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From Russia with love
Boris Akunin’s tasty whodunits
BY CLEA SIMON
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When 1998’s The Winter Queen was finally published in English translation last year, American readers got a glimpse of why Boris Akunin has become a bestseller in his original Russian. A stylish historical with a gaspingly good finale, The Winter Queen outdid many of its British Isle predecessors, drawing heavily on Arthur Conan Doyle–style basics to set an innocent young diplomat, Erast Fandorin, against a villainous conspiracy in 19th-century Moscow, armed primarily with his native smarts and acute observational skills. The backstory that Akunin (a pseudonym for Grigory Chkhartishvili, an academic and literary critic from Georgia) had started writing mysteries only to offer his whodunit-addicted wife a better class of reading material made his success at the genre the more poignant: neither Caleb Carr nor Anne Perry has been so sharp in years. As the title hints, in this second translated outing, Akunin tips his very stylish hat to Agatha Christie. Like her Murder on the Orient Express, his Murder on the Leviathan abounds in suspicious characters, all rather badly hiding some secret or other, all more or less trapped together as passengers on a long voyage, in this case a cruise from Southampton to Calcutta. Because of a very particular clue left behind — a gold badge signifying first-class passage on the Leviathan — we know that one of them is fleeing the scene of a murder: the rather bloody dispatching of Lord Littleby, a collector of Indian antiquities, and the cool ancillary killing of his entire Parisian household staff. The book opens with an entry from the notebook of French police commissioner Gustave Gauche, who believes he is hot on the trail of the killer. But as soon as a mysterious Russian passenger — Fandorin, of course — boards the ship in Cairo, we can tell who the real (if amateur) detective will be. As he progresses, overturning Gauche’s reasonable hypotheses and the motley group’s alibis, we are drawn in the old-fashioned way, clue by clue, body by body, until a series of dénouements reveals all. Murder on the Leviathan (translated, like its predecessor, by Andrew Bromfield) is a solid take on a classic genre, and if it’s not as breathtaking as The Winter Queen, in some ways it’s a more accomplished book. Some letdown was inevitable: The Winter Queen was, after all, the first chance English readers had to sample Akunin’s considerable skill, and any follow-up to that brilliant debut was bound to be a bit disappointing. But in Leviathan, Akunin pushes a bit harder, trading the simple limited third-person voice of The Winter Queen for a rotating series of narratives from five characters (four of whom are suspects!), some told in first-person accounts, via journals and letters, others in the third person, with that particular narrator as focus. That these narrators range from a Japanese man of samurai descent to a seemingly unbalanced British lord just makes the puzzle more interesting, since language as well as points of view diverges wildly. It’s through such accounts, in fact, that we learn of the book’s ancillary mysteries, the personal stories that give Leviathan its depth and play up Akunin’s dark humor. Reginald Milford-Stokes, for example, recounts each day’s events in long letters to his beloved wife, Emily, who seems already to know why her traveling spouse is compelled to take sextant readings hourly. Why this is, and why he breaks off one such letter abruptly ("Lord, what nonsense is this! . . . I am a monster, and there can be no forgiveness for me"), the rest of us will not find out until much later. What we do not get in Leviathan is enough Fandorin. Because of the more challenging structure of this book, he’s relegated to being just one of many characters, and — probably to preserve the mystery — his particularly astute viewpoint is heard only second-hand. He remains, therefore, something of a cipher. Some of his fellow passengers view the young, prematurely white-haired Russian with distrust. "He is a terrible man, a dangerous lunatic with a fantastic, monstrously depraved imagination," writes one British observer. Yet the Japanese passenger records his admiration, noting, "The first star I glimpsed glowing in the blackness around me was Fandorin-san." Much of the mystique surrounding our putative hero will be clear to readers of The Winter Queen. More, perhaps, will be revealed next year when Random House publishes an English translation of The Turkish Gambit, which is actually the second of this series — Murder on the Leviathan is the third of what are now 10 books. For those of us entranced by the mysterious diplomat, any upcoming translations will be worth the wait.
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