The plot makes this sound like a routine serial-killer book: working girls start turning up horribly murdered, so our plucky narrator sets out to identify and trap the villain. But these girls are ‘girls’ – transvestites working the bars of Istanbul, a risky enough career choice at the best of times, one would think. Worse, each victim’s birth name was that of a prophet, and the manner of their death refers to their more famous predecessor, so that Ibrahim dies in a fire, a reference to Abraham being cast into a fiery furnace; meanwhile, in the ‘manly girls’ chatroom, a fanatic proclaims that ‘those who defy the names of the prophets are infidels the end of the infidels is nigh’.
So far, so dark. But the narrator, who him/herself (the pronouns switch from one sentence to the next) owns a transvestite nightclub, is blessed with warmth and humour as he navigates his ambiguous world. Early on he tells us, ‘I glory in being both man and woman’, and later another character remarks, ‘I’m still a real man. I mean,
I still like a young boy like you.’ Our hero/ine’s sense of the absurd is essential: not many amateur sleuths have to endure a face mask with ‘the colour and consistency’, though luckily not the smell, of ‘baby excrement’ in order to move the investigation forwards.
His light touch serves to intensify the horror when it comes, and the climax is genuinely shocking. Somer is not always well-served by his translator – a young man to be used as bait is described as being ‘at loose ends’ while he waits to go to university (a Freudian slip?) – but he writes with such freshness and compassion that ‘The Prophet Murders’ is an excellent introduction to a fine and unusual writer.
