You might fear that a 1960s middle-class English writer setting a novel in Istanbul would be prone to the worst kind of exoticising description of the city, the people, the religion, even the stray cats. In this case, you'd be absolutely right.

It's an interesting question whether Joan Fleming ever visited Istanbul (actually, it's not, but let's pretend). The case against: everything said about the city (etc) is said in a plodding, didactic manner that suggests diligent book-learning being recited. The case for: everything said about everything is said in a plodding didactic manner. We can't get through a description of a character building a rockery without a little digression on the formation of basalt. The dialogue is similarly appalling. You'd think it was an insulting characterisation of Turkish people to make them all so windy and stiff, were it not for the fact that the English characters are also so windy and stiff.

So that's the setting, the style, the writing. Is there something in the characters? Well, the principal villain is a one-time member of the Sultan's harem (I kid you not) sunk into old-age avarice, bitterness, and vanity. She gets angry a lot. She cackles. She is called Madame Miasma (again, I kid you not). She is attended in her schemes by a eunuch, also from the harem, who is secretly in love with her (once more, or perhaps twice more I kid you not). I will not describe the other characters.

Oh, the plot? It's barely there, and the few elements it has are laid out in front of us over and again: foreshadowed, occurrent, recalled. It's hard to tell what the central mystery, suspense, or drama is even meant to be.

All in all: a stinker. Hard to see what the 1962 prize-givers saw in it; remarkable to see that an Ambler novel came second to it; dismaying to see that there's more Fleming coming up in 1970. Perhaps she spent the decade learning how to write. But let's not worry about the far future now, because it's 1963 next, and this one is a stone-cold classic.

Each year's prize is no doubt influenced by the year before's, but more than influence, there's a faint sense of actual trolling here. The 1960 winner involved faked industrial espionage, rendered airily and unconvincingly; the 1961 winner involves real industrial espionage, rendered in convincing, concrete detail. I learnt a lot more about pottery than I had expected, and ended the book with a faint desire to buy fine china. The espionage strand of the plot is woven with with a murder strand, with the relation between the two unclear for a fair part of the book. Both strands are of fine quality, resolved satisfyingly. Characters are well-written, often identifiably human, not just contrivances of the plot. The Staffordshire setting is terrific. The final few pages are really excellent, downbeat in a very unexpected and very welcome way.

So all in all, you can see why the novel won an award, and it's got a lot going for it. But the accolades in the introduction to my copy—"masterpiece", "one of the finest British stories about a private investigator"—strike me as rather hyperbolic.

The first point of demerit is the writing, which has a tendency towards the purple and some peculiar passages in which the author seems to exhaustively test out a stylistic device---for example, three pages where five of or eight paragraphs begin with a single-word sentence. The narration is first-person, and I suppose one could attribute all this to the clever capture of a slightly pretentious voice, but I rather think that the author quite likes their narrator, and reckons the prose does him a favour. I'm not sure it does.

The second point of demerit is the relentless appraisal of women's appearances, by the narrator, other men, and other women. It's not just that they're all evaluating looks all the time; it's also that they're all drawing ridiculous inferences from appearance to character. There's even a bit of meta-judging, where the narrator makes judgements of some other men's characters on the basis of their judgements of women's appearances (and whether their judgements accord with his). I suppose this again could be very clever writing: a woman accurately capturing the way in which male gazes imposed verdicts on women in that time and that place, in the cause of undermining the power of that gaze. I don't much doubt the accuracy of the description, but I do doubt the emancipatory intention; again, the author seems to like the narrator, and it's the narrator whose judgements we hear about most often, in most detail. Also, women get blamed for a lot of things in this book. Really a lot.

All in all, I think this one is excellent if you're prepared to credit the author with a sophisticated dislike of the narrator, and fairly good if you're not. I'm not.