And just who are these characters moving about in this nubiferous, tramontane tale? Kamil Pasha is a magistrate who considers himself to be a modern man, believing more in reason, logic and science than his ancestors did. He's studied in England and is highly educated in the Western manner. He's called upon to investigate the murder of an Englishwoman when her nude corpse washes up on the riverbank. The killing eerily resembles one that took place eight years before—an incident also involving an English female victim. The first time we meet Kamil, he's awakened in the night by his servant and, as he tries to get out of bed, he slips on a magazine, immediately indicating to us that he may be slipping and sliding inside a web of dissimulation and intrigue from this moment forward. Most of the novel is told from his point of view (third person), but White employs an interesting narrative device which lets us see the story from two other angles. In both cases, these angles provide knowledge about the mystery that Kamil Pasha doesn't have.

One of the other points of view is offered in first person narratives by a girl named Jaanan. Jaanan's memoirs have to be read with attention because they veer backwards (back to the time of the first murder) and only gradually catch up to the main action being investigated by Kamil. Here, again, White's writing is simply astounding as she thinks herself into the consciousness of this young woman from a land long ago and far away, enmeshed in a murder case. But there's an even stronger reason to give particular alertness to Jaanan's chapters, because they bring out one of the many kinds of dichotomies mentioned earlier. In this case, it's the dichotomy of the life of the mind and the life of the senses.

Jaanan lives with her uncle, a respected hodja (which I believe translates as 'professor', with religious overtones) who is almost exclusively committed to the life of the mind. An intellectual, if you will. His counterpoint appears in the person of Violet, Jaanan's servant. Look:

And:

So, we have Jaanan, who is central to the unraveling of the mystery(ies), and her uncle, Ismail, and her servant Violet—both of whom are central to Jaanan's world and represent opposite stances toward life: the intellectual and the sensual.

The third voice is that of Sybil, the daughter of the British ambassador, We're given the privilege of reading letters that she writes to her sister back in England and, through these, we gather information about her own investigations into the killings, which differ from Kamil Pasha's insofar as Sybil can gain access to the females in the Sultan's harem who are inaccessible to Kamil. (Again, opposites butt heads. Kamil, using his modern criminology, doesn't get as far as Sybil, who networks in the ancient, outdated way dictated by the customs of the harem.) Well-intentioned, she's a bit naïve and a bit of a bungler; she ends up in a terrifying situation at the climax.

Sybil's letters to her sister speak of both the overall situation in the country and her personal speculations about the crimes:

And:

As it happens, Kamil Pasha is the replacement for that now gone superintendent, and the inevitable discreetly takes place between Kamil and Sybil. Kamil is also in complex friendships with two men—Bernie, a scholar, and Michel, the police surgeon. Both contribute significantly to the story in surprising ways that are not easy to anticipate. There are, in fact, many details and subplots contributing shades and nuances to the overall happenings and that are fairly surprising: a lesbian affair; Kamil Pasha's infatuation with orchids; the reason why one of the characters is unable to speak; who belongs to which organization, and so forth.

I haven't really dwelled much on the logistics of the mystery, itself, because it's too much fun to see it unravel as you read; of deeper interest to me is the way everything supports everything else—the political observations support the historical exposition, which supports the development of character, which facilitates the delicate electricity of the language, which draws us deeper into this exotic culture, which gives the mystery an even more mysterious character. The overall effect of the various aspects of the novel working together is fascinating and important. White has said she is working on a followup to The Sultan's Seal. She's given herself a pretty high standard with which to keep up.

QUINONES: Being that you're an expert on the time, place and culture you're writing about, and given that most of your readers probably aren't, what challenges did that present for you? Were you concerned about communicating mood and atmosphere without being overly academic?

WHITE: Actually, my research and studies have been about contemporary Turkey. For context, I had done some reading about early twentieth-century Turkish history and much less about the late nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire when many of the reforms in place today (like democracy, secularism, western lifestyles, women's rights) first started being debated and introduced. So, when I decided to set the novel in 1886, I had to do a lot of research. Of course, research is something I knew how to do. Writing a novel was something I was still learning to do, mostly, at that point, by trial and error. So, I threw myself into the research.

