From Publishers Weekly
If chatty digressions on love and war tend to slow the third Erast Fandorin historical to appear in the U.S. (after 2004's Murder on the Leviathan), Russian author Akunin does a superb job of rendering the immediacy of battle in the 1877–1878 conflict between the Motherland and Turkey, and illuminating the politics behind czarist fantasies of recapturing Constantinople. At the Balkan front, the quiet, stuttering Fandorin befriends Varya Suvorova, a midwife turned telegraphist. Varya is bent on visiting her court-martialed fiancé, who's accused of being a spy. Fandorin and Varya are soon caught up in the fortunes of the Russian army, which a well-placed mole seems intent on betraying. Suspicions point to various Russian staff officers and to some glamorous foreign correspondents, including Seamus McLaughlin from London's Daily Post and Michel Paladin from the Revue Parisienne. Codes, courtesans and love letters all come into play, as well as murder and suicide in combat, in a plot more complex than some West Point battle plans. While the plethora of minor characters can be confusing, the quirky Fandorin and determined Varya stand out amid the turmoil of their surroundings.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From AudioFile
A witty and gabby historical whodunit from Russia is set in 1877 during hostilities between the motherland and the Ottomans. As diplomat/stutterer/detective Erast Fandorin investigates a case of espionage, the accused's lovely, spirited fiancée keeps getting in his way. Paul Michael nicely delivers the lengthy conversations of les Russes. But his narrative, with slurred diction that sounds ever so modern and American, clashes with the book's setting, atmosphere, and sophistication. Michael lacks variety and an appreciation for the book's humor. Y.R. © AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Booklist
Grigory Chkhartishvili, writing as Boris Akunin (The Winter Queen, Murder on the Leviathan), is one of Russia's most popular mystery writers. His third Erast Fandorin historical mystery, set in 1877, finds the detective-diplomat gathering intelligence for the Russian army, which is at war with the Ottoman Empire. On the Bulgarian front, Fandorin meets Varvara Andreevna Suvorova, Varya, a feisty, liberated woman who is searching for her fiance, a cryptographer. She soon has the motley crew of soldiers and journalists in the camp vying for her affection when they are not playing chess, gambling, or discussing the meaning of life. When an error in a secret message causes catastrophe for the Russian army, Varya's fiance, Petya, is accused of espionage. She and Fandorin must clear his name to save him and ensure success in battle. Akunin provides readers with vivid historical detail, witty dialogue, and colorful characters. Those who love historical mysteries and Russian intrigue will be delighted with his latest offering. Barbara Bibel
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Review
“Akunin’s mystery [series] is wildly popular in his homeland, and deservedly so. His plots are intricate. . . . Impressive.”
–The New Yorker
“An exquisitely filigreed thriller . . . delicious.”
–Entertainment Weekly
“This sophisticated mystery is a marvel.”
–The Boston Globe
“Fandorin delves with his customary mix of taciturn superiority and apparent bewilderment. He is a delightful character like no other in crime fiction.”
–The Times (London)
–The New Yorker
“An exquisitely filigreed thriller . . . delicious.”
–Entertainment Weekly
“This sophisticated mystery is a marvel.”
–The Boston Globe
“Fandorin delves with his customary mix of taciturn superiority and apparent bewilderment. He is a delightful character like no other in crime fiction.”
–The Times (London)
Product Description
“[An] elegantly spun yarn . . . Akunin’s wonderful novels are always intricately webbed and plotted.”
–The Providence Journal
It is 1877, and war has broken out between Russia and the Ottoman Empire. In the treacherous atmosphere of a Russian field army, former diplomat and detective extraordinaire Erast Fandorin stumbles upon his most confounding case. Its difficulties are only compounded by the presence of Varya Suvorova, a deadly serious (and seriously beautiful) woman with revolutionary ideals who has disguised herself as a boy in order to reunite with her respected comrade and fiancé. Even after Fandorin saves her life, Varya can hardly bear to thank such a “lackey of the throne” for his efforts. When Varya’s fiancé is accused of espionage and faces execution, however, she must turn to Fandorin to find the real culprit . . . a mission that forces her to reckon with his courage, deductive mind, and piercing gaze.
