 2006, 383 pp., $ 24.95 (cloth).
"One of the most frequently asked questions that I get
as a British author," Barbara Nadel tells the e-zine
Shots ( ), "is ‘why do you set your
crime series in Istanbul?’ I generally finish my now
familiar diatribe with . . . ‘Istanbul has a lot of
places in which to hide bodies.’ "
Since her release of "Belshazzar’s Daughter" in 1999,
Nadel has continued to prove her point in an ongoing
series of police procedural novels set in Istanbul
featuring inspector Cetin Ikmen. The work under review
is for the U.S. edition, initially released in Britain
under the title "A Chemical Prison."
Ikmen, Nadel’s series character, is a tough Turkish
cop, a chain smoker and plodding investigator out of
the Simenon-Maigret mold, so old-fashioned he still
hasn’t figured out how to use his cell phone. From his
personal life we see he’s also something of a male
chauvinist. Problems at home, including a senile
father who needs to be institutionalized, are taking a
toll on his subservient wife.
In "The Ottoman Cage," police find themselves
confounded by the crime scene. Located in a house next
to Topkapi palace, it bears a striking resemblance to
what is known as a Kafes apartment, where the old
Ottomans used to keep rivals confined in a sort of
urban exile. The victim, a young man, had been
strangled, and the atrophied condition of his body
suggests he has been prisoner in the room for a
considerable duration, kept in a sedated state by
injections of a synthetic opiate that only doctors can
easily obtain, and thereby casting suspicion on the
city’s close-knit community of well-to-do Armenian
physicians.
Part of book’s appeal is in how well Nadel presents
Turkey’s social classes and ethnic diversity, with a
Jewish police detective, Armenian physicians and
people smuggled into the country from parts of the
former Soviet Union. A side plot involves an
on-the-job relationship: Sgt. Farsakoglu, an
attractive, single policewoman, has the hots for
Suleyman, her unhappily married male colleague.
The London-born Nadel, who is intimately familiar with
Turkey, also has a background in counseling sexually
abused teenagers and teaching psychology, which
doubtless has influenced her various insights into the
sexual mores of a predominantly Muslim country that
are touched upon in this book.
Those interested in reading other mysteries set in
Turkey might enjoy contrasting Nadel’s series with the
translated works of Turkish mystery author Orhan
Pamuk, whose novel "My Name Is Red," set in
16th-century Istanbul, was reviewed here last March.
Title fatigue
With a name like "Dragon Fire," it’s got to be a
potboiler involving China, right? Fortunately, this
thriller by William S. Cohen, who was U.S. Secretary
of Defense from 1997 to 2001, turned out to be more
original than its cliched title.
The protagonist is the U.S. defense secretary — not
Donald Rumsfeld but Michael Patrick Santini, a former
senator who spent several years as a prisoner of war
in the Hanoi Hilton and who accepted the Cabinet
appointment after his predecessor died mysteriously of
anthrax.
Threats from Middle Eastern terrorists barely figure
in this work. Instead, poor America is in danger of
being blindsided by a host of other foreign intrigues,
beginning with a militant faction in China that is
plotting to hamstring the civilian party leadership so
it can pounce on Taiwan.
First, however, it needs to keep the U.S. Navy out of
the Taiwan Strait. The Chinese conspirators outsource
their skulduggery to someone with money and influence:
a billionaire Russian oligarch who hopes to forge an
alliance with Germany, and who will sell drugs,
high-tech weaponry or assassination services to all
comers, if the price is right. To add to the intrigue,
Elena, a beautiful and mysterious Israeli assassin,
sashays into the picture.
Aside from having a John McCain clone as his main
protagonist, Cohen does not succumb to the temptation
of caricaturing specific individuals in the Bush
administration. But that does not mean he doesn’t have
a serious message, which seems to be that Americans
seem bent on being their own worst enemies. The heroic
Santini, unable to dissuade the president from the
aggressive strategies pushed by saber-rattling
conservatives, is driven out of desperation to disobey
his boss’s orders and put his country first.
This cliffhanger is convincingly spun as only a
Washington insider of Cohen’s caliber can do, although
its climax, a Dodge City shootout at Tiananmen Square,
seems a bit contrived. I was pleased to see Chinese
names in the story rendered more or less correctly
using hanyu pinyin spellings — usually a bete noir
for American proofreaders — although a "Hsu" (using
the old Wade-Giles romanization) was allowed to slip
in. It should have been "Xu." But as I like to say, if
the Hsu fits, wear it.
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