I don’t imagine that Yashim, the Ottoman investigator, has a Christmas list.

His more devout Greek friends in Istanbul will fast through Advent: even George the greengrocer keeps a three day fast. Christmas is not a time of gifts for them – that belongs to the New Year, St Basil’s Day, when Christ was circumcised. Then a child – usually a boy – first foots his friends and relatives, bringing a ‘dog onion’ to each house. He goes away with a few coins.

Ambassador Palewski celebrates Christmas in his own way, naturally. On Christmas day he eats only what has been prepared the day before, and he lays an extra place on a white tablecloth in case someone turns up unexpectedly. That person is often Yashim. Under the tablecloth he puts straw. Otherwise, he watches the weather, according to the Polish tradition that the weather at Christmas foretells the pattern for the coming year. Once he invited Marta, his housekeeper, to pick a straw from under the tablecloth. A green straw for marriage, a yellow straw for spinsterhood, and a withered straw for more waiting; the short straw indicates an early grave. Inevitably the experiment led to misunderstanding, and tears.

Yashim visits the local orthodox church on Christmas Eve and lights a candle in memory of his Greek mother.

There’s a little more about her in An Evil Eye, which comes out this Summer.

Writing THE END at the bottom of the page – the bottom of the whole great scrolling and unwieldy document, in fact – should be a cork-popping moment.

And so, in a way, it is. The Valide has made her point, Yashim has saved his little bit of a vanished world, and whatever I hoped would be true about it all has been said, one way or another. For this time, and in this story.

But An Evil Eye isn’t quite finished, yet.
There are scenes which need knitting together. There’s a whole character who needs to be veiled more thickly in suspicion. A ticking clock I still need to wind. I need, finally, to print the whole book out and sit up somewhere with tea and a pencil.

The book’s there, all the same. More from Preen, the dancer; Palewski coming up trumps, and laying his comfortable fire; some good moments between Yashim and his chopping board again. And also a story about Yashim dealing with his own past, as it comes up to bite him in the character of Fevzi Ahmed Pasha – a real-life figure I’ve snatched out of history for the purposes of the novel. Oh, and the Valide, who is getting increasingly frail…

I’m pleased about the time-scale of the book, too, which starts in the same month as The Bellini Card, but returns to Istanbul that winter, when snow lies on the ground. Different stories, but casual overlap here and there.

An Evil Eye revolves around treachery and the harem. Both of them moral dilemmas, of a sort.

So the champagne’s on ice – at least until the pencil’s done its work. And then, perhaps, it’s time to move to a new blog, too?

An Evil Eye.

Can’t help it: writing about food, about Yashim’s cooking or – as now – the picnic he’s assembling, to take with him on board ship – makes me terribly hungry.
My first port of call is always Ayla Algar’s splendid book Classical Turkish Cooking: Traditional Turkish Food for the American Kitchen. It’s the Bible.
But today I’m looking for more about pastirmi, the dried beef fillet that travelled to Italy and then to the US as pastrami.
And I found this interesting website:

http://www.turkishculture.org/pages.php?ChildID=306&ParentID=11&ID=49&ChildID1=306

It’s always a hoot – and this year was no exception. I hesitate to say that it was all the usual suspects, but there they were – Laura Wilson who faultlessly organised the whole shebang, Val McDermid who first set it all up, Natasha Cooper who can do no wrong , Mark Billingham (getting an award, of course), the on-page terrifying Stuart MacBride down from the bothy, Laura Lippman over from Baltimore, Simon Kernick up from town, writers, agents, publishers and pr people all over the place. And that was just the first night party.
Five of us at least kept our heads clear for the Friday panel, Digging UpThe Past – with Mark Mills in the chair and doing a darn good job. He floored me by remembering my last stage performance at university, playing Abelard in Abelard and Heloise. I haven’t thought about it in years, but of course Abelard ended where Yashim began, as a eunuch. How I roared on stage as the knife came down! That’s good acting for you.
Fascinating panel – Ariana Franklin and Caro Peacock with their immaculately researched mediaeval mysteries and Giles Brandreth with Oscar Wilde as his sleuth. All of them very funny and revealing, so I imagine the huge audience enjoyed the hour as much as I did.
I wish I could have stayed on: so many good panels and specials, but I had to thunder south to another festival – one I could take my children to, in a tent. In Harrogate there’s no messing about under canvas; it’s more in the bar.

I’ve posted my thoughts about Page 69 – supposedly representative of the novel as a whole, according to a theory, if it is one, proposed by Marshall McLuhan – on this site. It’s run by an engaging fellow called Marshal, too. Marshal Zeringue.

http://americareads.blogspot.com/2009/03/pg-69-jason-goodwins-bellini-card.html

In The Globe & Mail, Margaret Cannon writes:

 Jason Goodwin won an Edgar for The Janissary Tree, his first novel set in 19th-century Istanbul, featuring the eunuch, cook and investigator Yashim. It was a brilliant debut, followed by the equally fine The Snake Stone, but in The Bellini Card, Goodwin and Yashim really hit their stride.

