Dennis Wheatley: The Eunuch
of Stamboul
Dennis Wheatley’s The Eunuch of Stamboul(25) is a
typical example of the novel that relies on images of Turkish brutality
as it introduces the reader to the transformation of Turks from Orientals
to Westerners in terms of administration, education, social life, etc.
through the transformation of the Ottoman Empire into Turkey in 1930s.
The plot of the novel involves an adventurous coup attempt by KAKA -
an illegal pro-Ottoman organisation in Turkey which is aborted by the help
of a highly skilful British intelligence officer Swithin Destime. It is
based on a number of religious, political and cultural anti-Turkish clichés
ranging from a misinterpretation of Islam and haunting stories about the
exotic harem and other historical sites of Istanbul to distorted and abusive
accounts of significant Turkish figures of history. Moreover, the villains
chosen from history are also depicted as brutal and repulsive, while the
Bosphorus is revealed as a setting for brutality and execution. The story
set in the early 1930s initially starting in England, consists of a political
conspiracy by a pro-Ottoman underground organisation which aims to restore
the Caliphate and operates through various high-rank bureaucrats in Istanbul.
The chivalrous hero Captain Destime pretends to resign when he interferes
to stop the Turkish Prince Ali trying to seduce Diana, the daughter of
a prominent British diplomat, Sir Charles Duncannon, during a formal party
in London. Upon Sir Charles's request, Captain Destime agrees to resign
in order to keep Turco-British diplomatic relations intact, and afterwards
he is honoured with a top-secret mission when he is asked to go to Istanbul
as a British spy by Sir Charles:
I want someone like yourself to go out at once and investigate the
situation at first hand... The remuneration, of course, if you take this
job on, will be handsome, you may leave that to me, and you would have
the additional satisfaction of knowing that you are also serving your country,
since any information you may secure will be passed on to the Foreign Office
and might enable them to avert serious trouble by acting in time if there
are any grounds for the sort of thing I fear (The Eunuch of Stamboul, 44-45).
Assigned to be director of a tobacco company around Istanbul and staying
in the Pera Palas, Swithin Destime tries to uncover the illegal organisation
known as the KAKA which is planning to overthrow Ataturk in the hope of
rebuilding the previous Ottoman state. One of the top figures of this organisation
is Prince Ali, nephew of the late sultan and 'Emir of Konia and Grand Commander
of the State and Crescent' (The Eunuch of Stamboul, 11); another is the
chief police director of Istanbul named 'Eunuch Kazdim'.
Through making contact with a Turkish university student and a Russian
woman working in the bookstall of the Pera Palas and reluctantly spying
for the Eunuch since she and her mother are threatened with deportation,
Swithin learns something about this illegal organisation. Subsequent to
various adventures, the hero manages to obtain some important clues and
finally uncovers the conspiracy of revolution and a detailed list of the
leading committee members. He takes this valuable information to the British
authorities first, and then to Ankara - to Kemal Ataturk. In return, apart
from official congratulations, most importantly, he gains Diana's
love.
As an interwar thriller The Eunuch of Stamboul is a typical example
of Turkish stereotyping in the first half of the twentieth century as it
was written during the transition period of Turkish history and politics.
The book builds up various Turkish stereotypes in reference to previous
historical events, places and figures in a degenerated form supposedly
representing early reactions to the modernisation process in Turkey (The
Eunuch of Stamboul, 49). These stereotypes appear to reinforce the images
of massacre, execution, brutality associated with some historical figures
such as the Eunuch of Stamboul or Prince Ali as well as with the historical
places such as the Bosphorus.
Since the plot is composed of a historical conspiracy, a brutal reflection
of the Ottoman Empire and its corrupt state system, Dennis Wheatley, in
order to justify the westernisation process in the country after the foundation
of the Turkish Republic, chooses all the villains from the late Ottomans
rounded up in the anti-Republic organisation, the so called KAKA. The Empire
is depicted as exotic and brutal, through stereotypical figures like Eunuch
Kazdim and Prince Ali. Wheatley portrays 'those strange half-Eastern and
half-Western people-the Turks' (The Eunuch of Stamboul, 55) as a nation
still identified with brutality and cruelty which, it is claimed, was mainly
inflicted upon minorities such as Armenians, Greeks and Jews:
All business in Turkey before the Kemal era was transacted by Greeks,
Armenians, and Jews. The Turks despised such men and all their activities.
