The Notorious Beyoglu Affair: A dark humor thriller about gay marriage challenges in Istanbul

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The present detective story might be considered by few stern critics as an extreme case where an author’s imagination seems derailed like an express train traveling from Sodom to Gomorrah. However, the origin of all the evil deeds that followed, namely an innocent kiss exchanged between two men in the infamous Istanbul district of Beyoglu, is a true event even though its sequences are fictitious to a great extent. Nevertheless, the entire script is not a figment of the author’s galloping imagination, but a patchwork of real but unrelated events, like clandestine affairs, divorces, celebrity marriages, DVD leaks, etc., popping up from time to time in celebrity news worldwide to intrigue the imagination of the average reader by the tantalizing question how extremely affluent celebrities spend their time, and what the average Joe is missing. In this context, the eternal question which portion of widely accepted history is real and what a myth created by imaginative historians or the news media that have great financial interests in thrilling their readers, remains still unanswered and only blind faith of a fan to his idol can provide easily digestible answers.
The location of the present drama is Istanbul, a natural setup between Asia and Europe where myths and facts create the most interesting meals as tasty as the ones created by the world renowned Ottoman cuisine. This particular choice of surroundings is also based on the assumption that truly new ideas are born not in the desert, in a cave, or an isolated monastery, but in great cities where there are healthy population increases, since new ideas are born by interactions, spin-offs or cloning, and not via microwave warming precooked freeze-dried recipes.
For one more time in its rich history Istanbul is such a place these days, struggling hard to answer a fundamental question: “Is running after progress a worthwhile cause for a developing nation, or sticking to traditional values contained in a single book is the safest way a nation may achieve long-lasting prosperity?”
In several districts of this ancient city the traditional values of an Islamic society are enforced, and in others the so-called “Modern” European suggestions are tested by “progressive” social groups. Among them Beyoglu is the more notorious area, and deep in its heart, Taksim Square, is the more famous meeting place in the Eternal City along with the ancient Sultanahmet Meidan reserved mainly for tourists. It is the place where most demonstrations of civil rights or acts of terrorism usually occur. Historically Beyoglu is a district the Romans called Galata that got its new name from the “son of a Bey”, a Venetian nobleman who had his residence there as his more famous father of the Doge Gritti family became the ambassador of Venice in the Ottoman Empire during the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent. This notable Venetian offspring of supposedly exquisite appearance had a turbulent career becoming eventually the governor of the vassal state of Romania. However, in the end he was executed by Suleiman the Magnificent allegedly because of financial misconducts.
To intensify the sense of reality the author has included in the text true pictures of real people digitally processed to hide their identity and personal data, but at the same time provide outlines of objects suitable for reminiscences or fantasies. The Chinese say a picture is worth a thousand words, but the use of high definition digital photography has produced images much more extensive than a thousand words and in some cases a picture occupies in computer memory the data volume of an entire book and not merely one thousand words.To demonstrate this Photoshop filtering technique which the author has applied also to a certain extent in the text, a night picture of the famous Galata Tower has been chosen as the book's cover, leaving free the imagination