–The Providence Journal
It is 1877, and war has broken out between Russia and the Ottoman Empire. In the treacherous atmosphere of a Russian field army, former diplomat and detective extraordinaire Erast Fandorin stumbles upon his most confounding case. Its difficulties are only compounded by the presence of Varya Suvorova, a deadly serious (and seriously beautiful) woman with revolutionary ideals who has disguised herself as a boy in order to reunite with her respected comrade and fiancé. Even after Fandorin saves her life, Varya can hardly bear to thank such a “lackey of the throne” for his efforts. When Varya’s fiancé is accused of espionage and faces execution, however, she must turn to Fandorin to find the real culprit . . . a mission that forces her to reckon with his courage, deductive mind, and piercing gaze.
From the Back Cover
Praise for Murder on the Leviathan
“With a cast of eccentrics [and] a plot bristling with surprises . . . this is a novel that does Christie, Collins, and Conan Doyle proud.”
–The Washington Post Book World
“[Akunin] writes at a breakneck pace. . . . Murder on the Leviathan harks back gratifyingly to the cerebral nature of this genre.”
–The New York Times
“A splendidly atmospheric story . . . as stylish as it is suspenseful.”
–People
“Intricate and marvelous . . . addictively dazzling . . . Akunin’s agile leaps of time, tone, and narrative style are matched by a frisky erudition: The book itself is a luxury literary cruise.”
–Entertainment Weekly
“Fiendishly witty . . . [Akunin] knows his Arthur Conan Doyle, and his Fandorin likes to indulge in showy displays of Holmesian observations.”
–Time
“A crafty puzzle in a sophisticated setting.”
–The New York Times Book Review
From the Hardcover edition.
“With a cast of eccentrics [and] a plot bristling with surprises . . . this is a novel that does Christie, Collins, and Conan Doyle proud.”
–The Washington Post Book World
“[Akunin] writes at a breakneck pace. . . . Murder on the Leviathan harks back gratifyingly to the cerebral nature of this genre.”
–The New York Times
“A splendidly atmospheric story . . . as stylish as it is suspenseful.”
–People
“Intricate and marvelous . . . addictively dazzling . . . Akunin’s agile leaps of time, tone, and narrative style are matched by a frisky erudition: The book itself is a luxury literary cruise.”
–Entertainment Weekly
“Fiendishly witty . . . [Akunin] knows his Arthur Conan Doyle, and his Fandorin likes to indulge in showy displays of Holmesian observations.”
–Time
“A crafty puzzle in a sophisticated setting.”
–The New York Times Book Review
From the Hardcover edition.
About the Author
BORIS AKUNIN is the pen name of Grigory Chkhartishvili, who was born in the republic of Georgia in 1956. A philologist, critic, essayist, and translator of Japanese, he published his first detective stories in 1998 and quickly became one of the most widely read authors in Russia. He has written eleven Erast Fandorin novels to date, which have sold more than eight million copies in Russia and been translated into nearly two dozen languages. He lives in Moscow.
ANDREW BROMFIELD was born in Hull in Yorkshire, England, and is the acclaimed translator of the stories and novels of Victor Pelevin. He also translated into English Boris Akunin’s first two Erast Fandorin mysteries, The Winter Queen and Murder on the Leviathan.
From the Hardcover edition.
ANDREW BROMFIELD was born in Hull in Yorkshire, England, and is the acclaimed translator of the stories and novels of Victor Pelevin. He also translated into English Boris Akunin’s first two Erast Fandorin mysteries, The Winter Queen and Murder on the Leviathan.
