SOURCE: Davis, Dick. “Murder and Joy.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 5136 (7 September 2001): 6.

In the following review, Davis commends My Name Is Red for transcending the “conventional limitations” of the mystery genre and creating a rich narrative that draws from both Eastern and Western cultural traditions.

To say that Orhan Pamuk's new novel, My Name Is Red, is a murder mystery is like saying that Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov is a murder mystery: it is true, but the work so richly transcends the conventional limitations of the genre as to make the definition seem almost irrelevant.

We are in Istanbul in the 1590s, and the main characters belong to an atelier of miniaturists commissioned to produce a masterwork for the Sultan. Populist religious preachers are stirring up sentiment against the whole concept of representational art (traditionally regarded with great suspicion in Islam), and the world of the artists themselves is...