Creating Constantinople: Influences on a Victorian Novel

I started writing novels at a very early age. I was twelve when I wrote my first novel (a crime-thriller told from multiple perspectives in seedy LA), and fourteen when I wrote my second (an epic revenge Western)! Growing up in leafy Golders Green, novels were an escape from normal life – and that escapist urge still motivates my writing to this day.

Murder in Constantinople follows Ben Canaan, a troublesome 21-year-old in the East End of London in 1854. When we meet Ben, he is torn between a life of petty crime under the wing of a dockland gangster, and following his father’s footsteps as a tailor in the family workshop. But an affair with a beautiful stranger and a theft gone wrong results in Ben going on the run to Constantinople: capital of the Ottoman Empire on the eve of the Crimean War. Ben quickly finds himself caught in the crosshairs of a deadly serial killer terrorising the city, and must unravel a series of brutal murders in order to survive.

Murder in Constantinople began life when I graduated as an English student at Cambridge. My literary passions were the Russian giants of the nineteenth century – Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev – as well as specialists in serialised storytelling including Dickens and Henry James. I particularly loved the Bildungsroman genre: coming-of-age stories such as David Copperfield and Great Expectations, focused on the personal growth of the protagonist from youth to adulthood. 

I wanted to bring this type of storytelling to the detective genre. Our hero Ben is not a detective when we meet him, but over the course of the story, he becomes one. This explodes the conventional trope of detective novels: usually, we meet the detective once he already has his bag of tricks, his modus operandi, his view of the world (think Sherlock or Poirot). But in Murder in Constantinople, we see Ben start to fill his bag of tricks – we are watching the formation of a detective in real time.

The nineteenth century fascinated me not just because of my literary influences, but also because of my family history. Similar to the Canaan family of my novel, my ancestors were Jews who fled to London from Vienna in the mid-nineteenth century, setting up shop as milliners in the Jewish ghetto of London’s East End. I wanted to explore what it must have been like growing up in that world as an immigrant, but told from the perspective of a young man with my mindset: wanting to break free from these confines and chart his own course.

Ben, like many children of immigrant families, is saddled with his family’s rigid expectations – especially his father, who demands that he joins the family business. For Ben, the alternatives are stark: either he fully embraces life in London’s criminal underworld, or he embarks on an unexpected adventure into a warzone. Murder in Constantinople tells the story of how Ben makes this choice, and in the process finds his calling.

A major theme of Murder in Constantinople is colonialism and its legacy. Ben’s adventures are set against the backdrop of colonial conflicts, allowing us to see colonialism at work – its perpetrators, its winners and losers, the roots of modern conflicts, and how the practices of colonialism persist even today in a post-colonial age. 

The Crimean War is a powerful example of this which still resonates today. In the 1850s, Crimea was the epicentre of a violent clash between the Russian Empire and the empires of Europe. And now, in the 21^stcentury, that same region is the focal point for another violent clash between the “modern empires” of the Global East and the Global West.

A significant part of my research was devoted to understanding Constantinople, the location of modern-day Istanbul, as it existed in the 1850s. To do this, I read travel books from the 19^th century – old Baedekers and Murray’s Handbooks – to develop a nuanced sense of life in all its facets: the city’s topography, its rich array of languages, peoples and cultures, its architecture, its political hierarchies, its local economy, its laws. The goal was to portray Constantinople not as a place in history, but as a place that feels as present for readers as it is for the characters inhabiting it.

Murder in Constantinople is the first in a planned series of five novels, each exploring Ben’s adventures as a globe-trotting detective. I am currently writing the second book in the series – titled Death on the Pearl River, also for Pushkin Press – which takes an older Ben into even darker territory. The Ben Canaan Mysteries will chart the course of Ben’s entire life over several decades. So, on some level, these detective novels taken together will be a biography both of Ben and the century he lived in, as much as a series of crimes to be solved.

Murder in Constantinople by A E Goldin (Pushkin Press) Out Now. London, 1854. Twenty-one-year-old Ben Canaan attracts trouble wherever he goes. His father wants him to be a good Jewish son, working for the family business on Whitechapel Road, but Ben and his friends, the 'Good-for-Nothings', just want adventure. Then the discovery of an enigmatic letter and a photograph of a beautiful woman offer an escapade more dangerous than anything he'd imagined. Suddenly Ben is thrown into a mystery that takes him all the way to Constantinople, the jewel of an empire and the centre of a world on the brink of war. His only clue is three words: 'The White Death'. Now he must find what links a string of grisly murders, following a trail through king making and conspiracy, poison and high politics, bloodshed and betrayal. In a city of deadly secrets, no one is safe - and one wrong step could cost Ben his life.

More information about Aron and his work can be found on his website. You can also follow him on X @A.E.Goldin and on Instagram @a.e.goldin and also on Facebook.