From the Hardcover edition.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
CHAPTER ONE
In which a progressive woman finds herself in a quite desperate situation
la revue parisienne (Paris)
14 (2) July 1877
Our correspondent, now already in his second week with the Russian Army of the Danube, informs us that in his order of the day for yesterday, 1st July (13th July in the European style), the Emperor Alexander thanks his victorious troops, who have succeeded in forcing a crossing of the Danube and breaching the borders of the Ottoman state. His Imperial Majesty’s order affirms that the enemy has been utterly crushed and in no more than two weeks’ time at the very most the Orthodox cross will be raised over Saint Sophia in Constantinople. The advancing army is encountering almost no resistance, unless one takes into account the mosquito bites inflicted on the Russian lines of communication by flying detachments of the so-called Bashi-Bazouks (“mad-heads”), a species of half-bandit and half-partisan, famed for their savage disposition and bloodthirsty ferocity.
According to St. Augustine, woman is a frail and fickle creature, and the great obscurantist and misogynist was right a thousand times over—at least with regard to a certain individual by the name of Varvara Suvorova.
It had all started out as such a jolly adventure, but now it had come to this. She only had her own stupid self to blame—Mama had told Varya time and again that sooner or later she would land herself in a fix, and now she had. In the course of one of their many tempestuous altercations, her father, a man of great wisdom and endowed with the patience of a saint, had divided his daughter’s life into three periods: the imp in a skirt; the perfect nuisance; the loony nihilist. To this day Varya prided herself on this characterization, declaring that she had no intention of resting on her laurels as yet, but this time her self-confidence had landed her in a world of trouble.
Why on earth had she agreed to make a halt at the tavern—this korchma, or whatever it was they called the abominable dive? Her driver, that dastardly thief Mitko, had started whining, using those peculiar Bulgarian endings: “Let’s water the hossesta, let’s water the hossesta.” So they had stopped to water the horses. Oh, God, what was she going to do now?
Varya was sitting in the corner of a dingy and utterly filthy shed at a table of rough-hewn planks, frightened to death. Only once before had she ever experienced such grim, hopeless terror: when at the age of six she broke her grandmother’s favorite teacup and hid under the divan to await the inevitable retribution.
If she could only pray—but progressive women didn’t pray. And, meanwhile, the situation looked absolutely desperate.
So . . . the St. Petersburg–Bucharest leg of her route had been traversed rapidly enough, even comfortably: The express train (two passenger coaches and ten flatcars carrying artillery pieces) had rushed Varya to the capital of the principality of Romania in three days. The brown eyes of the lady with the cropped hair, who smoked papyrosas and refused on principle to allow her hand to be kissed, had very nearly set the army officers and staff functionaries bound for the theater of military operations at one another’s throats. At every halt Varya was presented with bouquets of flowers and baskets of strawberries. She threw the bouquets out the window, because they were vulgar, and soon she was obliged to forswear the strawberries as well, because they brought her out in a rash. It had turned out to be a rather amusing and pleasant journey, although, from an intellectual and ideological perspective, of course, all her suitors were complete worms. There was, to be sure, one cornet who was reading Lamartine and had even heard of Schopenhauer, and he had been more subtle in paying court to her than the others, but Varya had explained to him—as one comrade to another—that she was traveling to join her fiancé, after which the cornet’s behavior had been quite irreproachable. He had not been at all bad-looking, either, rather like Lermontov. Oh, to hell with the cornet.
The second stage of her journey had also gone off without a hitch. There was a stagecoach that ran from Bucharest to Turnu-Magurele. She had been obliged to swallow a little dust as she bounced and jolted along, but it had brought her within arm’s reach of her goal—for rumor had it that the general headquarters of the Army of the Danube was located on the far side of the river, in Tsarevitsy.
This was the point at which she had to put into effect the final and most crucial part of The Plan that she had worked out back in St. Petersburg (that was what Varya called it to herself—“The Plan,” with capital letters). Yesterday evening, under cover of darkness, she had crossed the Danube in a boat a little above Zimnitsa, where two weeks previously the heroic Fourteenth Division under General Dragomirov had completed a forced crossing of that formidable water barrier. This was the beginning of Turkish territory, the zone of military operations, and it would certainly be only too easy to slip up here. There were Cossack patrols roaming the roads, and if she ever let her guard down she was as good as done for—she would be packed off back to Bucharest in the blink of an eye. But Varya was a resourceful girl, so she had anticipated this and taken appropriate measures.