A couple of years ago, after I had started writing the novel, I was on sabbatical in Turkey for several months, interviewing Turkish theologians and politicians for a new scholarly project. I rented a room at the American Research Institute in Turkey, known by its acronym ARIT. ARIT is a warren of rooms in a cozy old building on the Bosphorus. One of those rooms is an overstuffed library, lined with books primarily on Turkish history and archaeology. I had stayed there many times before, but used the library only sparingly. This time, I spent my days pursuing subjects around the city to interview and my nights on a ladder in the library looking for books on the 1880s. I went through the entire library systematically, shelf by shelf, and either read the books on the spot or photocopied relevant pages. I schlepped a huge stack of paper back to Boston with me—not all of it about Turkish theology. (This is an unheralded cause of back problems among scholars: the lugging of large cases of books and papers from one spot on the earth to another. The new limits on carry-on baggage have, perhaps, saved the physical health of many a scholar while destroying their mental health, worrying about whether or not their suitcase containing months or years of laboriously acquired papers and out-of-print books will be forever lost.)

When I returned to writing the novel, though, I realized I was missing important details that scholarly history books usually don't bother with. What were the streets of downtown Istanbul paved with in 1886? Were there streetlights? If so, gas or electric? Was there a shore road up the Bosphorus? What were fashionable veil colors in 1886? The list is endless. Being a scholar, of course, I couldn't get myself to make this stuff up. I had to know. The Web turns out to be relatively useless for this sort of thing. After wasting countless hours and developing dry-eye from staring at the Google screen, my scratchy eyes happened to alight upon a series of large identical volumes on the bottom shelf of a bookcase in my hallway (another scholarly characteristic is that their houses are tinder boxes, with bookshelves and stacks of books and papers on every available surface). The books I saw were two encyclopedias in Turkish—one about the Turkish Republic, the other about Istanbul. I had lugged all 24 volumes over from Turkey, in a suitcase, a few years back. I remember the cabbie at this end refusing to lift it into the trunk. An entire nine-volume encyclopedia of Istanbul, the city. The proverbial lightbulb flashed over my head and I reached for the "S" volume: streets. There, I found an entire history of streets—paving, lighting and more.

The essence of scholarly research is this treasure hunt for knowledge, for revealing facts, for seemingly abstruse information, then putting it all together like a giant jigsaw puzzle. When you have enough pieces in the right order, and you begin to see the final image emerge, and that image allows you to understand something new, it's a most exhilarating feeling. That feeling is what drives scholars on, despite low pay and back problems. And it was the same for the novel, only the picture that emerged was of a fictional story in a real time and place. The puzzle pieces I used were, as far as I could make it, the real thing—whatever I knew of present culture (extrapolated back in time, which, admittedly, is not kosher from a scholarly point of view) and whatever I could find out about the history, politics, bureaucracy, clothing, lifestyle, architecture, economy, and debates of the period. It was exhausting. It was fun. I got to look up unusual stuff—not just street lamps, but also orchids, the Bosphorus currents, the habits of fish as well as people. And I got to make stuff up; it is a novel, after all! I added fictional pieces to the puzzle—characters, lives, loves, dangers, dilemmas. I got to kill people in interesting ways.

Getting back to your question (digression is another hard-to-break scholarly habit), I used a lot of that information in the novel. After all, I had laboriously winkled it all from books, had lost sleep and strained my back in the service of finding it all out. A friend kind enough to read the draft crossed it all out—at least, the parts where I explained all these things. Apparently, in a novel, only the characters have a right to explain, not the author. So, I put long expositions into the mouths of my characters. My agent edited those out. Then, my editor at W. W. Norton crossed out the rest of the explanations with her sharp red pen. In the end, I had a lean, mean text in which the characters ruled the plot and chose to share with the reader (that included me) only what they thought the reader should know. I, of course, would have larded on a lot more information; but, at some point, the characters told me to shut up. So, to get back to your question: Yes, it was hard, but I finally learned to let go.

QUINONES: You chose a prototypical American genre—the murder mystery—for your novel. What attracted you to this form? Are you a fan of mysteries, yourself?

WHITE: I started writing this novel without a genre in mind. In fact, I had no idea that novels come in genres and that you are supposed to "position" your work along the lines of bookstore shelf titles. So, I didn't set out to write a mystery, just a novel. I had an idea about some characters and some interesting tidbits of historical events and snatches of gossip I had heard over the years that kept bumping up against each other in my mind. I finally sat down and wrote a scene (a man eating an egg in a rather unusual way) that had popped into my mind while jogging. Twenty years ago, a Turkish friend had mentioned, in passing, that his uncle ate an egg that way. The anecdote remained dormant in my mind until it was jogged loose [pun intended] on that sunny day in Boston. I ran home, wrote it down, and kept writing. Who was watching the man eating the egg? Where were they? Why? And so on. Before I knew it, I had a hundred odd pages of a novel. That's when I realized I needed a plot. Caution: Do not try this at home. It is very hard to insert a plot after you have already written a novel.

