The Page 69 Test: "Istanbul Crossing"

From a young age, Timothy Jay Smith developed a ceaseless wanderlust that has taken him around the world many times. En route, he’s found the characters that

people his work. Polish cops and Greek fishermen, mercenaries and arms dealers, child prostitutes and wannabe terrorists, Indian Chiefs and Indian tailors: he hung with them all in an unparalleled international career that had him smuggle banned plays from behind the Iron Curtain, maneuver through Occupied Territories, and stowaway aboard a ‘devil’s barge’ for a three-day crossing from Cape Verde that landed him in an African jail.

Smith has won top honors for his novels, screenplays and stage plays in numerous prestigious competitions. Fire on the Island won the Gold Medal in the Faulkner-Wisdom Competition for the Novel, and his screenplay adaptation of it was named Best Indie Script by WriteMovies. Another novel, The Fourth Courier, was a finalist for Best Gay Mystery in the 2020 Lambda Literary Awards. Previously, he won the Paris Prize for Fiction (now the de Groot Prize) for his novel, Checkpoint (later published as A Vision of Angels). Kirkus Reviews called Cooper’s Promise “literary dynamite” and selected it as one of the Best Books of 2012.

Smith applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, Istanbul Crossing, and reported the following:

From page 69:
In the dead air of the hallway, that morning’s characteristic stratification of odors was permeated by something appetizingly fried, causing Ahdaf ’s empty stomach to growl all the way to the next corner. He bought a simit – a large thin bagel covered with sesame seeds – and ate it on his way to the tram stop.

The stop was mobbed. Like everyone, he used his shoulders to wedge his way closer to the turnstiles, where people backed up because half the time their tickets didn’t work on the first swipe. Passengers pressed against him on all sides. Remembering to be wary of pickpockets, he slapped his hand against his back pocket and felt someone’s hand quickly jerk away. He whipped around. Who’d it been? No one looked guilty. Then he saw the girl leaning against her mother’s knees, maybe five years old and staring at him.

“I’m sorry,” her mother said. “She lost her balance.”

He transferred his wallet to a front pocket and kept his hand on it.

The platform was so crowded that people had to stand in the demarcated danger zone at the edge of it. It made Ahdaf nervous, the possibility that someone might knock him onto the tracks, and he let the crowd push forward around him as a tram approached. When its doors opened, a brief melee ensued as passengers pushed their way off while others pushed their way on. He was the last on before the doors closed, grazing his shoulders.

Getting off at the docks, he headed for the newsstand, assuming Selim would look for him there. The dozen or so newspapers clipped to wires all headlined the bombing of the nightclub in Athens. From what Ahdaf could read above the fold, most described the nightclub as trendy and popular with gays, but the right-wing press applauded the attack on queers and their perverted lifestyle.

“Excuse me,” he heard.

Selim reached around him for the top newspaper in one of the stacks. “My boat leaves in five minutes. Maybe I’ll see you on board.”
It’s amazing how much of my story is inferred, reinforced or foreshadowed on page 69.

Ahdaf’s hungry, and lives in a building where the air is ‘dead’ in the hallway. So he’s poor.

He goes to catch a tram on a platform that’s mobbed, and he’s afraid of being pushed onto the tracks. A child tries to pickpocket him. So there’s a sense of threats coming from anywhere and any kind.

He goes to the ferry docks and heads for the newsstand, where someone named Selim will likely look for him. It’s obviously a planned encounter and where to meet has been left to habit. While waiting for Selim, Ahdaf reads the headlines about a terrorist attack on a gay nightclub in Athens that will ripple through the rest of the story.

Selim arrives and reaches around Ahdaf for a newspaper. Pretending he doesn’t know Ahdaf, he apologizes, explaining he has a ferry to catch. Maybe he’ll see Ahdaf on board?

Immediately, there’s a sense of mystery about the relationship between Ahdaf and Selim which isn’t fully resolved until the novel’s last page.

Istanbul Crossing is a coming-of-age gay literary thriller. After watching his cousin’s execution by ISIS for being homosexual, he flees to Istanbul for safety where he survives by smuggling other refugees to Greece. Eventually he’s approached by both the CIA and ISIS to smuggle high-profile individuals in both directions between Turkey and Greece. In the process of juggling their two operations, he falls in love with, and must decide between, two men who offer very different futures.