The competing claims of crime versus heritage in A Memento for Istanbul, Ahmed Umit

This article notes the competing narrative drives, in A Memento for Istanbul byAhmed Ümit, of a crime police procedural and of a celebration of the history of Istanbul. It examines the tensions in play with these competing trajectories and questions whether they compete for attention in an expansive layering of the readerly experience, or pull in opposite and damaging directions? Noting that readers are always plural, and some will look for the whodunit while others will enjoy the historical information, the paper traces the different ways in which history is used in the novel, beginning with the obvious placing of the murder victims at the various cultural sites which trace the emerging history of the city, starting with Byzantium and ending in the present. This mix of taut crime narrative and travel guide, the article concludes, could perhaps be most usefully considered as a hybrid text, a ‘cross-over’ novel incorporating two separate generic expectations where neither is secondary to the other.

Crime Writing Special Issue