Special Assignments
The Jack of Spades & The Decorator
by Boris Akunin
Anybody who has read the other four books (if you haven’t, you will need to do this first) will know all about
Erast Petrovich Fandorin. He isn’t just a pretty face, (although he has one of those, too), but a master of
oriental martial arts, speaker of several languages, many times decorated and a winner of all the games of chance
he plays. He is rich, and a Collegiate Counselor (aka special agent extraordinaire) but unlucky in love. Here he
has two missions to apply himself to, and they couldn’t be more different. First, he has to unmask and bring to
justice a confidence trickster calling himself Momos, or the Jack of Spades. For an encore, he must capture Jack
the Ripper!
I asked somebody if they thought that Akunin was a cozy writer, and I was told that soft-boiled was a better
description. After the light shenanigans of the first story, we get to the meat and potatoes of the second and
are very definitely not in cozy territory in any sense of the term. This is a particularly graphic tale, which
shows once again how Akunin likes to experiment writing stories echoing the various sub-genres of the crime novel.
They are exciting, and in the first case delightfully tongue-in-cheek which works very well with a chilly character
like Fandorin as protagonist. He is a difficult person to like who seems to be forever viewed through the opposite
end of a telescope, and so remains a distant, frosty star. In this book he has a new assistant in the persona of
Anisii Tulipov, who almost plays Watson to his Holmes. But this does not quite come off, as Tulipov lacks the
personality to be viewed close up, and is another, much fainter, distant star. This aside, these are wonderfully
inventive books that have given a new dimension to crime fiction, and best of all give a compelling picture of
Russia in the late 19th century from a Russian’s point of view. When I read them, I can’t help thinking that if
anybody else wrote them it would be all Siberia, salt mines and secret police but we are saved all this, and given
something else instead. |
The Book |
Weidenfeld & Nicholson (Orion) |
11 January 2007 |
Hardback |
9780297848226 |
Historical Crime - 1886 and 1889, Moscow, Russia |
More at
Amazon UK |
Excerpt |
NOTE: Not available at amazon US yet. Gory read. |
The Reviewer |
Rachel A Hyde |
Reviewed 2007 |
NOTE: |
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