Erast Fandorin - Background

Background

In the Soviet Union, detective novels enjoyed mass popularity. Although they were seen as a "low genre" by the communist officials, both local (such as Vayner brothers and Julian Semenov), and foreign detective novels have always been avidly coveted.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, many trashy detective novels were published that featured a lot of gore and sex. Akunin's wife, in common with many other Russians, started to enjoy reading this genre of literature. However, she did not want to be seen reading the novels and she always wrapped them in brown paper to prevent people from seeing what she was reading. This inspired Akunin to create a detective novel which nobody would be ashamed to be caught reading, something between the literature of Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky and the pulp of modern Russian detective novels.

He set out to write a cycle about Fandorin with an exploration of every subgenre of the detective novel in mind, from spies to serial killers. In addition, he wanted to address different types of human character in his books. As Akunin identified sixteen subgenres of crime novels, as well as sixteen character types, the novels in the Erast Fandorin series will ultimately number sixteen. As of December 2009, thirteen novels have been published in Russia. The series is titled Новый детективъ (New detective, or New Mystery). This title serves to set the novels apart from the postmodernist intellectual novels as well as from the trashy detective novels, but it is also a subtle play on the use of time in the novels.

Akunin uses many historical settings for his novels. He uses the war between Russia and the Ottoman Empire as background for the novel The Turkish Gambit; the death of the "White General" Mikhail Skobelev (as 'Mikhail Sobolev') in The Death of Achilles; and the coronation of Tsar Nicholas II and the Khodynka Tragedy for Coronation, or the Last of the Romanovs. Akunin uses the gaps in the knowledge of these histories to create an atmosphere for his mystery novels to which readers can relate.