The Winter Queen

Light entertainment, a little Russian noir, but too fantastic whilst too formulaic for my liking.
The period background is enlightning, but that's where my interest stopped.
Won't read more of his. ( )

My blog post about this book is here.
( )

Set in 1870s Russia and featuring an intriguing beginning, as a young man kills himself in front of a pair of women in broad daylight in a park. It’s an apparent suicide that blossoms into an international mystery, unraveled in stages by Erast Fandorin.

One of the thing that makes the novel so endearing is that we identify with Fandorin, who while smart and resourceful is also young and innocent. He is awkward and unsure of himself at times, and swallows hard in the presence of attractive women. Another is Akunin’s way with words, e.g. describing one character Fandorin comes across as “…a scrawny, lanky veteran with a crumpled face that looked as if a cow had been chewing on it”, and another trying to get rid of him by saying that “the scoundrel actually began nudging Fandorin toward the exit with his fat belly”. He also writes from a distinctly Russian perspective in the ‘feel’ of the book, and in various descriptions, e.g. the suicidal game as “American” roulette, and in while an Englishman sits patiently for hours, having a character inwardly remark, “There was an obstinate nation for you now”.

Despite the fun I had with the book, I knocked my review score down by a half point at the end. It may have been a little unfair, but I just thought the way the mystery played out was a little predictable, and some aspects of the plot seemed derivative, channeling 007 and featuring one ‘good’ girl and one ‘bad’ girl. All in all, though, it was fun stuff, and I will certainly be reading more of Akunin. ( )

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.

Boris Akunin, though born in Georgia, was raised and lives in Moscow. He studied Japan in the Institute of Asian and African Studies of the Moscow State University. He did literary translations from Japanese and English into Russian, including work on the "Anthology of Japanese Literature" and worked on the Pushkin Library.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, he 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, writing about a young man who solved crimes in Imperialist Russia. Part of his plan for the series is to include a novel for each of the 16 genres of mystery crime fiction that he has identified.

The Winter Queen is an international conspiracy, the second book is The Turkish Gambit, a spy novel and the third is Murder on the Leviathan, a classic cozy mystery. ( )

A surprising, rather humorous detective-novel set in Russia, featuring the unforgettable Boris Fandorin. ( )