Source:
https://scmp.com/article/555076/better-read-dead-tsar-attraction

Better read than dead for tsar attraction

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'.'

Then an editor in a publishing house, Akunin tried badgering established novelists into writing a book according to his formula. But when no high-brow writer was willing to tarnish their name with a potboiler, Akunin gave it a whirl himself. Six weeks later, he'd completed The Winter Queen. 'It was so much fun that I decided to continue.'

The readership he had in mind was Russia's new middle class - self-made citizens, fast acquiring capital, independent of the state. 'Everything they achieved they achieved by themselves, so when they want to amuse themselves, it needs to be something that makes them feel, not as normal popcorn eaters in a movie theatre, but intellectual. What I began to write was mass literature for sophisticated readers.'

Afraid of losing his friends in Russia's literati, Akunin hid behind a pen-name. At first, he considered Molotov, because 'my novels resemble an anarchistic cocktail - high- brow fiction and mass literature mixed together'. Ultimately, he chose Akunin, the Japanese word for bad guy, 'which doesn't mean that I consider myself to be a bad guy. It means that my focus is bad guys.'

But when Akunin started naming characters after his wife's friends, for a lark, the press rumbled him. 'Like any criminal who manages to escape several successful feats, I had become careless. To my colleagues, I was like a traitor who betrayed his high duty, or a defrocked priest.'

Fandorin is a picture of equanimity, gallantry and physical wellbeing - everything that Russian males, Akunin says, are typically not. His protagonist is a hit with female readers because, Akunin says, 'normally you fall in love with someone who can fulfil your hunger for things that you do not possess'.

He decided to set the series in 19th-century Russia, rather than the present day, because he felt that would make it easier to play loose with the truth. 'When you fantasise about a time from which no witnesses are left, nobody can tell you, 'It was not like this at all'.'

Recently Akunin grew tired of Erast Fandorin, so he launched a series of novels featuring a detective nun, Sister Pelagia. The first, Pelagia and the White Bulldog, has just come out in English. But despite employing a female sleuth, Akunin is no feminist. He figured that, as a woman, Sister Pelagia 'would not be able to shoot, to run, to fight and would have to use an alternative arsenal of methods. The style of these novels would be very feminine. It would be like a river which flows along a valley, taking unexpected turns, quietly and slowly, so you'd just have to follow the narration. It wouldn't be very quick.'

Setting out to write who-dunits that reward rereading, Akunin feels he owes more to Arthur Conan Doyle than Agatha Christie. 'Agatha Christie's plots are much more intricate, with unexpected endings. But for Agatha Christie to catch the reader unaware she has to sacrifice psychological credibility. Whenever somebody is killed you never really feel sorry for him because it's not a real human being. With Conan Doyle, the process of reading brings you more than the solving of this mystery - who killed whom and why.'

Pelagia and the White Bulldog by Boris Akunin (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, $195) is out now in hardback