The Snake Stone

By Jason Goodwin

Faber £12.99, 308 pages

FT bookshop price: £10.39

Jason Goodwin is a man of many talents. A scholar of Byzantine history, he won the John Llewellyn Rhys/Mail on Sunday Prize for his account of a walking journey to Istanbul, On Foot to the Golden Horn. He followed this up with a well-received history of the Ottoman Empire, Lords of the Horizons. In 2006, he published his first work of fiction, The Janissary Tree, for which he received the Edgar Allan Poe Award, given by the Mystery Writers of America to the year’s best crime novel.

Set in Istanbul in 1836, The Janissary Tree introduced one of the most fascinating characters to have appeared in detective fiction: Turkish eunuch Yashim Togalu, an imperial investigator at the service of Sultan Mahmut II. Devoted to French novels and passionate about cooking, Yashim moves inconspicuously between the palace’s inner sanctums and the city’s criminal netherworlds.

The Snake Stone is the second instalment in the Yashim series. Once more the setting is the cosmopolitan capital of the Ottoman Empire. It is 1838, and as the sultan lays on his deathbed the city is rife with rumours of conspiracy. There is a hushed unease among the Greek community. When French archaeologist Maximilian Lefevre arrives hoping to unearth Byzantine relics, Yashim suspects there may be trouble ahead.

What he could not have guessed is that after Lefevre’s mutilated body is dumped outside the French embassy, Yashim himself will become the prime suspect. With little time to prove his innocence, he jumps into action and unravels a tangled web of secrecy and deceit connecting the world of diplomacy to palace officialdom, shady antique collectors, Orthodox patriarchs, Greek irredentists, secret Hellenistic societies, Lord Byron’s final days and the city’s ancient guilds.

It is a spicy yarn – and an irresistible one. In a succession of cinematic set-pieces and cliff-hangers [it is not difficult to imagine the film version], the plot races tightly on towards its satisfyingly complex conclusion.

Above all, what makes The Snake Stone so enjoyable is the unassuming warmth of its enlightened hero. “There was a stillness about him: a steadiness in the gaze ... a soft fluidity to his movements, or an easiness of gesture, that seemed to deflect attention, rather than attract it.”

What is there not to love in a detective who enjoys cooking as much as he enjoys eating? Being a eunuch, Yashim’s sensuality seems to be channelled through the preparation of food. Stripping onions from their hulls and brushing the skin off garlic cloves becomes foreplay in anticipation of a fragrant, cinnamon-sprinkled pilaff. “Cookery wasn’t about fire,” Yashim knows, “it was about a sharp blade.” Goodwin must be a true foodie.

Yashim joins a pantheon of famous historical sleuths – Erast Fandorin, the 19th-century Russian detective in Boris Akunin’s novels, or Marcus Didius Falco, from the Lindsey Davis series set in ancient Rome. The novel’s other protagonist is Istanbul itself, with its bazaars, palaces and subterranean tunnels – a crossroad of cultures, a city rapidly changing under the drive of modernisation but struggling to retain its timeless soul.