More Beer (Kayankaya Thrillers) [Paperback]

There is more story in this short (176 page) novel than you'll find in most 400 page thrillers. That's because Jakob Arjouni doesn't waste words. Using language that is both efficient and precise, Arjouni manages to set evocative scenes, create convincing characters, and tell a story that is lively, meaningful, and entertaining.

The Ecological Front put an end to the pollution emitted from a chemical company's waste pipe by blowing it up. The four people involved deny responsibility for the contemporaneous shooting death of the company's owner, Friedrich Böllig. Böllig's death is fortunate news for the rival chemical companies that want to demonize the Greens but it also seems to benefit Böllig's young wife. The lawyer defending the four activists believes there was a fifth participant in the sabotage who might have been involved in the shooting but his clients won't betray their colleague. The lawyer hires private investigator Kemal Kayankaya to find the missing culprit. Spanning only three days, Kayankaya's investigation is impeded by violent hoodlums, corrupt (and equally violent) police officers, an unethical doctor, a reporter, and Böllig's family, among others. As Kayankaya continues to dig (in between incidents of getting his head bashed in), he discovers that the circumstances surrounding Böllig's death are ... complicated.

The story is entertaining but it is the main character that makes More Beer worth reading. Kayankaya is a Turk by birth and, despite having lived his entire life in Germany, he is regarded as an undesirable outsider. His fellow Germans expect him to be uncouth, sexist, and odoriferous. Instead, he's cantankerous, tenacious, and a bit philosophical. As the German-Turk version of the hard-drinking noir detective, Kayankaya is at once familiar and strange.

More Beer was first published in Germany in 1987. It is the second of four Kayankaya novels. Kayankaya meets a character in More Beer who shows up again in the next novel -- One Man, One Murder -- but Arjouni doesn't engage in the sort of novel-to-novel character development that makes it necessary to read the series in order. I don't think More Beer is quite as good as One Man, One Murder, but it's nonetheless a quick, engaging read. Readers who enjoy international mysteries and those who want to sample a different shade of noir should give Arjouni's Kayankaya novels a try.

Private detective Kemal Kayankaya can't help sticking his nose where things stink. In Jakob Arjouni's tough and nonstop crime noir tale from 1987, four so-called eco-terrorists in West Germany are accused of murdering the head of a Frankfurt chemical company whose products should, in a just world, get it accused of crimes of its own.

The four suspects had sabotaged the company's chemical plant, but they deny murdering anyone. A fifth man was seen at the crime, yet no one in authority seems willing to find him. In a tight spot, the defendants' lawyer hires Kayankaya to track down the missing fifth suspect.

If private detectives are outsiders in fiction, Kayankaya is doubly so. Born in Turkey but raised in West Germany, Kayankaya gets hit with ignorance, cruel insults and outright assault as he chips away at the case no one wants. In the 1960s, West Germany had invited Turks to come help the country rebuild and flourish, but now it doesn't want to know about Turks in its midst. It even seems to resent them for it. If this was set in America, it would be (in a simplistic analogy) as if our hardboiled detective was black or Mexican and operating in a far less tolerant era.

Kayankaya can take the slurs and blows after a lifetime of both. He fires back with a sharp wit, yet it's not only the dialogue that keeps us following our Turk PI. We aren't told a lot about him so we learn a lot through how he acts and reacts. He'll shout and insult back and go to the fist if need be; he'll wear it on his sleeve but he'll leave it on yours. To those with wealth, reputation and career to protect even when it's a stranglehold, Kayankaya appears to be a lazy, uncaring problem child -- and a dire threat. Yet he's the only one who cares, in his way, and he's willing to keep after the truth.

In this translation from Anselm Hollo, few words do a ton of work. This isn't literary fiction disguised as crime noir. In one passage, Kayankaya fails to address a suspect named Schmidi as "Mister."

Schmidi shoots back: "Mr. Schmidi. I don't call you rat-Turk."

Kayankaya: "So that's what you want to get off your chest all this time?"

