An Evil Eye (32 page)
Fiction
The Janissary Tree
The Snake Stone
The Bellini Card
Nonfiction
A Time for Tea:
Travels Through China and India in Search of Tea
On Foot to the Golden Horn:
A Walk to Istanbul
Lords of the Horizons:
A History of the Ottoman Empire
Greenback:
The Almighty Dollar and the Invention of America
For a recipe for the Greek
fishermen’s stew
with tomatoes , go to my website at
www.jasongoodwin.net
.
Western writers tend to imagine the harem as a perfumed bathhouse full of naked odalisques. In fact it was much more like an old-fashioned girls’ boarding school, run as a department of the civil service; the baths may have been hot but the food was usually cold. Having been brought up with four sisters, a mother, a stepmother, grandmothers, and innumerable aunts and great-aunts, it took no great leap of the imagination to people the harem of Abdülmecid. My thanks and love to them all.
I drew on several excellent accounts of harem life, including Leyla Saz Hanimefendi’s memoir
The Imperial Harem of the Sultans
(from which I borrowed the Ceremony of the Birth);
Arabesque
, the 1944 memoirs of HRH Princess Musbah Haidar; and Douglas Scott Brookes’s invaluable
The Concubine, the Princess and the Teacher: Voices from the Ottoman Harem
, from which I took the terrible engine.
While
An Evil Eye
is a work of fiction, Fevzi Ahmet happens to be a real person who rose to be Kapudan pasha and did make the astonishing career move with the Ottoman fleet described in this book.
Thanks to Richard Goodwin for his own patient and indulgent reading; to Sarah Crichton at FSG and Julian Loose at Faber for forbearance and wise comment; to Charles Buchan and Sarah Chalfant at Wylie; to Krista Kaer for taking Yashim (and me) to Estonia.
As for the harem, my wife, Kate, is as trenchant a critic as the valide herself: I am grateful for all her suggestions. Harry, my youngest son, is among other things a skillful and prolific writer. I do my best to discourage him from pursuing that path, but he comes up with wonderful ideas and I plan to steal some of them for the next Yashim story. Especially the banditry.
This one, meanwhile, is for him.
J
ason Goodwin fell under the spell of Istanbul while studying Byzantine history at Cambridge University. Following the success of his book
A Time for Tea: Travels Through China and India in Search of Tea
, he made a six-month pilgrimage across Eastern Europe to reach Istanbul for the first time, a journey recounted in
On Foot to the Golden Horn: A Walk to Istanbul
.
He later wrote
Lords of the Horizons: A History of the Ottoman Empire
, described as “a work of dazzling scholarship” in
The New York Times Book Review
. His books featuring Investigator Yashim have been translated into more than forty languages; the first,
The Janissary Tree
, won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Novel in 2007. He lives with his wife and their four children in Dorset, England.
Copyright © 2011 by Jason Goodwin
All rights reserved
SARAH CRICHTON BOOKS
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Designed by Cassandra J. Pappas
eISBN 9781429958875
First eBook Edition : March 2011
First edition, 2011
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Goodwin, Jason, 1964–
An evil eye : a novel / Jason Goodwin.—1st ed.
p. cm.
“Sarah Crichton books.”
1. Yashim (Fictitious character : Goodwin)—Fiction. 2. Detectives—Turkey—Istanbul—Fiction. 3. Eunuchs—Fiction. 4. Defectors—Fiction. 5. Women—Turkey—Fiction. 6. Harems—Fiction. 7. Istanbul (Turkey)—History—19th century—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6107.O663E94 2011
823’.92—dc22
2010039938
Jason Goodwin’s Investigator Yashim Series
The Janissary Tree
Winner of the Edgar® Award for Best Novel
This first book in the investigator Yashim series is a richly entertaining tale, full of exotic history and intrigue.
It is 1836. Europe is modernizing, and the Ottoman Empire must follow suit. But just before the Sultan announces sweeping changes, a wave of murders threatens the fragile balance of power in his court. Who is behind them? Only one intelligence agent can be trusted to find out: Yashim, a man both brilliant and near-invisible in this world, an investigator who can walk with ease in the great halls of the empire, in its streets, and even within its harems—because, of course, Yashim is a eunuch. His investigation points to the Janissaries, who, for four hundred years, were the empire’s elite soldiers. Crushed by the sultan, could they now be staging a brutal comeback? And can they be stopped without throwing Istanbul into political chaos?
To read an excerpt, and for more information, click here
www.picadorusa.com/thejanissarytree
The Snake Stone
Detective, polyglot, chef, eunuch: Investigator Yashim returns in this evocative Edgar® Award-winning series set in Istanbul at the end of the Ottoman Empire.
Istanbul, 1838. In his palace on the Bosphorus, Sultan Mahmud II is dying and the city swirls with rumors and alarms. The unexpected arrival of a French archaeologist determined to track down lost Byzantine treasures throws the Greek community into confusion. Yashim Togalu is once again enlisted to investigate. But when the archaeologist’s mutilated body is discovered outside the French embassy, it turns out there is only one suspect: Yashim himself. As the body count starts to rise, Yashim must uncover the startling truth behind a shadowy society dedicated to the revival of the Byzantine Empire, encountering along the way such vibrant characters as Lord Byron’s doctor and the Sultan’s West Indies-born mother, the Valide. With striking wit and irresistible flair, Jason Goodwin takes us into a world where the stakes are high, betrayal is death—and the pleasure to the reader is immense.
To read an excerpt, and for more information, click here
www.picadorusa.com/thesnakestone
The Bellini Card
Detective, polyglot, chef, eunuch: Investigator Yashim returns in this Edgar® Award-winning series…
Istanbul, 1840. The young sultan Abdülmecid believes that Gentile Bellini’s vanished masterpiece, a portrait of Mehmet the Conqueror, may have resurfaced in Venice. But it’s not Yashim, our eunuch detective, who takes a ship across the Mediterranean. Instead, it’s his Polish ambassador friend, Palewski, disguised as an American art dealer.
What begins as a simple inquiry soon turns into a murderous game of deception and suspense, played out among the faded palazzi and sluggish canals of the decaying city. Dealers, forgers, and aristocrats become fatally involved, as the search for the Bellini portrait uncovers a threat to the stability of the Ottoman throne, and the peace of Europe.
To read an excerpt, and for more information, click here
www.picadorusa.com/thebellinicard
An Evil Eye
From the Edgar Award–winning author of
The Janissary Tree
,
The Snake Stone
, and
The Bellini Card
comes the fourth adventure of the famous investigator Yashim.
When the admiral of the Ottoman fleet defects to the Egyptians, Yashim attempts to uncover the man’s motives. But Fevzi Pasha is no stranger to Yashim: it was Pasha, in fact, who taught the investigator his craft years ago. He is the only man whom Yashim has ever truly feared: ruthless, cruel, and unswervingly loyal to the sultan. What dark secret has led his former mentor to betray the Ottoman Empire?
While unraveling Pasha’s curious history, Yashim is drawn ever deeper into the closed world of the sultan’s seraglio, an intimate household populated by the young ruler’s women, children, slaves, and eunuchs. It is a well-appointed world dominated by fear, ambition, and deep-seated superstitions—a lap of luxury where talented girls hold sway in the ladies’ orchestra.
But as the women of that orchestra inexplicably grow ill and die, Yashim discovers that his investigations into the admiral’s defection have their roots in the torturous strictures of the sultan’s harem, where every secret is sacred: a place where the normal rules are suspended and where women can simply disappear.
To read an excerpt, and for more information, click here
