Rerun Tuesday: The Winter Queen

K is traveling this week and so we will be revisiting some posts from the early days of WeBeReading ... this is the first in a fantastic series.

"Chapter One -- in which an account is rendered of a certain cynical escapade". I'll admit that is not the first sentence of The Winter Queen by Boris Akunin. It's the first chapter heading -- but isn't it amazing? You don't even have to get past the chapter title to experience the fantastic writing of this book.

After giving up on The Mill on The Floss for now, I decided to go back and read The Winter Queen for a second time. It had been a while since I first read it (Amazon says I bought it in February 2005) which usually means that I can't remember much about it. It turned out that I remembered most of it but it was still throughly enjoyable this time through. Akunin is a fantastic writer and I also give credit to the translator of this book, Andrew Bromfield. He does an admirable job of translating this book from its native Russian.

The main character in The Winter Queen is a 20 year old clerk in the Moscow department of detectives in 1876. Erast Fandorin begins his adventure when he is assigned some investigatory work into the mildly suspicious suicide of a college student. This small and seemingly simple case leads Fandorin straight into the middle of a worldwide conspiracy. His life is constantly in danger but his intelligence and self-control help him to perserve in the most treacherous of situations.

This book was mentioned in my previous post about the best detectives around the world and it definitely deserves its place on the list. There are eleven books so far in the Russian series, 5 of which have been translated into English.

Moving on to another mystery,
K


Buy The Winter Queen on Amazon or find it at your local library.

"The square onto which the windows of the district court looked out was already almost completely empty by this hour in the early evening."

Sister Pelagia and the Black Monk is the second book translated to English in Boris Akunin's series about a young nun who is incredibly adept at gymnastics and solving crimes. I read the first book in the series, Sister Pelagia and the White Bulldog, just over a year ago and really enjoyed it. This book had many of the same features that attracted me to the first novel.

The setting of this series of mysteries is rural Russia, I believe in the early 1900s because this second book (which takes place directly after the first) references the work of Madame Curie which was first published in 1898. The mysteries in both of these books are very well formed and not at all predictable. In this current novel, a spectral "black monk" is appearing at a hermitage in their district, provoking hysteria and even death. After unsucessful investigations by three other people, Sister Pelagia eventually takes it on herself to travel to this monastery and solve the mystery. She is quite amusing in that, in both books, she takes on the persona of a Muscovite widow and dresses in the latest fashions, pretending to be a layperson. In this one she also adds a second disguise -- a young male monk.

Some of the more interesting parts of these books are not in the narratives at all but in the religious discussions between Sister Pelagia and her mentor, Bishop Mitrofanii. It is very intriguing to get a glimpse of Russian Orthodoxy about 100 years ago. More in the first book than this second one, there is quite a bit of information about rural political structure in Russia which is also interesting. These books are fantastic as both historical studies and mysteries. I again must complement Akunin's English translator, Andrew Bromfield, as I have ready many a poor translation from Russian.

The third book in the series, Sister Pelagia and the Red Cockerel, comes out in August.

Loving a dark Russian mystery,
K


Buy Sister Pelagia and the Black Monk on Amazon or find it at your local library.

"At Port Said another passenger boarded the Leviathan ... and Gustave Gauche's mood immediately improved."

Another book from my spooky books for fall list is Boris Akunin's Murder on the Leviathan. This is the second book in the Erast Fandorin series that starts with The Winter Queen which I reviewed last month. This is the story of a mass murder and theft of Indian antiquities in France and the murderer's attempted escape on an England-to-India steamliner, the Leviathan. Fandorin is a passenger on the boat en route to his new diplomatic post in Japan -- after the tragedy that ended the last book. A French police commissioner by the name of Gauche takes passage on the boat and has all of his suspects assigned to one meal salon, including Fandorin. Fandorin is quickly discounted but the others are all under various states of suspicion as the reason for their presence in the salon is revealed and multiple murders follow.

This book is something of an homage to other mystery writers including Agatha Christie, Wilkie Collins and Arthur Conan Doyle. Wilkie Collins was the first author to write a single novel in multiple voices. This book also tells the story from multiple viewpoints, although oddly never Fandorin's view. Akunin also writes a scene where Fandorin uses his powers of deduction to identify other passengers on the ship in a very Sherlock Holmes-esque way.

Murder on the Leviathan is a fantastic book and is highly different from the first book in the series. Akunin is very good at writing in different styles and different voices. If you want to read one book in the series, this is a probably the best and a good stand-alone story.

Sailing the treacherous seas,
K


Buy Murder on the Leviathan on Amazon or find it at your local library.

"Chapter One -- in which an account is rendered of a certain cynical escapade"

I'll admit that is not the first sentence of The Winter Queen by Boris Akunin. It's the first chapter heading -- but isn't it amazing? You don't even have to get past the chapter title to experience the fantastic writing of this book.

After giving up on The Mill on The Floss for now, I decided to go back and read The Winter Queen for a second time. It had been a while since I first read it (Amazon says I bought it in February 2005) which usually means that I can't remember much about it. It turned out that I remembered most of it but it was still throughly enjoyable this time through. Akunin is a fantastic writer and I also give credit to the translator of this book, Andrew Bromfield. He does an admirable job of translating this book from its native Russian.

The main character in The Winter Queen is a 20 year old clerk in the Moscow department of detectives in 1876. Erast Fandorin begins his adventure when he is assigned some investigatory work into the mildly suspicious suicide of a college student. This small and seemingly simple case leads Fandorin straight into the middle of a worldwide conspiracy. His life is constantly in danger but his intelligence and self-control help him to perserve in the most treacherous of situations.

This book was mentioned in my previous post about the best detectives around the world and it definitely deserves its place on the list. There are eleven books so far in the Russian series, 5 of which have been translated into English. I am going to re-read the rest of the series over the next couple of months so I promise to write more about this high-quality series again.

Moving on to another mystery,
K


Buy The Winter Queen on Amazon or find it at your local library.

Just A Little More Mystery

I was going to write about the book I just finished today but I ran into this great article so I'm going to write about it instead. You will get to hear about The Satanic Verses next time!

I'm friends on a social network with the author R.N. Morris and he pointed out this article today in the Books section of The Independent. It's called "Crime fiction: Around the world in 80 sleuths". It lists eighty locales and talks about a detective or two in each location. Some are familiar but some are new to me and I can't wait to check them out.

Here are some of my favorites that are listed:

Greenland -- Smilla's Sense of Snow (the article translates it as Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow) by Peter Hoeg
Yorkshire -- The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
St. Petersburg -- A Gentle Axe by R.N. Morris
Moscow -- The Winter Queen by Boris Akunin
West Point, New York -- The Pale Blue Eye by Louis Bayard
The Caribbean -- A Caribbean Mystery by Agatha Christie
Egypt -- Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie
New Zealand -- Vintage Murder by Ngaio Marsh

I hope to do write-ups on most of these later because they are really good reads. And that leaves only 72 more detectives and series for me to discover. I can't wait!

Good reading,
K