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When a woman comes to our hero to ask him to look into the death of her husband, he soon finds that the dead man was a rather unsavoury character. So are most of the other people in the book, which is to be expected. But I didn't like the hero much either. Some people seemed suddenly a little too willing to give information in answer to his questions.
Also violence has a place in this kind of PI fiction but there were times when he was gratuitously thuggish.
The female characters were not really drawn very fully at all - they are victims, prostitutes or downright nasty.
Overall the book was less interesting than I'd hoped or expected.
Kemal Kayankaya is Turkish by birth but was raised by Germans, and has little left of his heritage. He works in Frankfurt as a private eye, and is very stereotypical: he drinks too much, fools around with prostitutes, cracks wise when he would be wise to be serious, and is doggedly determined to solve his case. In the current installment, a Turkish man has been murdered and his wife thinks the police have no interest in solving the crime because of his race. Kayankaya dives into the case face first, getting into fistfights, having a car chase him, and getting teargassed, in between pistol-whipping various suspects.
This is a good book: I would recommend it. It *does* have the dated feel that a lot of European stuff has in contrast to American movies and television. You always think they're looking to Chandler rather than Robert B. Parker for their inspiration. Everything's *very* hardboiled. That being said, this is a fun book.
The story is pretty simple. Kemal Kayankaya is ethnically Turkish, but he was raised by a white German couple, so he doesn't feel like he belongs in the Turkish minority. He still looks Turkish, though, so he has problems fitting into German society. A Turkish woman, Ilter Hamul, comes to Kayankaya for help because he's Turkish.
Ilter's husband, Ahmed Hamul, was murdered, and the police aren't investigating. Kayankaya starts working on the case on his birthday (that's where the title comes from) and solves it within three days. The case becomes much more complicated than a simple murder, and involves drugs and corruption, and a very brief look at some of the troubles Turks face as a minority in Germany. That's kind of a bonus, because this is basically a simple, hardboiled detective novel.
Kayankaya is a good example of a hardboiled detective, so if you like hardboiled detectives, you'll like this book very much. Even if you don't, you'll probably enjoy it anyway, because it's well written. I usually don't like mysteries (besides Sherlock Holmes) but I enjoyed "Happy Birthday, Turk!"
One problem is what the dust-jacket claims as a merit "the influence of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett is impossible to miss." You can say that again. It begins with the private eye waking with a hangover and breakfasting on coffee and beer. He then goes on to Sachertorte (which Philip Marlowe would not have done) and gets hired by a woman to investigate her husband's murders, which she thinks the police are ignoring because he was Turkish.
I had a problem with some of the dialog which must be due to the use of German slang. I'm not blaming the translator, Anselm Hollo. Colloquialisms are often just untranlatable, but translators should decide whether to tranlate into British or American demotic. People are addressed as "sister" "duckie" and "dearie." I imagine "God almighty, what a skinflint. What's lose for a paltry thirty marks" was something more idiomatic in German. Maybe some of the jokes are funnier in German or maybe they are well-known idioms. For example the character who "snapped his jaws and squinted as if I had poured boiling water on his socks." which made me think of about the only line of German poetry I remember from school "Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten."
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