Jakob Arjouni was a German writer who has realized success as a mystery novelist, with various works in the hard-boiled genre popularized by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.
Background
Jakob Michelsen was born on October 8, 1964, in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. He was the son of the playwright Hans Günter Michelsen and Ursula Bothe, who was working for Suhrkamp Theaterverlag at that time. Later his mother married Kadisha Arjouni, and Jacob took his surname.
Career
Arjouni’s novels feature hardened private investigator Kemal Kayankaya. Arjouni introduced Kayankaya in Happy Birthday, Türke! (published in translation as Happy Birthday, Turk!), in which the unflinching sleuth probes the mysterious death of a Turkish immigrant who had apparently been stabbed to death while he visited the seamy prostitution section of Frankfurt. Upon being hired by the victim’s widow, Kayankaya soon finds himself the target of vicious thugs. But he perseveres in his investigation, and eventually uncovers the existence of a drug ring that profits from the plight of Frankfurt’s Turkish inhabitants.
Arjouni followed Happy Birthday, Turk! with Mehr Bier (published in translation as And Still Drink More!), in which Kayankaya is hired to locate the missing member of a band of ardent environmentalists who have been charged with murder. The group of four defendants concedes that they entered a Frankfurt chemical plant with intentions of committing sabotage. But they deny involvement in the murder of the plant’s director. During the course of his ensuing investigation, Kayankaya runs afoul of both political and judicial authorities, but he nonetheless continues his investigation.
In the next Kayankaya tale, Ein Mann, ein mord (published in translation in the United States as One Death to Die and in England as One Man, One Murder), the private investigator undertakes a search for the missing girlfriend of an artist. Kayanlcaya’s quest leads him into Frankfurt’s sordid underworld, where he learns that immigrant women - including, perhaps, his client’s Thai girlfriend - are being kidnapped and forced into prostitution.
Among Arjouni’s other writings is Magic Hoffmann, a novel about the follies that ensue when three Germans attempt to finance their flight to Canada by committing armed robbery. One of the thieves is apprehended and sentenced to imprisonment. Four years later, he gains his release and travels to Berlin in the hope of rejoining his two friends and, eventually, traveling to Canada. His friends, however, have other ideas.
In one of his last novels, Der heilige Eddy (2009), Arjouni departed from his previously serious themes and wrote a lightweight contemporary picaresque. Peter Henning, a critic from the German newspaper Die Zeit, commented that it is a "German screwball prose with 246 floating slightly staged pages". His thriller novel Cherryman jagt Mr. White (2011) has an 18-year-old protagonist in rural Brandenburg who has to face brutal violence by young Nazis of his own village. To overcome his subdued feelings, he turns them into the cartoon adventures of hero "Cherryman" and gangster "Mr. White".