Faber & Faber

Q. You wrote a number of successful history and travel books about Turkey and the region before you turned your hand to fiction. Is it a very different process to write fiction?

It's all storytelling, of course - but fiction is more obviously exciting and enjoyable to write. After all, you don't look things up, you make them up: the fiction writer's responsibility is to the story, the plot, and the characters.  When it works, and all the elements come together, it feels a bit like flying!

Q. Where does your love of Turkey and its history stem from?

Years ago I made a pilgrimage to Istanbul, a city I knew from the poetry of Yeats and a course in Byzantine history. We walked to the city from Gdansk, in Poland: all the way across eastern Europe in six months. What fascinated me was the way that the country began to tilt around us as we headed south - so that somewhere in Hungary, and afterwards, we found ourselves walking to a drumbeat that came from Istanbul, or old Constantinople. Thick black coffee, the colourful skirts of the gypsy women, a minaret in a dusty square ...

It wasn't just Ottoman echoes - it was Greek orthodoxy, too, the basilica churches and the Patriarch still in Istanbul, after so many centuries. So the music changed, and the whole rhythm of life. From then on, I was hooked.

I wrote Lords of the Horizons: A History of the Ottoman Empire, to understand who those people were. And that was another journey, I suppose: the past is another country - and you can travel there, in a sense.
 
Q. Yashim, your detective hero, is a eunuch. Where did the idea for him being the central figure come from?

Ottoman society was governed by tradition, including the separation of the private and the public realm: I needed a character who could move at will between the harem and the street. A man at ease with women, as well as men. Eunuchs functioned as go-betweens.

But there was more. Eunuchs were also guardians, chaperones - nannies, if you like. Yashim is a guardian, I think. He tries to sort out problems, resolve difficulties. He belongs to the society he patrols - but he is not helplessly involved.

Oddly, I think a lot of the great detectives are eunuchs, more or less - and maybe for the same reasons. Philip Marlowe. Sherlock Holmes. Hercule Poirot, for sure! They operate at a tangent to the world. They are, fundamentally, lonely men. I suppose they are a bit like priests, hearing confessions. It's important that they aren't entangled in the human comedy of love and lust. That said, I allowed Yashim a certain leeway: he can't father children but he still has the necessary equipment ...

And he's a great cook. That's how he gets his kicks!
 
Q. How do you go about plotting your books? Do you have all of the questions answered before you start or do you have room for improvisation as you write?

I start with an idea, an element in the teeming panoply of Ottoman life. The suppression of the Janissaries, or the underground water-system of Istanbul, or a mysterious painting - these things come from research, and they begin to gather wool in my mind.

I quite like flying a little blind - that is, I don't plot exhaustively before I begin. It makes it more exciting, to follow the story. The important thing is to build up your fictional world, to make it rich with characters and possibilities, because then you have a fabulous store of motives - events - and clues - to draw on. Sometimes the perpetrator changes as I write, or I notice an unforeseen link opening up that I can exploit. Sometimes I have to lie down with a wet towel over my face to figure out who did what, and why. It's dangerous - but if I had it all pat before I began, I think I'd dry up.

Q. Have you always been an avid crime reader? If so, who would you cite as your major influences?

I'm not bowled over by whodunits - I prefer those thrillers that take you into another world. Chandler is the master. Sometimes even he got confused by his plots - but plot, after all, is just the vehicle. What matters is the scenery, and who's on board. So his characters, and his LA, live vividly in the imagination.

Graham Greene's books thrive on atmosphere and questions of moral choice. The Confidential Agent is a masterpiece.

The Flashman books are a great read. Macdonald Fraser wrote with amazing drive, as well as an acute sensitivity to period. And I find Michael Dibdin irresistible, too.

Jason's Goodwin's website / The Bellini Card blog