Seeking a basic education on Turkish society, I found Andrew Finkel‘s book Turkey: what everyone needs to know a valuable resource—and now I’ve been admiring his debut novel The adventure of the second wife (2024) (see this short video clip).

It’s “a clever, compelling mystery about a Sherlock Holmes enthusiast who with the help of a brilliant Turkish professor, tries to solve the enigma of Arthur Conan Doyle’s dying words only to upend his life in the process”:

Strange that Abdülhamid II, the last great Ottoman Sultan, would have Sherlock Holmes stories read to him before he went to sleep. Even stranger is that his obsession helped change the course of history.

The explanation lies in the mystery of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s dying words, that the one Sherlock adventure still to intrigue him was that of “The Second Wife”. For no such story exists… Or does it?

Apart from what I trust is a captive audience of Sherlock Holmes fans and aficionados of Turkish culture, I hope the novel can find a wider audience. Rich detail—for Conan Doyle nerds, on Victorian and late Ottoman society, and on a rapidly changing modern Istanbul—is spiced with dry humour, impressive pastiche, vignettes on topics such as the Raj and the Constantinople exhibition at Olympia in 1893–4, and evocative illustrations. As befits a mystery thriller (has the baffling plot of The big sleep ever disturbed us?!), The adventure of the second wife is a challenging read, crammed with erudite and arcane digressions in virtuosic language.

In the ethnic Conan Doyle bazaar, I remain attached to Jamyang Norbu’s well-informed Tibetan fantasy The mandala of Sherlock Holmes.

See also The Janissary tree, The kiosk in Turkey and Europe, and other posts on Turkish culture under West/Central Asia.