That Istanbul was a magnet for spies in the 1940s made it a perfect location for Joe Kanon’s latest thriller, Istanbul Passage (Atria Books), not to mention that Kanon fell in love with the place as a tourist because of its physical beauty and many layers of history: “More than 2,000 years of being at the center of events,” notes Kanon. He tells Show Daily, “Where you set a book is really important in what happens to people’s lives. It also begins to suggest part of the story—things that would happen there and not happen somewhere else.”
Kanon learned, for example, that after the Young Turk Revolution in 1908, harems were abolished. “In 1945, that wasn’t very long ago. It’s likely that there would be people in Istanbul who had been in the harem, and I thought, ‘Well, let’s do one of those.’ What you aim for is to give a mosaic of the city—to give a variety of responses to what’s happening there.”
Kanon’s sixth book, which features an American businessman in Istanbul who is new to the world of espionage, is set in 1945—the time period around which his previous five books have taken place. “I think 1945, and the immediate postwar period, is the beginning of our world, the one we’ve inherited. The explosion of the atomic bomb, the revelation of the Holocaust are true pivotal moments, after which nothing can be quite the same. That’s the world we live in, and how we got there seems to me rich material for any novelist.”
The former editor and publisher first writes his novels in longhand on legal pads. “That doesn’t mean I’m a Luddite, and I’m not against high tech—it’s all great. But it’s just the way I started, and it works for me. I find it slows you down, which I find particularly useful in writing dialogue. I think that people write too fast on computers, but maybe that’s just me.”
A longtime attendee of Book Expo, Kanon admits, “It’s a lot more fun as a writer—you turn up at a certain time, and people make a fuss. There are booksellers that you’ve known for all these years—I knew them as a publisher, and now you see them at BEA as a civilian, so to speak, and it’s a delight. It has that wonderful effect of a reunion where everybody says to each other how wonderful they’re looking—and we mean it!”
