Boris Akunin’s prose doesn’t tell you that The Winter Queen is set in 1876 Tsarist Russia, it takes you there. It slows you down to an era before telephones, when steel nibs were replacing goose quill pens; an era when the potential of electricity was being explored and advertisements for Lord Byron’s whalebone corsets for men (AN INCH-THIN WAIST AND YARD-WIDE SHOULDERS!) appeared on the front page of the Moscow Gazette. The language itself becomes part of the story, keeping the reader delightfully immersed in the world of the mid-nineteenth century.
And perhaps that is why the first sentence is the exception to the rule of minimalist openings:
On Monday the Thirteenth of May in the year 1876, between the hours of two and three in the afternoon on a day that combined the freshness of spring with the warmth of summer, numerous individuals in Moscow’s Alexander Gardens unexpectedly found themselves eyewitnesses to the perpetration of an outrage that flagrantly transgressed the bounds of common decency.
My immediate reaction upon reading this sentence, was to check the publication date to make sure that I was reading a book that had been published in 1998. My second reaction was an intense interest in what outrage had flagrantly transgressed the bounds of common decency.
Our hero, Erast Fandorin, is an orphan who lost his mother early in life and his father shortly before the novel opens. Before dying, his father gambles away the family fortune forcing Fandorin to leave the gymnasium and forgo university to take a job as a low ranking police department functionary.
(Fandorin is a Collegiate Registrar, fourteenth class. In 1722, Peter the Great had introduced a table of ranks, which is included in the book, delineating status and seniority amongst the different government services. As a Collegiate Registrar, fourteenth class, Fandorin has a rank equivalent to a Naval Ensign.)
Only three weeks on the job, his boss indulgently sends him to retrieve the suicide note of the young man who "flagrantly transgressed the bounds of common decency” by committing suicide in the Alexander Gardens. A student at Moscow University who was heir to millions, Pyotr Kokorin walked up to a young lady and her chaperone, declared his undying love for her, put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger.
But that was not the only strange incident to occur in Moscow on that day, and from his desk at the Criminal Investigative Division, Fandorin suspected something more complicated was happening. Stretching the approval he got from his boss for his errand, he begins investigating what appears to be an outbreak of suicide attempts.
Following the clues left by the dead student Fandorin stumbles upon a salon conducted by a beautiful mysterious woman, Amalia, whom he describes as a Cleopatra. Amongst her many admirers, was the suicide, Kokorin, and his friend and fellow student, Akhtyrtsev, and "an officer of the hussars, a well-set-up young fellow with a slight slant to his eyes and a smile that was all white teeth and black mustache" named Count Zurov.
Leaving the salon, Erast falls in with Akhtyrtsev who, over drinks in a seedy bar, provides information about the suicide of Kokorin during a game of American Roulette.
This being Boris Akunin's world, it is called American Roulette until the actions of his characters cause it to be renamed:
Kokorin had read somewhere about American roulette and he liked the idea. He said, ‘Because of you and me, Kolya, they’ll rename it Russian roulette—just you wait and see.’
When Akhtyrtsev is murdered and Fandorin injured, as they are leaving the "iniquitous establishment" the investigation is taken over by a State Counselor, Ivan Brilling from St. Petersburg, who dazzles Fandorin with a display of deductive reasoning reminiscent of Sherlock Holmes; "It's the deductive method, my dear Fandorin."
Under new leadership the investigation picks up speed and the suspect pool increases, leading Fandorin on a race across Europe to England.
Beautifully written, with a plot that Ian Fleming or Robert Ludlum would admire, The Winter Queen is loaded with almost mischievous literary references and sly humor.
According to RT News (a Russian news broadcasting company) Russiapedia, Boris Akunin was born, Grigory Chkhartishvili, in 1956 in Georgia to a military father and a mother who taught literature and Russian language. The family moved to Moscow when he was only two years old. He grew up in the city and lives there today.
After high school Grigory entered the History and Philology Department of the Institute of Asian and African Studies of Moscow State University. He was fascinated with Japan, so chose it as the country of his study.
After obtaining his degree, Grigory did literary translations from Japanese and English - Ukio Misima, Malcolm Bradbury, Kobo Abe, Peter Ustinov and others. He also published his essays in the Foreign Literature Journal and went on to become its deputy editor-in-chief.
One of his major projects at that time was the translation and publication of the 20-volume “Anthology of Japanese Literature” in Russian. He also oversaw a major project under the Soros Fund – the Pushkin Library. He was the chairman of the board and also helped compile a 100-volume edition of the best works of Russian Literature of all time.
In 2009 he received the Order of the Rising Sun from Japan in recognition of "his contribution to the development of Russian - Japanese cultural ties.”
After the fall of the Soviet Union, Grigory turned to filling what he felt was a gap in Russian reading material. There simply was no decent, entertaining fiction. There were political exposés, of course, and the classics, which had always been available, even under the Communist regime. But well written fiction for pleasure reading was practically non-existent. He set about to change that, taking the name Boris Akunin (Japanese for evil man or villain) and writing about a young man who solved crimes in Imperialist Russia.
The Winter Queen is the first in that series, and was short listed for the 2003 Gold Dagger Award by the British Crime Writers Association. In 2000 he won the Antibooker Prize for a later novel in the series (which now stands at over a dozen) and was named the Russian Writer of the Year. Three of his novels have been made into big budget movies in Russia and an English version of The Winter Queen starring Milla Jovovitch is currently in pre-production. (In fairness, it has been in pre-production since 2007 so I’m not sure how soon it will be coming to a theater near you.)
In May of 2006, Boris Akunin sat down with a reporter from San Diego Reader and answered some questions about his work. There was a question about the translator, Andrew Bromfield. This book reads so smoothly ("smooth as liquid," according to the journalist) it was hard to believe that it was written by anyone whose first language wasn't English.
Boris Akunin leans back on the couch. "I was very cautious about my English translator. I didn't want to sell my books to an English language market for a long, long time. [They were among] the last countries where I sold translation rights. There were several translators who wanted to do the job. Andrew Bromfield, from England, was by far the best. He feels the style. He has just the right professional background, because he has translated both Leo Tolstoy and Viktor Pelevin, who is sort of Irvine Welsh."
...
"Why sixteen books in the Fandorin series?"
"For two reasons. One is that I counted 16 subgenres of crime novel. And each of my Fandorin books represents a different subgenre. Another is that I counted 16 types of human character[s] in the world. And each of those books is addressing one of those [psychological] types."
When I read that last paragraph my eyes lit up and my heart did a little pitter patter. What would be more perfect for a series on murder mysteries than a series that includes 16 subgenres of mysteries? Admittedly, I haven't yet discovered which 16 sub genres Akunin is referring to, but the title of the second book in the series is The Turkish Gambit and is clearly a spy mystery. The third in the series is Murder on the Leviathan which has to be an Agatha Christie type cozy.
I think it likely that Erast Fandorin will make future appearances in the Monday Murder Mystery series.
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