The discovery of a coaching inn in the Bulgarian village on the south bank of the Danube had been a really great stroke of luck, and after that things had gone from good to better; the landlord understood Russian and had promised to give her a reliable vodach—a guide—for only five rubles. Varya had bought wide trousers much like Turkish chalvars, a shirt, boots, a sleeveless jacket, and an idiotic cloth cap, and the change of clothes had instantly transformed her from a European lady into a skinny Bulgarian youth who would not arouse the slightest suspicion from any patrol. She had deliberately commissioned a roundabout route, avoiding the marching columns, in order to enter Tsarevitsy not from the north, but from the south. And there, in the general army headquarters, was Pyotr Yablokov, Varya’s . . . Well, actually, it is not quite clear who he is. Her fiancé? Her comrade? Her husband? Let us call him her former husband and future fiancé. And also—naturally—her comrade.
They had set out while it was still dark on a creaky, ramshackle carutza, a Romanian-style cart. Her vodach, Mitko, tight-lipped with a gray mustache, chewed tobacco all the while, constantly ejecting long streams of brown spittle onto the road. (Varya winced every time he did it.) At first he had crooned some exotic Balkan melody; then he had fallen silent and sunk into a reverie—it was clear enough now what ideas he had been entertaining.
He could have killed me, Varya thought with a shudder. Or even worse. And without the slightest problem—who would bother investigating in these parts? They would just blame those, what’s-their-names, Bashi-Bazouks.
But though things may have stopped short of murder, they had turned out quite badly enough. That traitor Mitko had led his female traveling companion to a tavern that more than anything else resembled a bandit’s den. He had seated her at a table and ordered some cheese and a jug of wine to be brought, while he himself turned back toward the door, gesturing as much as to say: I’ll be back in a moment. Varya had dashed after him, not wishing to be left alone in this dim, dirty, and distinctly malodorous sink of iniquity, but Mitko had said he needed to step outside—not to put too fine an edge on it—in order to satisfy a call of nature. When Varya did not understand, he had explained his meaning with a gesture and she had returned to her seat, covered in confusion.
The duration of the call of nature had exceeded all conceivable limits. Varya ate a little of the salty, unappetizing cheese, took a sip of the sour wine, and then, unable any longer to endure the curiosity that the fearsome denizens of the public house had begun to evince toward her person, she went out into the yard.
Outside the door, she froze in horror.
There was not a trace of the carutza or of the trunk with all her things that it contained. Her traveling medicine chest was in the trunk, and in the medicine chest, between the lint and the bandages, lay her passport and absolutely all her money.
Varya was just about to run out onto the road when the landlord, with a bright crimson nose and warts on his cheek, had come darting out of the korchma in his red shirt. He shouted angrily and gestured: Pay up first, and then you can leave. Varya went back inside because the landlord had frightened her and she had nothing with which to pay him. She sat down quietly in the corner and tried to think of what had happened as an adventure. But she failed miserably.
There was not a single woman in the tavern. The dirty, loud-mouthed yokels behaved quite unlike Russian peasants, who are quiet and inoffensive and talk among themselves in low voices until they get drunk, while these louts were bawling raucously as they downed red wine by the tankard, constantly erupting into loud and predatory (or so it seemed to Varya) laughter. At a long table on the far side of the room they were playing dice, breaking into uproarious disputes at every throw. On one occasion when they fell to quarrelling more loudly than usual, a small man who was extremely drunk was struck over the head with a clay tankard. He lay there sprawled under the table and nobody paid the slightest attention to him.
The landlord nodded in Varya’s direction and made some crude remark, at which the men sitting at nearby tables turned in her direction and roared with malevolent laughter. Varya squirmed and tugged her cap down over her eyes. Nobody else in the tavern was weari...
