One of the joys of Euro crime is the sense of visiting a specific place and being told a tale in a language unique to that place. Henning Mankell is now so clearly Swedish, MV Montalban Catalunyan and Fred Vargas French, so much so you couldn’t transpose the writing style of any from one location to another.

Disappointing then that Happy Birthday, Turk!, the first novel in Jakob Arjouni’s Frankfurt-based series featuring Turkish PI Kemal Kayankaya, should seek to pay such homage to hard-boiled US pulp of the 30s, 40s and 50s. This is perhaps not quite so surprising given the Kayankaya series arrives courtesy of the good people at No Exit Press, fine purveyors of all things noirish and hard-boiled.

Happy Birthday, Turk! was first published in 1989 and is the opening novel of a series featuring the Turkish-born investigator. In it Kemal Kayankaya is hired to find the killer of a Turkish worker stabbed to death in Frankfurt’s red-light district. During the course of a not particularly intellectually challenging investigation, KK finds time to be beaten up, be gassed, beat other people, have a gun pulled on him, pull the same gun on some one, come close to being run over, uncover a heroin ring, become involved with a prostitute and expose a little police corruption. And the murder itself. None of which is bad for three days work.

The harsh unattractiveness of the Frankfurt setting and the residual background racism towards Frankfurt’s Turkish community creates a suitably bleak backdrop to the action. KK himself is an identikit shabby PI, a wise-cracking, hard-drinking, hard-womanising scruffy rogue. There’s no sense of crusade, no sense of doing good, just someone getting by on the mean streets of the city. On the one hand it’s all classic hard-boiled noir but on the other, it’s nothing we haven’t seen a hundred times before.

Yet for all it’s cliched elements Happy Birthday, Turk! is superior pulp. It remains seedy, pacy, gritty and in the end is a pretty enjoyable, if perhaps unmemorable, read.

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