Mur­der in Con­stan­tino­ple fol­lows the exploits of Ben Canaan — the way­ward son of a Jew­ish tai­lor from the ghet­tos of London’s East End. In search of a lost love, Ben jour­neys to Con­stan­tino­ple, cap­i­tal of the mighty Ottoman Empire, on the eve of the Crimean War in 1854. He finds a city in tur­moil: ter­rorised by a bru­tal ser­i­al killer, in an empire on the brink of col­lapse. Mur­der in Con­stan­tino­ple is the first in a series of thrillers fol­low­ing Ben’s adven­tures as a detec­tive, as he solves crimes set against the mon­u­men­tal his­tor­i­cal events of the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry. One of the cen­tral themes of this nov­el is the chang­ing land­scape of Jew­ish life in nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry Europe: a peri­od of per­se­cu­tion, but also emancipation. 

Short­ly after Ben arrives in Con­stan­tino­ple, he meets Shoshan­na Carmi­no, heiress to a pow­er­ful bank­ing dynasty found­ed by her father Abra­ham. When Abraham’s corpse wash­es up on the shores of the Bosporus, it becomes appar­ent the patri­arch has been framed for trea­son and the Carmi­nos are exiled from high soci­ety. Shoshan­na con­vinces Ben to track down Abraham’s killers and help sal­vage her fam­i­ly name and for­tune. The ques­tion of who would mur­der such a pow­er­ful Jew­ish indus­tri­al­ist, and why, is at the heart of the novel’s mystery.

Writ­ing his­tor­i­cal fic­tion is a care­ful bal­anc­ing act, spin­ning a fic­tion­al nar­ra­tive around real events and, in the process, tak­ing us clos­er to his­to­ry and mak­ing these far-off events and peo­ple feel emo­tion­al­ly res­o­nant today. This fusion of fact and fic­tion opens up a space for human faces and voic­es from his­to­ry to declare them­selves to us. In Mur­der in Con­stan­tino­ple, we meet many such char­ac­ters: British Prime Min­is­ter Palmer­ston, the Ottoman Sul­tan, even Russ­ian nov­el­ist Leo Tolstoy. 

Whilst Shoshan­na and the Carmi­no fam­i­ly began as pure­ly fic­tion­al cre­ations, one of the great sur­pris­es in writ­ing this nov­el was dis­cov­er­ing a real Jew­ish dynasty in Con­stan­tino­ple that bore uncan­ny sim­i­lar­i­ties to the Carmi­nos whom I had created. 

Dur­ing the lat­ter stages of research into the geog­ra­phy of Con­stan­tino­ple in 1854, I came across the Camon­do Stairs, Neo-Baroque steps in Istanbul’s mod­ern-day finan­cial cen­tre. This minor archi­tec­tur­al gem was built by and named after one Abra­ham Salomon Camon­do, patri­arch of a Euro­pean dynasty to rival the Rothschilds. 

Abra­ham Camon­do grew a bank­ing busi­ness found­ed by his late broth­er, Isaac, into one of the most pow­er­ful finan­cial insti­tu­tions in the Ottoman Empire — span­ning Con­stan­tino­ple, Vien­na, Rome, and Paris. The Camon­dos were the toast of high soci­ety: con­fi­dantes of Sul­tan Abdul­me­jid I; guests at the wed­ding of the Aus­tri­an Emper­or Franz Joseph I; enno­bled by Vic­tor Emmanuel II, ruler of the new King­dom of Italy. They were a new gen­er­a­tion of Jew­ish tycoons, patrons, and aristocrats. 