I decided to add a mystery (not, please note, to write a mystery) because I like to read mysteries, among other things. Perhaps—and I am reluctant to admit this—I discovered that I like the freedom to kill my characters. It's quite empowering. Once the novel was published, one American reviewer complained that it was too slow for a "whodunit". A British reviewer, clearly raised on languorous BBC mysteries, called it a "fast-paced thriller". Later, some PBS-watching American reviewers agreed. I learned about genres. Academic books don't hang out in genre cliques. They're either good or bad, read or badmouthed, sold or remaindered. Which just goes to show, a Ph.D. means nothing in the continuing education of life, the universe and everything. (Scholars often have secret, unacknowledged reading habits, like Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe series.) I swallow mysteries for pleasure, much like good chocolates but less fattening, unless you are mean enough to count lying in bed as a weight-gaining exercise. I like to read Arturo Perez-Reverte, Boris Akunin, Jody Shields, Anne Perry, Dennis Lehane, Laura Joh Rowland, Alexander McCall Smith, Donna Leon, Andrea Camilleri, but also Sarah Waters, E. Annie Proulx, Marguerite Duras, Gail Tsukiyama, Louise Erdrich, John Le Carré, and many others. Don't ask how I find time to read all this. It's amazing how far a few daily nightcap pages can take you.

QUINONES: In its larger implications, this is a story about the clash of East and West, one world with another. Some of the issues stretch from the Crusades down to present day. At the same time, you deal with issues of love and romance that seem to be just as long-lasting. Is there any correlation between the issues that concern individual hearts with those that concern entire civilizations?

WHITE: What a wonderful question. Everyone's heart is, in some basic way, captured by the sights, smells, sounds, and habits of childhood. That is, we are shaped by a particular time and its culture and by a particular culture and its time. Even if we move to the other end of the earth, some smell or sound might catapult us into that sensory stronghold that is where we were shaped as human beings. Some people spend their lives seeking to recreate that atmosphere and the emotions it evokes. Their decisions about who to marry and how to live are shaped, perhaps unconsciously, by that goal. Others, like my main protagonist, Kamil, make a rational decision to move into another realm, take on new habits, squelch old ones. Such a move may open all kinds of doors—for instance, to a relationship with an English woman and with English society, in general. But Kamil inevitably also has an appreciation of Ottoman civilization and lifestyle. He wouldn't mind losing some of the aspects of Ottoman civilization that irritate or disturb him, but then he worries about what else will be lost with modernization and westernization—the essence of a civilization, of a people, their smells, colors, sounds, habits, to which he remains very much attached. The British ambassador's daughter also worries about what she might have to change and give up were she to "become" Ottoman. She doesn't agree with Kamil on some basic things, but is drawn sensually to both civilizations. Relationships that are understood and defined in one way in one civilization may have an entirely different meaning (or no special meaning) in another. What is taboo in one may be unremarkable in another. Love bridges these differences. All civilizations would agree on that.

One could also approach the question from the questions, so to speak, that are current in any given age and place and that are debated and discussed by society and, thus, shape the lives of individuals. In 1886, elite Ottomans were debating things like the role of religion in society, the challenge posed to faith by science and reason, and whether slavery should be abolished (slavery was legal, but took a very different, relatively more benign, form in which slaves were treated as family members, regularly manumitted, and even married into the owner's family). People fretted about what women's roles should be in the home and in society. How should minorities be incorporated into the political scheme of the Empire? Should they act, first and foremost, as Ottoman citizens, or should their loyalty be to their own sect? What does it mean to be modern? What are the costs of progress? What are the rights and obligations of the individual and those of the family and society as a whole? Should one be given preference over the other? The Ottomans were worried about the consequences of change, the decline of the family, losing the moral fiber of society. In many ways, these are questions people in Europe and the United States, and elsewhere, are still struggling with today. It is easy to see how these issues could shape the lives of individuals. Do you obey your family or marry the person you love? Could you marry someone from a different religious or ethnic group? In the novel, several men who strive to be modern and have tried to base their lives on the application of reason come up against women who point to the strength and stability that families and individuals gain from faith and religious knowledge, without being any less modern.

QUINONES: Do you feel that there is any kind of truth or insight that you were able to get a glimpse of, via the art of the novel, that you could not get through your more scientific work in anthropology?

