"A riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma." Erast Fandorin

Detective novels are a nice trick to pull off. There are so many expectations and tropes and the readers can be so alert to tricks that the writer can have a tough time creating something new, different and at the same time, and in the best sense, generic. Part of their appeal is their familiarity, so the author is left walking the tight rope between doing everything as expected and making it different.

Erast Fandorin is the detective hero of a series of novels by Boris Akunin , a Russian essayist, novelist and translator. At the beginning of the series, he is a young man on the lowest rung of the Russian police in the 19^th century. He is young, thin and keen. It is his enthusiasm that leads him to discover the truth in the first novel, The Winter Queen, which also sees him leap several ranks in the Russian bureaurocracy.

Akunin has said his aim is to write a detective novel in every subgenre available. He has identified sixteen and so intends to write sixteen Fandorin novels. The Winter Queen is a conspiracy mystery. Now here comes a bit of a trick for English readers. I tried to then read the second novel, so I picked out Leviathan, a Agatha Christie type novel – exotic setting, the world’s biggest boat, a closed set of suspects, and a bizarre murder to kick the plot off. However, while this was the second novel translated into English, it is in fact the third novel in the series, after Turkish Gambit. Apparently that ends in Fandorin being appointed ambassador to Japan, which explains his presence on the boat in the first place. But you read the publishers list, and the positions are reversed. It’s not a huge deal, the stories are self-contained, but it is just a little annoying.

Akunin is a prolific writer with one series involving Fandorin’s son Nicholas, another with a crime-solving nun, a third series with every book in a different genre, and a fourth based on the political rivalry between Tsarist Russian and Imperial Germany, but Fandorin is his biggest success. The Fandorin novels are huge in Russia, selling in their many millions and three of them have been adapted into movies. Like Christie’s Poirot and so many other detectives, Fandorin has distinct characteristics. He is expert at reading people, and likes to list his findings and number them. In gambling he is invariably lucky, so finds it dull. Despite his luck, his life is marked by tragedy, giving him a sadness that along with his good looks and slim build makes him attractive to women, even if he is largely self-contained. His other feature is his vanity, shown by his fastidious dress and wearing a corset.

Akunin delineates the difference between the naïve Fandorin of the first novel and this more experienced character in Leviathan very well.  While the stories are self-contained, we seem to follow the life path of Fandorin much more realistically than Poirot or Holmes. I think this is a more modern take on the series novel. Now characters get older, their lives changed, and some of them even die – Inspector Morse for example – and they now longer exist in a mysteriously extended now, such as James Bond.

These are enjoyable books, the mysteries are good, and solutions satisfying. A couple of times I thought I was a bit ahead of the game in The Winter Queen but mainly by focussing on the least likely suspect rather than anything intelligent or insightful. This is part of the appeal of the detective novel, the reader can feel a little bit clever but the author, or the detective, is a little cleverer still.  Leviathan meanwhile had me flummoxed. Now I’ve skipped ahead to The State Councillor, where Fandorin is framed for murder and has to solve it while keeping ahead of the police. The period detail in the novels is fascinating, the other characters well-delineated, much better than Christie, and the writing, even in translation, literate and readable.  I look forward to reading more.