Before Boris Akunin became Russia's most bankable novelist, he was a disgruntled editor and critic, busy declaring that fiction was dead. He took to the pages of Russia's most high-toned literary journals and called on writers to give up fiction. 'I was arguing that, if you are a writer and you want to tell me something important, don't hide under fictionalised characters,' he says. 'Just write what you think. If not, please write novels for children or mass literature, which is not worth serious readers.'
A decade on, Akunin is Russia's best known living novelist. His detective stories of tsarist Russia, featuring dashing sleuth Erast Fandorin, have notched up about 10 million sales. He now says his polemic against fiction was a reflection of his professional malaise. 'I was poisoned and fed up with reading fiction after 15 years. It's like when you're a kid, you dream of working in a chocolate factory. Then, after a week, you hate chocolate.'
Boris Akunin - the pen-name of Grigory Chkhartishvili - is such a hot commodity that the Ukrainian mafia recently issued a counterfeit Fandorin novel, titled The Rook, in Akunin's name. 'First, they did it to Dan Brown. I was amused. Then, it happened to me and I was not amused at all. Inside it was complete, complete - well, I cannot find a decent word - a text of very poor quality.'
Akunin is everything the traditional Russian is not. 'I don't want to be a teacher of life to my readers. I wouldn't know what to teach them.' Writing for a mere two hours a day - 'I get tired very quickly' - Akunin spends the rest of his time playing computer games, drinking with friends and reading (non-fiction only).
Why is he still allergic to fiction? 'If it's a talented book, you get an inferiority complex. If it's bad, it kills you for two or three days. You cannot work. It paralyses you.' He finds writing harder with every book. 'You have used all these metaphors and sentences already. You run out of words.' Still, he sticks at the writing game because 'unlike cards, you always win'.
After the Soviet Union disbanded - taking its censorship regime with it - Russian bookshops became inundated with trashy crime novels, full of gratuitous sex and violence. Crime fiction was a stillborn genre during the years of the Iron Curtain, because 'in the happiest country of the world, you weren't supposed to have serious crime. A criminal always had to be a 100 per cent negative guy. The detective had to be a state official.'
He first had the brainwave for the Fandorin books while riding the Moscow subway with his wife. Although a crime buff, she was ashamed to be seen reading a pulp thriller in public, so she wrapped its garish cover in newspaper. 'I thought, 'Someone needs to write an entertainment literature that women like my wife would not be ashamed to show'.'