In which a progressive woman finds herself in a quite desperate situation
la revue parisienne (Paris)
14 (2) July 1877
Our correspondent, now already in his second week with the Russian Army of the Danube, informs us that in his order of the day for yesterday, 1st July (13th July in the European style), the Emperor Alexander thanks his victorious troops, who have succeeded in forcing a crossing of the Danube and breaching the borders of the Ottoman state. His Imperial Majesty’s order affirms that the enemy has been utterly crushed and in no more than two weeks’ time at the very most the Orthodox cross will be raised over Saint Sophia in Constantinople. The advancing army is encountering almost no resistance, unless one takes into account the mosquito bites inflicted on the Russian lines of communication by flying detachments of the so-called Bashi-Bazouks (“mad-heads”), a species of half-bandit and half-partisan, famed for their savage disposition and bloodthirsty ferocity.
According to St. Augustine, woman is a frail and fickle creature, and the great obscurantist and misogynist was right a thousand times over—at least with regard to a certain individual by the name of Varvara Suvorova.
It had all started out as such a jolly adventure, but now it had come to this. She only had her own stupid self to blame—Mama had told Varya time and again that sooner or later she would land herself in a fix, and now she had. In the course of one of their many tempestuous altercations, her father, a man of great wisdom and endowed with the patience of a saint, had divided his daughter’s life into three periods: the imp in a skirt; the perfect nuisance; the loony nihilist. To this day Varya prided herself on this characterization, declaring that she had no intention of resting on her laurels as yet, but this time her self-confidence had landed her in a world of trouble.
Why on earth had she agreed to make a halt at the tavern—this korchma, or whatever it was they called the abominable dive? Her driver, that dastardly thief Mitko, had started whining, using those peculiar Bulgarian endings: “Let’s water the hossesta, let’s water the hossesta.” So they had stopped to water the horses. Oh, God, what was she going to do now?
Varya was sitting in the corner of a dingy and utterly filthy shed at a table of rough-hewn planks, frightened to death. Only once before had she ever experienced such grim, hopeless terror: when at the age of six she broke her grandmother’s favorite teacup and hid under the divan to await the inevitable retribution.
If she could only pray—but progressive women didn’t pray. And, meanwhile, the situation looked absolutely desperate.
So . . . the St. Petersburg–Bucharest leg of her route had been traversed rapidly enough, even comfortably: The express train (two passenger coaches and ten flatcars carrying artillery pieces) had rushed Varya to the capital of the principality of Romania in three days. The brown eyes of the lady with the cropped hair, who smoked papyrosas and refused on principle to allow her hand to be kissed, had very nearly set the army officers and staff functionaries bound for the theater of military operations at one another’s throats. At every halt Varya was presented with bouquets of flowers and baskets of strawberries. She threw the bouquets out the window, because they were vulgar, and soon she was obliged to forswear the strawberries as well, because they brought her out in a rash. It had turned out to be a rather amusing and pleasant journey, although, from an intellectual and ideological perspective, of course, all her suitors were complete worms. There was, to be sure, one cornet who was reading Lamartine and had even heard of Schopenhauer, and he had been more subtle in paying court to her than the others, but Varya had explained to him—as one comrade to another—that she was traveling to join her fiancé, after which the cornet’s behavior had been quite irreproachable. He had not been at all bad-looking, either, rather like Lermontov. Oh, to hell with the cornet.
The second stage of her journey had also gone off without a hitch. There was a stagecoach that ran from Bucharest to Turnu-Magurele. She had been obliged to swallow a little dust as she bounced and jolted along, but it had brought her within arm’s reach of her goal—for rumor had it that the general headquarters of the Army of the Danube was located on the far side of the river, in Tsarevitsy.
This was the point at which she had to put into effect the final and most crucial part of The Plan that she had worked out back in St. Petersburg (that was what Varya called it to herself—“The Plan,” with capital letters). Yesterday evening, under cover of darkness, she had crossed the Danube in a boat a little above Zimnitsa, where two weeks previously the heroic Fourteenth Division under General Dragomirov had completed a forced crossing of that formidable water barrier. This was the beginning of Turkish territory, the zone of military operations, and it would certainly be only too easy to slip up here. There were Cossack patrols roaming the roads, and if she ever let her guard down she was as good as done for—she would be packed off back to Bucharest in the blink of an eye. But Varya was a resourceful girl, so she had anticipated this and taken appropriate measures.