In this sense, the Camon­dos of his­to­ry and my fic­tion­al Carmi­nos are sym­bols of the assim­i­la­to­ry pow­er of mod­ern mer­can­tile indus­try. Through their sto­ries, we wit­ness the strug­gles and the glo­ry of Jew­ish life in the mod­ern indus­tri­al era — one that brought great for­tune, hard-earned lib­er­ties, and a new­ly-awak­ened social and artis­tic con­science. After cen­turies of reli­gious and eth­nic per­se­cu­tion, when Jews across Europe were barred from pro­fes­sions and denied the dig­ni­ty of basic civ­il rights, Jews could final­ly ben­e­fit from the progress of moder­ni­ty. As Ben inves­ti­gates Abraham’s death in Mur­der in Con­stan­tino­ple, Shoshanna’s uncle Gavriel offers this description: 

Abra­ham was of a new order. No longer did you need roy­al blood to be pow­er­ful. Just boats, bonds and bul­lion. And so, by the time he was forty years old, Abra­ham Carmi­no – a low­ly Jew that once would have been spat at in the street – could stand shoul­der-to-shoul­der with a man who had four hun­dred years on him.

In Con­stan­tino­ple, this eman­ci­pa­tion was called Tanz­i­mat, which sec­u­larised Turk­ish soci­ety and expand­ed the reli­gious free­doms offered to Jews. In Italy, Vic­tor Emmanuel II con­firmed the full eman­ci­pa­tion of Jews in 1870 and Franz Joseph I of Aus­tria had already done the same in 1867. Abra­ham Camon­do used his wealth and free­dom to build Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty cen­tres across Con­stan­tino­ple, aimed at edu­cat­ing Jews, sup­port­ing small busi­ness­es, and lift­ing Jews out of pover­ty. From the pow­er amassed by the Camon­dos and their coun­ter­parts came a ​“trick­ling-down” effect that saw Jews of all sta­tions on a strik­ing upward trajectory.

By the time Abra­ham Camon­do died in 1873, at the ripe age of nine­ty-two, the Camon­do dynasty had migrat­ed to Paris. Though the fam­i­ly bank was still run­ning, Abraham’s great-grand­sons shift­ed their atten­tion to phil­an­thropy and patron­age of the arts. The Camon­dos built an enor­mous art col­lec­tion, which they donat­ed to the Lou­vre in 1908, and over­saw the con­struc­tion of the Camon­do man­sion in Paris’s 8th arrondisse­ment. This man­sion stands today as the Musée Nis­sim de Camon­do, a short walk from the Parc Monceau. 

The end­ing to the Camon­dos’ sto­ry, how­ev­er, is painful­ly famil­iar. Abraham’s direct line of descent was cut short. His great-great-grand­son Nis­sim de Camon­do, a hero of French avi­a­tion, was shot down in World War I dur­ing a recon­nais­sance mis­sion, short­ly after his twen­ty-fifth birth­day. In 1943, Béa­trice de Camon­do, the last sur­viv­ing descen­dant, was mur­dered in Auschwitz along with her hus­band, the com­pos­er Léon Reinach, and their two chil­dren, Fan­ny and Bertrand. Their tale serves as a solemn reminder that no Jew, no mat­ter how suc­cess­ful, is ever safe from the evils of antisemitism.

The chang­ing for­tunes of the Camon­dos, and the Carmi­no fam­i­ly in Mur­der in Con­stan­tino­ple, are dra­mat­ic exam­ples of the improb­a­ble jour­ney that Jews went on through­out the 1800s. Tenac­i­ty, edu­ca­tion, and inge­nu­ity gave birth to a new era of Jew­ish life, in which Jews could aspire to some­thing more than their fore­bears. It is a les­son encap­su­lat­ed in the words that our hero Ben Canaan says to his grand­fa­ther Tuvia, in the liv­ing room of their mod­est Whitechapel ten­e­ment house before embark­ing on his adven­ture: “‘Maybe I can be a Jew and go my own way. Do it myself.’” 

Over the course of Mur­der in Con­stan­tino­ple, this plucky young man ven­tures out into the world, fash­ions him­self into a detec­tive, and enters the ranks of high soci­ety. In doing so he lib­er­ates him­self from the con­fines of the ghet­to. But as the plot unfolds, this too comes with a heavy price and dead­ly consequences.