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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'.