The discovery of a coaching inn in the Bulgarian village on the south bank of the Danube had been a really great stroke of luck, and after that things had gone from good to better; the landlord understood Russian and had promised to give her a reliable vodach—a guide—for only five rubles. Varya had bought wide trousers much like Turkish chalvars, a shirt, boots, a sleeveless jacket, and an idiotic cloth cap, and the change of clothes had instantly transformed her from a European lady into a skinny Bulgarian youth who would not arouse the slightest suspicion from any patrol. She had deliberately commissioned a roundabout route, avoiding the marching columns, in order to enter Tsarevitsy not from the north, but from the south. And there, in the general army headquarters, was Pyotr Yablokov, Varya’s . . . Well, actually, it is not quite clear who he is. Her fiancé? Her comrade? Her husband? Let us call him her former husband and future fiancé. And also—naturally—her comrade.
They had set out while it was still dark on a creaky, ramshackle carutza, a Romanian-style cart. Her vodach, Mitko, tight-lipped with a gray mustache, chewed tobacco all the while, constantly ejecting long streams of brown spittle onto the road. (Varya winced every time he did it.) At first he had crooned some exotic Balkan melody; then he had fallen silent and sunk into a reverie—it was clear enough now what ideas he had been entertaining.
He could have killed me, Varya thought with a shudder. Or even worse. And without the slightest problem—who would bother investigating in these parts? They would just blame those, what’s-their-names, Bashi-Bazouks.
But though things may have stopped short of murder, they had turned out quite badly enough. That traitor Mitko had led his female traveling companion to a tavern that more than anything else resembled a bandit’s den. He had seated her at a table and ordered some cheese and a jug of wine to be brought, while he himself turned back toward the door, gesturing as much as to say: I’ll be back in a moment. Varya had dashed after him, not wishing to be left alone in this dim, dirty, and distinctly malodorous sink of iniquity, but Mitko had said he needed to step outside—not to put too fine an edge on it—in order to satisfy a call of nature. When Varya did not understand, he had explained his meaning with a gesture and she had returned to her seat, covered in confusion.
The duration of the call of nature had exceeded all conceivable limits. Varya ate a little of the salty, unappetizing cheese, took a sip of the sour wine, and then, unable any longer to endure the curiosity that the fearsome denizens of the public house had begun to evince toward her person, she went out into the yard.
Outside the door, she froze in horror.
There was not a trace of the carutza or of the trunk with all her things that it contained. Her traveling medicine chest was in the trunk, and in the medicine chest, between the lint and the bandages, lay her passport and absolutely all her money.
Varya was just about to run out onto the road when the landlord, with a bright crimson nose and warts on his cheek, had come darting out of the korchma in his red shirt. He shouted angrily and gestured: Pay up first, and then you can leave. Varya went back inside because the landlord had frightened her and she had nothing with which to pay him. She sat down quietly in the corner and tried to think of what had happened as an adventure. But she failed miserably.
There was not a single woman in the tavern. The dirty, loud-mouthed yokels behaved quite unlike Russian peasants, who are quiet and inoffensive and talk among themselves in low voices until they get drunk, while these louts were bawling raucously as they downed red wine by the tankard, constantly erupting into loud and predatory (or so it seemed to Varya) laughter. At a long table on the far side of the room they were playing dice, breaking into uproarious disputes at every throw. On one occasion when they fell to quarrelling more loudly than usual, a small man who was extremely drunk was struck over the head with a clay tankard. He lay there sprawled under the table and nobody paid the slightest attention to him.
The landlord nodded in Varya’s direction and made some crude remark, at which the men sitting at nearby tables turned in her direction and roared with malevolent laughter. Varya squirmed and tugged her cap down over her eyes. Nobody else in the tavern was weari...
