Boris Akunin, The Winter Queen (Random House, 2003)
Boris Akunin, Murder on the Leviathan (Random House, 2004)
Boris Akunin, The Turkish Gambit (Random House, 2005)
Boris Akunin, The Death of Achilles (Random House, 2006)
I must have initially seen copies of The Turkish Gambit on the new book table at Borders a couple of years ago. A historical mystery translated from Russian? Of course I was interested. Although we requested a review copy from the publisher, it never arrived. Eventually we acquired it -- and the other three books in the series that are currently available in English -- through other means. (All translated by Andrew Bromfield.) When you write for the Green Man, you always have options for acquiring goodies. . . .
These four books are part of a series about a young Russian detective named Erast Fandorin. Akunin's dustjacket biosketch indicates that there are eleven novels to date in this particular series. It looks like the rest haven't been translated into English. The very same biosketch admits that Akunin has also written novels in two other series. According to Wikipedia, the other series are known as the Adventures of Sister Pelagia and the Adventures of the Master. This source also reveals that Akunin's pen name has several meanings reflecting the author's interests in Japanese culture (akunin means 'villain' in Japanese), anarchy (Mikhail Bakunin) and the Acmeist poet Anna Akhmatova (far more difficult to explain!). Under his birth name of Grigory Chkhartishvili, Akunin is a writer, editor and translator of Japanese literature.
Like most mystery novels, each of the Fandorins is relatively short, varying in length from just over 200 (the first three) to just over 300 pages (the last one). They follow a chronological order, starting with The Winter Queen, which introduces Fandorin and gives about as much of his personal history as you are ever likely to see again. That one starts in 1876, when our intrepid hero is a fresh and innocent youngster not yet twenty years old. In terms of this timeline, the next novel in the series is The Turkish Gambit, which picks up the following year and makes explicit reference to events that took place during one of the many Russo-Turkish Wars. Murder on the Leviathan takes place in 1878, while The Death of Achilles leaps ahead to 1882.
In The Winter Queen, the reader meets the young Fandorin, orphan son of a father prone to making really bad investments, employed as a low-level clerk in the Criminal Investigation Division of the Moscow Police Department. The book contains a table of civil and military ranks in Imperial Russia, which helps to establish the reality of Fandorin's place in the pecking order. Although Fandorin's formal education came to a halt prematurely due to his father's lack of financial resources, the young man is meticulous, well-mannered and highly literate. He also seems to have a knack for learning foreign languages. His kind-hearted supervisor, Xavier Grushin, dispatches his young assistant to gather intelligence on an apparent suicide reported on the city pages of the Moscow Gazette. Fandorin finds the death, the suicide note, and the decedent's will all quite suspicious, and dashes off into an investigation that is only partly sanctioned by the Department. This work leads him around various parts of Moscow (love those street names) and all the way across Europe to England -- the book's title in English refers to a rather seedy London hotel that figures in the plot. Interestingly enough, the Russian title is Azazel (in Cyrillic, of course), in reference to a very strange conspiracy that Fandorin uncovers during his travels. Fandorin also discovers that many of the people he encounters are not what they appear to be: thus begins his loss of innocence and the commencement of his career as an inscrutable investigator of strange cases.
I will be the first to admit that I did not enjoy the two middle books -- The Turkish Gambit and Murder on the Leviathan -- nearly as much as the first and last books in the series. They both take place in locations away from Mother Russia, the first somewhere on the Bulgarian front, the second on a steamship headed from Cairo to Calcutta. I think that was part of my difficulty with them: I like urban detective stories in large part for their grounding in interesting cityscapes, and these two weren't grounded in that way. But they also weren't terribly grounded in Fandorin's consciousness.
In the first, The Turkish Gambit, the viewpoint is that of a young woman, Varya Suvorova, who comes to the military encampment in search of her comrade and fiancé Pyotr Yablokov, and never quite figures out who Fandorin is or what he is doing there. Her difficulties with him made it hard for me to feel connected to him (and he is never a very easy character to understand or even to like). I also had much more trouble keeping track of the plot twists in this novel, a trait I found quite charming in The Winter Queen.
As the title suggests, Murder on the Leviathan is a take-off on Agatha Christie's well-known Murder on the Orient Express. Although I have seen two film versions of this tale and have certainly done a bit of reading about Christie herself (see my review of The 8:55 to Baghdad), I have never read the novel and so am not able to render any systematic comparison. Again, my greatest difficulty with this piece of the Fandorin saga is the lack of direct connection to him. We always see him through the eyes of the other passengers on the steamship, among them a Parisian police commissioner, Gustave Gauche (what a name!) on the trail of a mass murderer suspected of being on board the ship. In this novel, Fandorin presents himself as a Russian diplomat on his way to Japan. None of the passengers has a clue that he is really a police officer, in fact, a titular counselor, having risen through the ranks during The Winter Queen investigation (titular counselor is five civil service ranks higher than the title he held at the start of that novel).
Akunin finally reverts to his earlier masterful story-telling with The Death of Achilles. Fandorin returns to Moscow, and at least three of the characters in this novel made their initial appearances in earlier novels. One of the challenges in reading these is managing the long and unfamiliar Russian names, and that combined with the constant introduction of new characters is almost too much to handle. As I mentioned earlier in this review, The Death of Achilles takes place about four years after Murder on the Leviathan. Fandorin has spent those years in Japan, working at the Russian embassy. While in Japan, he appears to have solved at least a few other cases. These must have taken place in the books that haven't been translated into English. Also during the Japan sojourn, he acquired a trusty sidekick, Masa, learned to speak Japanese (of necessity, since Masa speaks no Russian) and picked up a few rather arcane practices of dubious Oriental origin (Edward Said will forgive me for using that word!), such as bathing in icewater.
Almost immediately upon his arrival in Moscow, Fandorin learns with delight that one of his comrades from The Turkish Gambit, General Michel Sobolev, is staying at the same hotel, then discovers that the famous general (the Achilles of the book's title) has died under mysterious circumstances. Without further ado, Fandorin dives into the investigation, only partly under the auspices of his new position as Deputy for Special Assignments to Prince Dolgorukoi, an aging, but still highly influential, Moscow leader. As usual, Fandorin's investigations get him into trouble with the authorities because the murder is really part of a conspiracy that involves some very important players. He has a chance to work again with his old supervisor, Xavier Grushin, and gets to demonstrate how his Oriental arts -- and his sidekick -- serve him in good stead as he hurtles from one close call to another.
I mentioned earlier that The Death of Achilles runs about one hundred pages longer than the other three novels in the Fandorin series. There's a very simple explanation for this: those extra pages comprise a detailed and entertaining biography of the story's 'bad guy', a very intriguing fellow whose real name is Achimas Welde. By the time I finished reading his story, whose telling dovetails nicely with events that form the climax of this novel and the resolution of the mystery, I was feeling pretty kindly toward Achimas, which made the ending somewhat less satisfying than I might have expected.
By no means serious literature, these are decent historical detective stories. The hero remains a bit more of a cipher than I would like, and has some annoying habits, like a persistent stutter that shows up in most of his spoken lines as e-e-extra l-l-leading l-l-letters on his words. The settings are interesting (especially those located in Moscow), the plots well-turned in at least the first and final installments, the side characters sufficiently well developed. I can also say this-the resolutions kept me guessing, often right to the last few pages. That's what a good mystery is supposed to do, right?
