The Turkish Detective, a series based on Barbara Nadel’s bestselling novels, is both familiar and delightfully other. Set in Istanbul, it brings the heady scent of cumin, cardamom, fresh mint and tobacco deep into your sitting room, leaving you itchy for travel or (budgets being as they are) perhaps a visit to your local ocakbasi. At home, our hero, the outwardly shambolic Inspector Cetin Ikmen (Haluk Bilginer) eats – not a lonely sandwich straight out of a chiller cabinet, but delicious home-cooked food with his lovely wife and children. But even down at the nick, which is overrun with cats, you’ll find no vending machine; little glasses of sweet tea are delivered to suspects personally by the coppers on tiny trays. The traffic is chaos. Religion is all around. Manners are highly important, but also complicated: a language it takes a whole lifetime to learn.
So, that’s the other. In other ways, though, this is a straightforward police procedural. If Ikmen is old school, reluctant to do things by the book, he’s also wily and knowing – and you’ll recognise his team, too. Ayse (Yasemin Kay Allen) is there to roll her eyes at sexist men, of which there are plenty in Istanbul; Tarik (Erol Afsin) is a nerd who can break into any phone, hack any computer; and Suleyman (Ethan Kai) is a fish-out-of-water newbie freshly landed from London, a former Met officer who cannot get the measure of Turkish policing, which seems to him haphazard and highly irregular.
Content from our partners
