Kemal Kayankaya
Created by Jakob Arjourni (1964- )

And now, for your literary and cinematic pleasure, a whole new thang! All the way from Germany, courtesy of Jakob Arjourni. It's modern day Frankfurt, and the private eye on today's menu is KEMAL KAYANKAYA, an orphaned Turk raised by German foster parents. Kemal's German is flawless, but he speaks not a word of Turk. And so he's the ultimate loner, the ultimate outsider among hard-boiled private eyes, forever caught between two solitudes, too Turkish to be accepted by German society, and not Turkish enough to be accepted by that community. As he moves through all strata of society, through sex shops, gambling dens, government offices and other unsavory centers of vice and greed, drinking, getting beat up, getting wet in the rain, layer after layer of corruption and racism is exposed. Supposedly very impressive, all the more so because Arjourni was only 19 when he wrote the first book.

In 1992, a big-screen version of Happy Birthday, Turke! was produced, written and directed by Doris Doerrie, one of Germany's busiest directors (although primarily of rather conventional TV-style flicks, according to Gunnar Geller). The film offered a gritty, hard look at contemporary German society that pulled no punches as Kemal searches for a missing Turkish husband. Arjourni himself felt the film was too soft, too much of a "leftist, liberal view of the world" but it was a huge hit in Germany. Too bad the Americans can't seem to make this stuff anymore. Instead, they seem to rig most of their detective films to feature as much pointless sex and violence as possible, substituting tit shots and cars, buildings and boats blowing up for plot development. Supposedly, it's available on video, in German; with sub-titles, if you're lucky. My friend Dieter swears this is the best P.I. film ever made.

NOVELS
All originally published in German

• Happy Birthday, Turke! (1987)
• More Beer (1987)
• One Man One Murder (1991, originally published as "Ein Mann, ein Mord")
• One Death To Die

FILM

• HAPPY BIRTHDAY, TURKE!
  (1992)
  109 minutes
  Written and directed by Doris Doerrie
  Based on the novel by Jakob Arjourni
  Starring Hansa Czypioka as KEMAL KAYANKAYA
  Also starring Meret Becker, Özay Fecht, Doris Kunstmann, Lambert Hamel, Omer Simsek, Nina Petri, Christian Schneller, Ömer Simsek, Ulrich Wesselmann

Report respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith. Special thanks to our Hamburg correspondent, Gunnar Geller, for his help here.