From its inception in the first half of the nineteenth century—most scholars point to Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue of 1841 as the first story containing all the elements of the detective story—detective fiction has been a powerful tool for propaganda. A largely European construction (with some inspiration from the United States), detective fiction consistently presented positive images of detectives and police officers in general in an attempt to assuage public fears of the new police forces (Reitz, Detecting the Nation: Fictions of Detection and the Imperial Venture, 2004). Indigenous detective fiction in Turkey, beginning in 1912, also had significant propaganda value; the difference being that instead of building support for new police forces, Turkish detective fiction worked to present an image of an ideal Turk alongside concepts of Turkish nationalism. Following a difficult recovery period after a decade of wars and Mustafa Kemal’s moves to secularize the country in the 1920s, the 1930s saw the rise of what Soner Ça?aptay calls “High Kemalism” (1930-1938). That is, in effect, a period during which concepts of Turkishness received a great deal of political attention. Efforts were made to define the term “Turk” and to determine who could call himself a Turk. Ankara set down fairly clear criteria for the definition of Turk and, in its immigration and resettlement policies of the period and it set Turks apart for advantageous treatment (Ça?aptay, 2006). In this paper I will focus on the criteria, or character traits, one must have to be considered a Turk. Specifically, I will address this question with reference to a popular detective hero of the 1940s, Orhan Cak?ro?lu. Murat Akdo?an wrote more than thirty Orhan Cak?ro?lu detective stories between 1941 and 1945 and there is a great deal of intentionality in the elements of Orhan Cak?ro?lu’s character. In this paper I will compare these definitive character traits to those criteria that Ankara deemed necessary for Turkishness. In so doing, I will assess the level to which Orhan Cak?ro?lu was the prototypical Kemalist Turk.