WHITE: Much of my insight into what I wrote came to me after I wrote it. To be honest, people have been pointing things out to me that I wasn't aware I had done in my writing. Both scholarly and novel writing are intuitive in some basic way that I do not claim to understand. Refer to Freud, Jung and Bruno Bettelheim. I now realize that what I have put into the novel (and what perhaps drove my writing of it) was the sensory experience of Turkey, the wonderful contradictions, the exquisite customs and habits, the details that made me fall in love with the country in the thirty years I have been going there. I've lived in Turkey, on and off, for more than seven years—much of that engaged in an intensely focused project of learning the culture, rather than just inhabiting it. But what gets into my scholarly writing? Only those observations that make a point.

This is, of course, the essence of clear, focused, scholarly writing. Every word serves a purpose. I've found that, over the years, my scholarly writing has become more and more literary. That is, I've been putting in mood, color, and details that, while not exactly extraneous, could have been left out to make my point. As a result, in my two scholarly books, the stories of people (real people) come alive to illustrate whatever larger theoretical point I am making. (How did the world market capture women's labor in 1980s Istanbul squatter areas? Why did Islamic politics become so popular in the 1990s?) I'm pleased that at least one of those books is doing well (for a scholarly book), in large part because professors assign it to students who seem to find the stories compelling and, in the process of reading, learn something about drier subjects like economy and politics.

Still, there is a lot that is left out. And that mass of color and contradictions is what you will find in the novel, the quirks and idiosyncrasies, the details that don't make a poin but are the essence of what it means, to me, to be Turkish.

QUINONES: Your prose style is very natural, very fluid and literary, the complete opposite of technical academic writing. Have you ever studied creative writing, and do you have favorite novelists or poets that you read or look to for inspiration?

WHITE: Thank you. I did take a creative writing course, once, in college. I remember the teacher saying that, of the students in the class, those who write all the time will be the most likely to get published. There's some truth to that, although some talent clearly is needed, as well. I've always been driven to write. As long as I can remember (well, since I learned English after emigrating here from Germany as a 7-year old), I've carried a notebook around with me, filling it with observations, descriptions, ideas, the exact, perfect word for a particular nose seen on the subway, or for the way light falls on river ice, or...well...really anything. I'm like a magpie, picking up anything that winks at me. I don't know where that compulsion came from.

I take great pleasure in words, the way they feel in the mouth, the noise they make on the page, their fan dance of meanings. I also try to write clearly. I've learned from years of scholarly writing to pare sentences to the bone, to say exactly what I want to say, not one syllable more. I've also given a lot of public talks, so I have a sense for the rhythm of language. In the academic world, you're often given only fifteen minutes to present your life's work to an audience that may or may not have any background in your subject. Pieces of paper are passed to you with the countdown, in progressively larger script: You have two minutes. Finish now. Please stop. So, you have to be succinct, brief, and interesting. I usually practice my talks beforehand and have noticed that words spoken are different than words read. I found that insight useful when writing dialogue in the novel. I write it, then speak the dialogue out loud and adjust what's on the page.

As for style, I'm not aware that I've been influenced by any particular author. I've never tried to copy anyone's voice or style. I do remember, after I started writing the novel, picking up Le Carré's The Night Manager, which my father had on his shelf, and being blown away by one sentence in which he describes a guest signing in at the hotel registration. With just a few words, Le Carré gives the reader a powerful image of the guest's appearance, social class, character, and place among the other guests in the lobby. I immediately went back to my prose and went through the manuscript chopping out or rewriting any sentence that I thought didn't do as much as Le Carre's sentence did. (Of course, he remains the master, I the apprentice, but I was inspired to do more with my prose, to push myself further.) He proved to me that you can write a thrilling novel that is also good literature.

It may sound immodest, but I think I have an ear for language, for grammar, for correct language, but also for richness of tone and meaning. I find it painful and almost impossible to read bad writing. Spelling or grammatical mistakes are like logs in the road. I fall over them and lose the will to accompany the author further. I sound pretty insufferable, come to think of it. I swear I'm perfectly charming in person. In my defense, I will add that I also like experimental language use. Poetry, for instance. I used to read a lot of poetry, but poetry needs reflection and so doesn't make good nightcap reading.

I try not to read any novels set in the Ottoman period because I don't want to be unconsciously influenced. I read much else. I love sparse prose that is also sensual and rich in meaning. There's a lot of good writing out there.

As Douglas Adams would say, "Goodbye. And thanks for all the fish."