Andrew finkel biography

Andrew Finkel’s The Adventure of the Second Wife is a beautifully crafted book, a boys’ own detective story that is also part history, part travelogue, part love letter to the city which has been the writer’s home for close on half a century.

The novel carries the subtitle The Strange Case of Sherlock Holmes and the Ottoman Sultan. Finkel explains in the acknowledgments that the inspiration for his tale was a single sentence in his friend Philip Mansel’s book Constantinople: City of the World’s Desire.

Here Mansel describes Sultan Abdülhamid II, the last Ottoman ruler, as a collection of contradictions: “subtle and silly, brave and frightened, cool and tolerant, modern and traditionalist, listening at one moment to the Koran, the next to the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, read to him at night from behind a screen in a specially commissioned translation.”

So a throwaway line in one book is made the central conceit in another. Holmes is still top billing, the detective who knows “nothing of your emotion but operates at the vertiginous level of reason”. But perhaps the portrait of Abdülhamid himself is the real ultimate piece of imaginative legerdemain. Finkel’s Sultan is a tragic figure who gives up his love of a Belgian girl to become Sultan – “forced to reject bourgeois monogamy for an Oriental harem”.

Has Abdülhamid ever been given a more sympathetic rendering? Of all the vignettes, I especially liked the story of how the Sultan narrowly avoided an assassination attempt. The carriage which was to take him to prayers outside the gates of the palace had pulled off without him. A shot was fired – the bullet lodging in the seat where Abdülhamid would have been sitting. This particular day he was late for the outing to the mosque. The reason? He was in his private chambers, buried in the latest Sherlock Holmes.

Finkel’s c

Andrew Finkel

Andrew Finkel has been a journalist based in Turkey since 1989, and has corresponded for a variety of print and broadcast media including The Daily Telegraph, The Times, The Economist, TIME, The Art Newspaper and CNN. More unusually, he has worked in the Turkish language press both in the news room and as a featured columnist. His free-lance articles and editorials have appeared in a large number of publications including The Washington Post, The Guardian, the Observer, Foreign Affairs, The Financial Times, Le Monde Diplomatique and in the Latitudes column of the New York Times.

He is also a founding member of P24, an Istanbul-based NGO that supports independent journalism. Finkel has written for Cornucopia since its inception and is a contributing editor as well as the magazine’s restaurant critic. His handbook, Turkey, What Everyone Needs to Know is published by Oxford University Press and a novel, The Adventure of the Second Wife will be published later this year.

Andrew Finkel has been a journalist based in Turkey since 1989, during which time he has corresponded for a variety of print and broadcast media including The Times, The Economist, TIME, and CNN. More unusually, he has worked in the Turkish language press, on television, in the news room and as a featured columnist. He was a regular contributor to the Latitude section of the international edition of The New York Times and his free-lance articles and editorials have appeared in a The Washington Post, The Guardian, Observer, Foreign Affairs, Financial Times and Le Monde Diplomatique. He is also the contributing editor and restaurant critic of Cornucopia Magazine. Finkel is a founder of P24, an NGO whose mission is to strengthen the integrity of independent media in Turkey. His last book, Turkey: What Everyone Needs to Know is published by Oxford University Press and a novel, The Adventure of the Second Wife will appear both in English and Turkish later this year.

The British say it about the police but it may be equally valid for the press – a nation gets the one that it deserves. Yet even I, a long-time resident of Istanbul, wonder what heinous sins Turkey has committed to have merited a fourth estate so seemingly unfit for the purpose to which any theory of democracy or universal rights would have it assigned – namely to hold power accountable, to ensure a reliable flow of information, and to facilitate a free and rational discussion that helps define the public good.

I realise this criticism is at odds with the more conventional depiction of Turkish media as more sinned against than sinning. The country has long been notorious for its rough-handling of the press. The number fluctuates, but there are currently over 140 journalists behind bars and this is the thin end of a very long wedge. The imposition of emergency rule after the failed 2016