In 1937, Halide Edib wrote her second detective novel, Kızıl Hançerler (The Red Daggers), following Yolpalas Cinayeti (Yolpalas Murder), which was first serialized in the Yedigün magazine and later published as a book. Kızıl Hançerler, Edib’s last work, was serialized in the Hayat magazine between January 23 and February 20, 1964. Edib’s lifelong interest in the detective genre began as a teenager by reading Sherlock Holmes stories, which continued throughout her life, and she followed American detective novels closely. Kızıl Hançerler, which was published by Şevket Rado after Edib’s death, has not been regarded as part of her works. This work tells the story of a young man who is interested in American gangster stories and his journey to become a gangster.

Almost thirty years have elapsed between these two hardboiled novels, and during this period, Edib moves from writing about a young girl who is known from the beginning and pushed by circumstances to commit murder, to writing about a gangster who turns out to be a murderer, and a psychopathic murderer at that. In this article, I will try to explain the reasons for Edib’s transition from writing about a girl who kills due to external circumstances, even to protect herself, to writing about a psychopathic killer, by examining the changing and unchanging elements in her work. In doing so, I will argue that her view of crime as a writer in 1930s Turkey, who writes from the outside looking in, and in 1960s Turkey, who writes from the inside looking out, are effective in creating these two types of protagonists. Further, I will argue that this transition affects her relationship with liberalism.

Halide Edib was living abroad during the years when Yolpalas Cinayeti was published. Before Yolpalas Cinayeti was published in Yedigün, one of the leading magazines of the period, with illustrations by Münif Fehim, the author wrote a series of articles about criminals and women’s prisons in England. After she died in 1964, the illustrations, made under the signature of Mihriban, accompany the Kızıl Hançerler serial published in Hayat magazine, which was not only one of the leading magazines of the period but also one of the most popular. America and Americanism play a dominant role in this work by a writer who looks from the inside out, and precisely because they play such an important role, the author turns the narrative of an innocent man propelled into crime by society in Yolpalas Cinayeti into the story of a psychopath who has been destabilized by the books he reads. Thus, she uses two different forms of the hardboiled genre. Both hardboiled novels emphasize the importance of society’s role in crime, but both evolve from the obvious crime featured in the first novel to the crime that has to hide itself in the second. In this evolution, it is clear that Edib, who talked about a liberalism that was closer to socialism in the late 1930s, embraced nationalist and conservative liberalism in the 1960s.

In Edib’s hardboiled novels, Yolpalas Cinayeti and Kızıl Hançerler the definition of crime is an important issue in the individual’s relationship with society and the law. In both works, it is the life of the society that drives the individuals, who are revealed as criminals, to commit murders. Both of them are pushed into crime because they are unable to abide by society’s rules. The inability of society to assimilate and absorb them has disrupted the harmony between individuals in society that brings together different elements. The tardiness of society’s realization of the deterioration of this harmony puts it in an untenable position vis-à-vis the individual. Therefore, in both novels, criminals are incarcerated in asylums instead of prisons. The asylum will tame not only their bodies but also their souls. In many of her works, Halide Edib emphasizes spiritual values in society, the solidarity of neighborhood life, and the traditionalism of this life. However, regarding crime, the supremacy of the law, which constitutes the essence of liberalism based on individual freedom, can only be possible in this way. Since the law is supreme, it not only punishes the individual but also undertakes the task of taming the individual. It decides the extent of this taming by considering material and moral aspects.

In parts of the fiction of Yolpalas Cinayeti and Kızıl Hançerler, multiple characters appear on stage and speak. In the first case, witnesses take the stand in a court scene and contribute to police reports; in the second case, news reports are made through the eyes of a journalist, with exaggerations mixed into these news and police reports. Different characters are accompanied by different narrative genres, turning the crime narrative into a polyphonic community narrative. Thus, with its thriller detective narrative that replaces the classical detective narrative, the plot leaves its importance to the stage and, in the case of Halide Edib, turns written and verbal communication between the members of society into a stage. In this way, the justice that will punish the criminal listens to individuals and does not close its ears to their voices.