Screaming toddlers and paper-thin hotel walls. Cold poached eggs on your full English. That stag party from Wolverhampton stealing the karaoke.
Turkey can be a great destination for a budget package holiday, but it’s a gamble. There are so many things that can ruin it – although you’ll have to hope your all-inclusive deal doesn’t involve a dead body in the pool.
Istanbul multimillionaire Mesut (Baris Kislak) in The Turkish Detective wasn’t the type to book a budget double room at a three-star resort. His luxury villa was practically a private hotel for one. Yet he ended up in the deep end, face down and strangled.
If you encounter something similar on your holiday, ask for your money back. But hey, after that you shouldn’t have any problems finding a sunbed by the pool.
Inspired by Barbara Nadel’s crime novels (more than two dozen of them), The Turkish Detective delves into a world hidden from tourists. Haluk Bilginer plays Inspector Cetin Ikmen, a flaunting maverick and chain-smoker whose team idolizes him as a hero.
The Turkish Detective, from left to right, Ayse Farsakoglu (Yasemin Kay Allen), Cetin Ikmen (Haluk Bilginer), Mehmet Suleyman (Ethan Kai)
A fugitive from Scotland Yard, Mehmet Suleyman (Ethan Kai) — bound by rules, smart, eager to impress, but shocked by his new boss’s unorthodox tactics
Ikmen drives so recklessly that even taxi drivers avoid him. He takes the same approach when interrogating suspects: slinking past security guards to enter a drug lord’s party, or gaining the trust of a computer hacker by providing his own online bank account details.
Such arrogant talk might become tiresome if he were not also a devoted family man and an intuitive student of human psychology.
In his environment he encounters Mehmet Suleyman (Ethan Kai), a fugitive from Scotland Yard. He is strict, smart and eager to impress, but is shocked by the unorthodox tactics of his new boss.
If this all sounds familiar, maybe it’s because it’s the same setup as Life On Mars. Suleyman hasn’t fallen through a time machine into the Gene Hunt era of the 1970s, but police work in Istanbul is the next best thing. And it has the added bonus of postcard views and snapshots of urban street food.
The first two episodes followed an investigation into the murder of an internet fashion influencer and her super-rich fiancé. The circle of suspects was limited: the killer had to be either the girl’s father or her brother.
While the stakes kept rising with every twist, things got a little ridiculous in the second episode, when Suleyman and fellow detective Ayse (Yasemin Kay Allen) were lured to the docks, where snipers trained laser sights on their foreheads while the drug lord delivered a sermon on the importance of paying for your dinner.
This could have been a complicated metaphor, or maybe he was frustrated with the dine-and-dash customers at his chain of noodle restaurants. At this point I started to get confused.
The climax was even more astonishing when it turned out that the murder victim’s brother was a suicide bomber who hated feminists and wanted to blow up the school where Ikmen’s daughter was attending.
Perhaps the writers had indulged in a few too many alcopop cocktails. That’s always a danger on those all-you-can-drink package holidays.