Nothing Is the Number When You Die

 Nothing Is the Number When You Die (1965) by Joan Fleming

Nuri bey, accidental detective (who helped find a murderer and a drug ring in his last book), is asked by his friend Torgut to leave Turkey and and go to London to look for his missing son, Jason. Jason is in his third year at Oxford and should be studying for his final examinations. He also should have come home during the last holiday--and didn't. Torgut is sure that something dreadful has happened to the young man. Nuri has never been to England and isn't sure that he's the right man for the job and insists he must think it over. After taking a very long and circuitous route home, he arrives to the news that Torgut has been brutally murdered...just moments after he and another friend, Landrake had left he house. 

Now, it is not Torgut begging his assistance, but Torgut's lovely half-Russian, half-English widow Tamara--a woman that Nuri has long adored from afar. Like the knights of old, it's possible that if Nuri is successful  that he will win the lady's love and it isn't long before she has convinced him to go. He hopes that the young man has just wanted to sow a few wild oats before finishing school and heading out into the "real world." But as soon as Nuri sets foot in England, he finds himself followed by a man he noticed on the plane. Amazingly, a brief scuffle with his shadow gives Nuri the upper hand and his investigations show ties between the shadow, Jason, and another trail of drugs....a trail that leads right back to Turkey and puts his lady in danger.

This is one of those titles that got put on my "To Be Found" list so long ago, that I can't remember how I came across it or what made me so interested in the first place. I suspect it was the mention of Oxford and the missing student (giving me an academic mystery vibe), but as I started reading it I really wasn't feeling the love for it as a mystery. Nuri bey is an interesting character (he loves books and I feel his pain when we're told that his house full of books burned down--at the end of the last mystery?), but he's most definitely not a gifted amateur detective. As mentioned above, he's an accidental detective. He wanders into situations or gets finagled into them by beautiful ladies. He seems to be awfully lucky in keeping out of the clutches of the bad guys. He somehow figures out the whole drug plot and even having read the book I can't tell you how he did it. I can tell you what the plot was--but I have no clue how Nuri was able to lay it all out based on what "we" found while looking for Jason. He also gets the answer to the murder of his friend Torgut--but not because he solves it, the culprit confesses to him. With no provocation whatsoever. And, honestly, Nuri didn't even need to know...he wasn't trying to solve the murder. He only wanted to find Jason (which he did) and return to Tamara to live happily every after (which it looks like he will...). ★★ and 1/2--all for Nuri's character and interactions with all the people in the book. But none for the book as a mystery.

First line: "...and I shall always remember you saying, my dear Nuri, after that historic occasion, only two years ago, when your house was burnt down and all of your books destroyed, that now you would study, not books, but the people amongst whom you lived."

Last line: "Can it be, can it be," Nuri bey asked with great shining eyes, "that it is, when 'all is said and done,' a woman's world?"
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Deaths = 4 (one natural; one shot; one explosion; one strangled)