The First of Boris Akunin's Erast Fandorin Mysteries: "The Winter Queen"

Boris Akunin (the pen name of Grigori Shalvovich Chkhartishvili, who was born in the Republic of Georgia in 1956) translated Japanese literature into Russian for a living before launching a far more profitable career writing multiple series of detective fiction. By the time the first one (The Winter Queen, published in Russian in 1998 in Azazel) made it into English (2003), his books had sold more than three million copies in Russian. Given his prolificness, it would not surprise me if the number has doubled by now,

Being generally more interested in the Ottoman than in the Romanoff Empire, the first Akunin book I read was The Turkish Gambit, the second in the series chronologically, but third published, set against the backdrop of Turco-Russian war, ca. 1877. I enjoyed it and have been mired in 19^th0century Russian dissidents (Tom Stoppard's Coast of Utopia driving me to Isaiah Berlin's Russian Thinkers) and went back to the first Erast Fandorin book, The Winter Queen.

The book opens on 13 May 1876 with a very rich young landowner speaking to a pretty girl, then shooting himself in front of her. The very junior police inspector, Erast Fandorin, just of out university, connects the mysterious suicide to a set of other instances of what we call "Russian roulette" (and the Russians in the book call "American roulette," tracing its origins to California gold country), and from there to a Elizaveta, the queen of a salon (akin to the one in Maupassant's Alien Hearts). Both the dead youth and another who was "playing" with him are in thrall to Elizaveta, and Erast Fandorin is smitten by her, too.

Soon, Fandorin is in trouble with her seeming favorite, Count Zurov. The plot continues to thicken, if that metaphor can be sustained for so brisk a narrative. Although The Winter Queen has (to date) ten sequels, and is projected by the author eventually to have fifteen, it seems to me that Fandorin used up at least six lives in the first book, so he must have far surpassed the proverbial nine lives of a cat by now. Some of his escapes from death strain my ability to suspend disbelief. He is smart, but also very, very lucky. Being lucky is ostensibly a family trait that skips a generation... and is not shared in marriage.

Fandorin travels to London, where the Winter Queen is, via Vienna, Stuttgart, and Paris. In addition to his native Russian, he fluently speaks French, English, German, and Japanese.

I don't want to spoil the many surprises of the novel, which seems to me more a spy narrative than a detective story. I guess it is difficult to distinguish spies and detectives in the Czarist secret police in an earlier war on terrorism by the exceedingly autocratic regimes of Nicholas I (1825-55) and Alexander II (1855-81) following the crushing of the Decembrist revolt in 1825.* Anarchists are the villains for the Third Section (of the czar's chancery; "Tretiye Otdeleniye" in Russian), for whom Fandorin works. Could the subversives have infiltrated it it is charged with searching for and seizing? That is one of the questions that Fandorin has to ask himself as he matures over the (very dangerous to him) course of The Winter Queen.

The chapter titles and various locutions (our hero, for instance, mimic 19^th-century fiction, but the pace of the novel is not like 19^th-century novels. And there is a lot more action than in Sherlock Holmes Stories, Fandorin has a boss to deduce to rather than a Dr. Watson, but is no less given to systematically thinking through matters that escape the attention of others than the opium addict of Baker Street. And Fandorin is far more an action hero than Holmes, at least in his first outing. (I remember being him more omniscient and less physical in The Turkish Gambit, but he proved himself in the complex case of Azazel.)

The novel has been filmed in Russian. A version in English to be directed by Paul Verhoeven was delayed by the pregnancy of Milla Jovovich, but is apparently going to be filmed soon (in Vancouver).

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Berlin wrote that Nicholas I "saw himself as the ruler appointed by Providence to save his people from the horrors of atheism, liberalism, and revolution, and being an absolute autocrat in fact as well as in name, he made it the first aim of his government to elimiante every form of political hterodoxy or opposition." The failed European revolution(s) of 1848 led to a renewed resolve to crush any independent thought in the bud.