There’s a sultan and a Bellini portrait, and the plot takes Yashim and his friend Palewski to Venice in all its slightly sultry, slightly tawdry glory. There is a murder, of course, and the suspects include faded aristocrats and a mysterious and very beautiful contessa. If you want to completely escape the chilly, dreary modern world, this is the book to take you away.

New in – this from Carol Memmott writing in USA Today:

Jason Goodwin’s series starring a eunuch detective serving the Ottoman Empire’s sultan is as much literary novel and historical fiction as it is a mystery. In The Bellini Card: Investigator Yashim Goes to Venice (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 288 pp., $25), the eunuch Yashim and his friend Stanislaw Palewski, a Polish diplomat, tackle the assignment of discovering whether a rumored portrait of Mehmet the Conqueror by the painter Gentile Bellini exists and, if so, to buy it for the sultan. The investigation takes these clever, endearing detectives to Venice, where lucky readers are transported to a fascinating period in Venetian history.

And here’s the review from National Geographic’s Traveler magazine: 

A Venetian Journey by Don George

Bringing a contemporary city to life in words is an extraordinary enough challenge. But bringing a mid-19th-century city to life is infinitely more challenging. Edgar Award-winning mystery writer Jason Goodwin overcomes the challenge with vigor and grace in The Bellini Card, his third in a series of historical mysteries featuring the eunuch investigator Yashim, who serves the Ottoman court in 19th-century Istanbul. In this new book Yashim journeys to Venice at the behest of the new sultan to search for a legendary portrait of Mehmet the Conqueror, painted by Gentile Bellini. From its fast-paced dialogue to its interlacing political and social intrigues to its atmospheric depictions of Venetian life, The Bellini Card presents a riveting and revealing journey in time and space.

Speaking of covers… here’s the US edition, out in hardback on March 3rd – tomorrow!

In The Bellini Card Yashim’s old friend Palewski, the Polish ambassador in Istanbul, goes to Venice on the trail of a lost portrait of Mehmed II.

For safety’s sake he presents himself as an American dealer, buying Old Masters for millionaires across the Atlantic. Why? Because nobody in 1840 Venice really knew what an American might be like. 

Popi Eletro dreams of selling his Canalettos to a land of timber and furs. Count Barbieri, on the other hand, believes that New York might be the modern Venice: ‘It takes a wealthy and energetic commercial city to spawn rich men,’ he says, ‘who then vie with each other to call out what is beautiful.’

Dangerous ground for them, of course.

For anyone browsing from the US or Holland, feel free to go back to my posts in April 2008, when I began this blog to coincide with the UK publication. The Janissary Tree came out first – by a matter of days – in the USA, but the rift in schedules has widened since then. I’m not sure why, exactly. For The Evil Eye next year, it’ll be simultaneous. 

That was my request. Sometimes it’s better to have more time. You can fill it, of course, with everything but writing. Gardening and  cooking and having friends around. Children, always. Moving house. Walking on a beach. And don’t forget worrying as an occupation.

For Patty and others, who’d like to follow the action more closely…

This diagram, which figures so prominently in The Bellini Card, is an eight-pointed star inside a square. The above illustration comes from a Japanese website and it is, as far as  know, the only illustration of the Sand-Reckoner’s diagram online. 

The idea that it was used as a fencing diagram, governing positions and strokes, was put to me in Hampshire some years ago. It has been on my mind ever since, not least because of its delightful name:  I was glad to unpack it for The BelliniCard.

Here’s the new Faber paperback cover, as promised. I think it’s great – and so, I’m glad to say, do the Waterstone’s bookshop people.

Over the past few weeks some really amazing artwork has come in – covers for The Snake Stone done by my publishers in Korea and Denmark and Russia. Also the Icelandic version of The Janissary Tree. I’ll have to get my eldest son to post them here, along with the other 38 or so covers around the world; but that’s already two books, so at least 76 covers. All of them individual, striking, different. Which goes to show that everyone’s vision is unique. And that, in turn, suggests that we are the product of our histories. Vive la difference!

I know, I know, who wants a blog that falls asleep for a couple of months? All I can say is that we need to live in the world, too – and get down to some hard writing when the winter festivities are cleared away…
Thanks to the delightful people who have written to say how much they enjoy the Yashim stories. Thanks too to Faber, who have come up with another cover for The Bellini Card, for the paperback edition which will be out this Spring. It’s a move away from the fruity orientalism of the Ventura artworks, which I really liked, and I’ll post it here asap. Promise.
Meanwhile the forthcoming US edition really goes to show what a difference close line-editing can make to an author’s pride, at the very least. And with that, I have to ackowledge my enormous debt to Enrico Basaglio, who read The Bellini Card for fun and made a note of all my mistakes… He’s a true Venetian, so he knows what’s what. I can’t thank him enough.
Back soon. In the meantime, here’s a piece I wrote for the FT on researching Venice:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/b916dd3e-d6c7-11dd-9bf7-000077b07658.html