Customer Reviews

Kismet (Kayankaya)

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Kismet is part of a series featuring a German detective of Turkish extraction Kemal Kayankaya. The books are set in Frankfurt, but not the glittery efficient Frankfurt most visitors know from trade shows and business meetings. This story turns around the station area, the red light district where gangs struggle for control of the drugs, prostitution, gaming and protection rackets. The book surfaces the engrained racism of Germany towards its Turkish population (all of the industrial economies have deep racist thinking em bedded in their psyche, including Canada where I live, so this is not a particular slap on Germany, it is a fact that festers if ignored). Kismet, in which a group of Croatian nationalists is trying to wrest the area from its current Albanian, Turkish and German bosses. Kayankaya gets caught up in this almost by accident, killing two of the Albanians while trying to help a Brazilian friend. Struggling with a guilty conscious, and wanting to keep the Brazilian alive, he sets out to find out what is really behind the killings and who the people he killed are. In the best of Noir style, he becomes obsessed with the case, and won't let go no matter how often he is threatened or beaten up. The book gives a real feeling for the gritty side of Frankfurt and the ethnic tensions that color people's relationships. Kayankaya is the right mix of tough, smart, determined and vulnerable. He can suck up punishment and will kill if he has to but is not a bloodless automaton. All in all a fascinating look into Germany and an intriguing character. I will follow this series and look for the next books as they come out.

If you new to the genre and looking for something great to sell it to you as literature, this isn't the title that will do it (check out Jim Thompson, Bill James, or others). If you read a lot in this genre and are looking for something new to add some variety, the characters and settings of this book are a nice change of pace. Good, entertaining summer reading, and a nice view into something a little different from the usual LA/Gotham hardboiled setting, or historical settings, but not something that made me want to run out and buy everything this author's ever written.

Arjouni's final novel in the Kayankaya series is a treat for crime fiction lovers: a breezy, first-person narrative situated firmly in the hard-boiled tradition. Comparisons to Chandler and McBain are rife, but the novelist Arjouni reminds me of the most is that pillar of the African American crime tradition, Chester Himes. Like Himes, Arjouni is his country's keenest observer of the intersections of race, masculinity, and the urban underworld. And like much of Himes's fiction, Kismet includes memorable scenes of surreal, explosive violence.

Originally published in German ten years ago, in 2001, some of Kismet's narrative details (I won't mention which, for fear of spoiling the "mystery") are dated, a product of specifically turn-of-the-millennium transformations to European society. Still, the novel affords great insight into Kayankaya's experiences as a Turkish-German man who, by all accounts, is as solidly working-class "Frankfurt" (the city in which he resides) as can be. For fans of the hard-boiled tradition, you can't go wrong with this finale to Kayankaya's adventures. The American publication of Kismet by Melville House leaves much to look forward to for the rest of the series' availability Stateside.

Jakob Arjouni. Kismet. trans. Anthea Bell. 255p. Melville House. October, 2010. $15 (pb).

This is the fourth detective thriller by German author Jakob Arjouni but it seems to be the second to be translated into English. A third, Happy Birthday, Turk!, is due to appear from Melville House in February. All feature Turkish immigrant detective Kemal Kayankaya. He isn't too fast on his feet or too sharp at detecting and the bad guys beat him occasionally but boy, is he dogged. Once on the trail, he never leaves it.

In this installment of the Kayankaya chronicles, he agrees to help an immigrant friend, a restaurateur named Rosario, who is being threatened by two truly weird thugs, who wear painted white faces, sport yellow fright wigs on their heads, and never say a word, just hand over a note to Rosario demanding "protection" money: refuse to pay, and bad things will happen. Kayankaya's intervention makes things worse, and soon Kayankaya, a friend of his and Rosario are all three on the run with a hit squad of Croatian nationalists in hot pursuit.

Kayankaya is a delightful character, but more like Parnell Hall's Stanley Hastings than Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe, no matter the hype on the jacket cover -a sharp tongue but prone to mishaps. His language is flip, sometimes overly colorful, but fun to read. (A bad guy is described as coming in like "Popeye on coke" -"to see from one end of his shoulders to the other I had to turn my head back and forth slightly, as if watching tennis." Shortly after that, a young immigrant girl with a terrible potty mouth tells him she learned her German by watching porno films in the immigrant hostel where she was housed and reading the novel, The Sperm Huntresses, which was the only books she had at hand.)

Not earthshaking but enjoyable, Kismet is a welcome introduction to a private investigator I hope to come across again soon. This is another solid entry from, Melville House.

David Keymer. Modesto CA.

The Kayankaya Quartet (of which this is the final book), was originally published in Germany between 1985 and 2001, the previous installments being Happy Birthday, Turk!, More Beer (which was previously released as And Still Drink More!), and One Man, One Murder. Set mainly in Frankfurt, they use the hardboiled detective genre to examine the changes underway in German culture, especially with regard to immigrants. Although private eye Kemal Kayankaya is the German-born son of Turkish guest workers, he comes across as a classic American PI: a guy whose smart mouth and streak of compassion lands him in plenty of trouble (and gets him roughed up quite a bit), and who wears weariness, cynicism, and disgust like beloved overcoat. His adventures often involve immigrants, and this one is no exception, as a Brazilian restaurateur asks him to help scare off a couple of weird gangsters demanding protection money. This small favor gets him entangled in the operations of a Croatian gang, an Albanian gang, and a young Bosnian girl whose mother is missing. The story is perfectly fine, quick paced, well translated, but for all that, feels somewhat stale. It's now been twenty years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the Kayankaya books are of the decade immediately after that (this last book is set in 1998, which is why the focus is on the Balkans). While they provide an interesting angle on Germany in the late '80s and '90s, they feel decidedly less relevant or fresh than when I originally read them. Still worth reading if you're interested in international crime fiction, and Germany in particular, but not vital.

Excellent hardboiled history, at times approaching the end of the world. In addition, nice update on crime in the new Europe.

Kismet is a Kayankaya Mystery written by German author Jakob Arjouni and translated to English by Anthea Bell.

Main character Kemal Kayankaya is a risk taking Turk working as a Private Detective in Frankfurt, Germany with mobster and government contacts.

Brazilian Romario is the owner and manager of a german restaurant named Saudade.

Slibulsky is a former jailed small time drug dealer, brothel bouncer, politician body guard turned wealthy ice cream vender willing to risk everything to help his friend, Kayankaya. His girl friend, Gina is former dance teacher turned archaeologist.

The story begins with Romario being shaken down by a pair of mafia like characters park their BMW, enter the store, and present a note demanding an exorbitant amount of money for protection. When Romario refuses, the two "Army of Reason" criminals clad in expensive Italian suits, wearing blond wigs and white powdered faces manhandle him cut off his thumb and give him a dead line to make payment.

Enter Kayankaya and Slbulsky armed and clad in bullet proof vests hiding in wait for the return of the "Army" resulting in a shootout and the death of both criminals and the three survivors scrambling to figure out how to keep Romario alive while Kemal seeks to find out who the dead men are and who is behind the Army of Reason.

Using the dead man's cell phone, the head of deportation, and the Albanian Mafia boss as contacts Kayankaya survives a couple near death altercations, rescues a young woman whose mother was forced to work for the "Army" just to satisfy his curiosity of finding out who the bad guys are. He also had a paying client; Frau Beierle's who hired him to find her lost German Sheppard.

Although this novel had some pretty good action scenes, Kismet was not one of my favorite novels. Perhaps many of the poor transitions were a result of its translation; however, the story itself was not believable.

If you are looking for a well-written and thrilling mystery, THIS IS NOT IT.