The majority of those they have now butchered or deported (The Eunuch of
Stamboul, 42).
Elsewhere we are told that 'there were quiet periods and during them massacres
of Bulgars, and Armenians were carried out on a greater scale than ever
before' (The Eunuch of Stamboul, 90).
Moreover, these references to Turkish brutality are underlined in another
way towards the end of the novel when the British hero has been helped
by a little electrician named Murad, a Syrian living in Istanbul:
'Splendid!' Swithin looked at the little electrician. 'And very kind
of you, Mr. Murad. Am I right in thinking that you are not a Turk?' Murad
grinned and shook his head. 'No, I Syrian. Turks kill my father, mother,
brothers, rape sister, all in big war against Eengleish-hate Turk.' He
spat (The Eunuch of Stamboul, 299).
Apart from his biased and contemptuous attitude to the late Ottoman sultans
through the utterances of different characters such as; 'Teh! The Old Red
Fox-Abdul the Damned! (Abdulhamid II) (The Eunuch of Stamboul, 90), and
'the Emperor of all the Turks and Terror of the world, fat, flabby, and
useless, escaping out of his rebellious capital under the protection of
the British' (the last Ottoman sultan Vahideddin) (The Eunuch of Stamboul,
64). Wheatley shows a similar negative attitude towards Kemal Ataturk,
who replaced the Ottoman system with the new western-oriented Turkish Republic,
by accusing him of similar brutality, foolishness and betrayal. Cynical
references to Kemal Ataturk are made through different characters with
remarks such as; 'They gave him the title of 'Gazi', the Destroyer of Christians'
(The Eunuch of Stamboul, 44) (Gazi simply means survivor of the war). Elsewhere
Kemal is presented as the traitor whose admiration for western nations
has brought about the sacrifice of the Nation (The Eunuch of Stamboul,
94).
It should also be noted that it is not only the Turks who are despised
and insulted, but also other ethnic groups such as Russians, Arabs and
Kurds. The Russian woman Tania is treated as a mistress and forced to work
for the KAKA by the Eunuch in order to obtain a residence permit from the
Turkish authorities for herself and her mother; the Kurds living in the
southeast of Turkey are designated as weird and lecherous as the Eunuch
threatens Tania:
I will send her to Bitlis as a plaything for a Kurdish chieftain of
my acquaintance. A man whose only pleasure is to inflict pain upon soft
bodies. She will have aged thirty years by the time she has been his mistress
for six months (The Eunuch of Stamboul, 266).
On another occasion, he repeats a similar threat to her: ‘You shall be
sent to the Kurd, and I will kill your lover. Once more, with that air
of terrible finality that Tania knew so well’ (The Eunuch of Stamboul,
267).
Wheatley seems to make an implicit comparison between the Turks and
the Arabs in terms of brutality through Eunuch Kazdim when he orders Tania
to bring the documents as soon as possible: ‘I shall be waiting outside
the hotel and if I find that you have lied to me you know well that a Wahabi
would have less mercy for an unbeliever than I for you’ (The Eunuch of
Stamboul, 286).
Wheatley depicts the Turkish character as the embodiment of all vices
and cruelties, together with repulsive physical features since ‘the villains
are an imperious scion of the last sultan and the chief of the secret police,
a eunuch whose former job was guarding the sultan's harem, ensuring that
none of the ladies indulged in any hanky-panky’(26).
When Prince Ali is introduced to the reader for the first time in a
formal party in London he is described as vulgar and repulsive through
Diana Duncannon:
Her glance fell from the haughty, well-marked olive features of the
Turkish prince to his waistline, so narrow that one might almost have suspected
him of wearing corsets, and a long cigar that he was holding. Half unconsciously
she noticed that for so tall a man his hand was surprisingly small - plump,
sensitive, womanish - and that the index finger was distinctly crooked
(The Eunuch of Stamboul, 11).
The title figure of The Eunuch of Stamboul, is Eunuch Kazdim Hari Bekar,
the formidable chief of the secret police in Istanbul. Kazdim has also
a strange record since he used to be the chief eunuch of the last sultan's
harem, and now he is an active member of the KAKA. Besides the repulsive
physical description of him such as his great, egg-shaped face creased
into a frown, he also has a brutal and sadistic side as Jeanette suggests:
‘'But Kazdim!' breathed the girl. 'That man is a monster of sadistic cruelty;
'e 'as never missed an execution an' delights in carrying them out i'self'‘
(The Eunuch of Stamboul, 116). His brutality and relentlessness are made
explicit when he threatens his victims during an interrogation that; 'All
my life I have preferred to experiment on others, and I am too old to change
my habits now' (The Eunuch of Stamboul, 221).