"You better leave while the going is good."

"Yes, I might just give in to the urge to beat the name of that fifth guy out of you."

Some of it may come through as clunky in translation, but it always moves the story along.

The eco-terrorism threat is a ruse used by the forces of complacency and corruption, Kayankaya learns. A sad and thorny love scandal holds the real crime. There are shades of Chinatown here, though without the imposing Noah Cross figure. The staid Establishment in the West German state of Hessia fills that role, arrogant and entitled and getting a little jumpy.

One passage hits at the futility of the little guy versus ruthless power -- Kayankaya's small-time dealer sidekick, Slibulsky, comments on the real possibility of getting killed for their efforts:

"And who would [care]? Some little dealer from the railroad station, and a Turkish snooper. That doesn't even rate a mention on the morning news. They'd just plow us under in a hurry. So you risk your life for something you believe is justice, and end up in the compost heap. What's justice, anyway? It doesn't exist, not today, not tomorrow. And you won't bring it about, either. You're doing the same scheiss-work as any cop ... you won't change a thing about the fact that it's always the same guys who do something, who get caught -- not a thing, because the rules are set up that way."

Supporting characters like Slibulsky and the grim Frankfurt settings are superbly drawn, and they deliver details that surprise. Who knew that arsenic was capable of improving one's beauty in the right doses, even as it's causing death?

I had few complaints. We know little about Kayankaya other than that he was born a Turk but raised by German parents. I wanted to know why and how he's fallen so low. Usually I don't need such background in a hardboiled tale, but Kayankaya's unique background left me wanting to know. Also, the journalist Carla Reedermann seems underdeveloped, disappearing for much of the story.

Kayankaya doesn't need her help in the end. He makes enough waves on his own, whether it's in a sea of foul muck or too many liters of beer.

* A longer version of this review ran originally in the blog Noir Journal. *

The Böllig chemical plant just outside Frankfurt has been emptying waste into a nearby lake for years. Despite the illnesses of several children who had been swimming in the lake, nothing was done. Four members of the Ecological Front decide that something must be done to refocus attention on the problem. One night they enter the plant grounds and blow up the waste pipe.

Unfortunately for them, Friedrich Böllig, the owner of the plant was discovered "with four bullets in his chest and head, on the grounds of the plant, not far from the detonated waste pipe." They are swiftly arrested and charged not only with eco-terrorism, but murder. A murder they insist they did not commit.

Witnesses report that on the night of the crimes they saw five men running away from the exploded pipe. The four refuse to identify the fifth man even though it is likely he is the one who alerted the police to their whereabouts.

Enter Kemal Kayankaya, the private detective in More Beer, the second in Jakob Arjouni's international noir thriller series. Kayankaya was born in Turkey. When he was one, he was brought to Germany by his father ("one of the first Turkish garbage collectors of this republic") who was killed soon after. Adopted and raised by a German family, Kayankaya is a full German citizen but cannot escape constant racial prejudice because of his Turkish background. ("A private investigator - and a Turk? I'm supposed to believe that?")

When the attorney who hired him is threatened and begs him to drop the case, Kayankaya refuses and angrily tells him, "I told you I'd find the fifth man, if he exists. So I'll go looking. Since your clients were unlucky enough to get hold of such a wet blanket of a lawyer, they at least deserve a halfway decent detective."

Throughout, he maintains his firm belief that, "the most revealing thing about a murder is its motive. And the most revealing thing about a motive is the victim." And so he visits Friedrich Böllig's lovely widow whose home "had the atmosphere of an abandoned first-class service area along the freeway." He gets drunk with the wife of the plant's night watchman, a woman who had also been a lover to both Friedrich Böllig and his father.

More Beer is replete with intriguing characters. Not least is Kayankaya himself, who is part smart-ass, part Philip Marlow. And who, despite pervasive prejudice, despite multiple beatings and, despite too much beer and vodka, Kayankaya presses on determined to solve the crime.