Crime, Gender, Sexuality: Female Villains in Late Ottoman Crime Fiction

Abstract

In 1914, a Turkish novella depicting a young woman pressing a dagger to the throat of a bearded old man on its cover, with the title Bloody Fairy (Kanlı Peri), appeared for sale on bookshelves in the capital of the Ottoman Empire (Fig. 1). This relatively small book of fifty-four pages, with its price as low as 50 paras, was available to almost anybody who wanted to purchase and read it. Bloody Fairy was the first of a popular series of ten murder mysteries, National Collection of Murders (Milli Cinayat Koleksiyonu), written by Süleyman Sudi and Vassaf Kadri. On the back cover of the first book, the publishers promised readers that the series would tell matchless mysterious and murderous stories that “will arouse curiosity and excitement” (merak-aver ve heyecan-amiz ) among readers. This cover image must have been rather curious since popular crime fiction usually featured male protagonists as their central characters. In those books women were almost always the target, not the ones attacking men or committing crimes. A crime story featuring a female character leading a gang, not falling victim to a male criminal or being his lover, was not a figure that readers would expect. The preface of this book—and indeed the whole series—depicts countless oddities, strange events, enigmatic murders, and other crimes that had taken place in Istanbul during the prior twenty years. Many of these events were carried out by women. The authors write that although there was nothing astonishing in crimes committed because of a woman, women committing crimes was something never seen or heard of. Thus, they surely hoped that this extraordinary crime series about two female criminals would be a commercial success. On the back cover of the first book, they announced that the series would be published as two parts, comprising ten books each, and would be offered for sale as individual titles every Thursday. Unfortunately, their grand plans were never fulfilled; only the first ten books were published. Although the series is far from complete and we will never know about the authors’ plans to unfurl further crimes and mysteries, something wondrous eventually happened: these two authors, who were never among the canon of Ottoman Turkish literature, were discovered in the 2000s. In addition to National Collection of Murders, several of their other works have been transcribed and published. Süleyman Sudi and Vassaf Kadri, who yearned for popularity in the early 20th century, indeed became popular, albeit a century late.