Reinforcing the cruelty and repulsiveness of Eunuch Kazdim, Wheatley
depicts his guards in more appalling terms:
Then he saw that two other men beside the Eunuch and his guards were
present. Both were huge negroes, naked to the waist, their black skins
shiny and glistening, their white eyeballs staring at him with dumb animal
curiosity. The mouth of one opened in a half-imbecile grin,..the man had
no tongue-and they were mutes, old henchmen of the Eunuch's from his palace
days perhaps, the instruments of many hideous crimes under his orders (The
Eunuch of Stamboul, 187).
Another image which can repeatedly be seen in other thrillers concerning
Turkey like Black Amber, When I Grow Rich and Journey Into Fear is created
in particular reference to Istanbul and its different historical sites
like the Bosphorus and Topkapi Palace. The city in The Eunuch of Stamboul
is represented through various intrigues, mysteries, and sadistic tales,
for 'despite its surface modernity, still held all..., cruelty, romance,
and intrigue of timeless East' (The Middle East, 71). As Wheatley sets
the story on 'returning the political situation to the status quo ante'
(The Middle East, 66), and chooses the villains - members of the KAKA -
mainly from historical figures, Istanbul, being an Imperial capital once,
is still depicted as the cruel city of the sultans (The Eunuch of Stamboul,
59).
Linking the Bosphorus with exotic harem intrigues (like other thriller
writers such as Joan Fleming and Phyllis Whitney) Wheatley designates it
as a place of suicide and execution; an image of punishment which can be
traced back to Ottoman times. When Sir Charles asks Swithin Destime to
be careful in Turkey, he also mentions that Turkish punishment in case
of capture is 'ten years in a fortress, or worse, he would be knocked on
the head one dark night and flung into the Bosphorus' (The Eunuch of Stamboul,
70). When the Russian girl is threatened with being sent to the Kurds by
the Eunuch, her answer is: ‘No! Rather than face that she would kill herself-throw
herself into the Bosphorus-that was the way out’ (The Eunuch of Stamboul,
278).
The Bosphorus is portrayed in connection with the harem and its wives
that:
The Bosphorus still contained traces of the lattice work which had
shielded the ladies of the harem from the gaze of curious, and Swithin
knew that a number of them had remained in residence there until as recently
as 1922 (The Eunuch of Stamboul, 69).
As far as Istanbul with its popular sites is concerned in The Eunuch of
Stamboul Wheatley creates a mosaic of images of romance, intrigue, cruelty,
lust and exoticism:
He thought...of the beautiful veiled odalisques who had danced and
loved and died in the great, haunted echoing chambers, of the curved sharp-bladed
scimitars which decorated the walls of the Palace Armoury and the quarters
of those almost legendary creatures, the eunuchs (The Eunuch of Stamboul,
129)
As we have seen, in the long tradition of depicting Turks and Turkey in
a negative light within a number of western genres examined so far in this
thesis, the most prevalent stereotype has emphasised hostility and savagery,
which have taken diverse forms. This stereotype is usually displayed -
explicitly or implicitly - through the evil often injected into the characters
of these novels involved, or attributed as an innate element of some of
the more well-known parts of the country. These have had the effect of
reminding the reader of unusual stories or reminiscences from the past.
Although the image has at times been reinterpreted with relation to a few
contemporary political and military issues relevant to twentieth-century
Turkey, nevertheless the historical process of repeating past images has
never been explicitly countered or brought to an end.
NEXT
NOTES
25-As the son and grandson
of Mayfair wine merchants, Dennis Yeats Wheatley was born in London on
8 January, 1897. At the age of seventeen he was commissioned in the army
at the beginning of World War I; then he turned to work in the family wine
business from 1919 until 1931. In his mid-thirties he had to leave his
wine business because of the financial difficulties during the Depression,
and it was at this point he started writing and published The Forbidden
Territory in 1933. Although he has been well-known for his occult novels,
he has also written various thrillers such as The Eunuch of Stamboul (1935).
26-Reeva S. Simon, The
Middle East in Crime Fiction (New York:Lilian Barber Press, 1989), p.71.
Further reference to this work will be given after quotations in the texts,
by mentioning its shortened title, 'The Middle East'.