Boris Akunin: The bookish detective

Boris Akunin's distinctive crime series, set in 19th-century Russia and featuring detective Erast Fandorin, has been a huge success in his native country and has also got off to a stellar start in the UK. The first in the series, The Winter Queen, was a BBC Radio 4 "Book at Bedtime" and was shortlisted for the CWA's Gold Dagger award.

The new novel, Leviathan, takes Fandorin onto a grand steamship on the trail of a murderer known to be among the passengers.

"My intention was to create a kind of encyclopedia of different subgenres of the crime novel. Each one of my books is distinctly different: The Winter Queen is a romantic adventure; Leviathan is a hermetical detective story, a homage to Agatha Christie; The Turkish Gambit (next in the series) is a spy thriller. Later there is also a maniac thriller, a picaresque novel, a political thriller etc.

"It's not so much a matter of literary influences as playing literary puzzles. I like to improvise with situations and characters familiar to readers from other books. It gives me a chance to amuse readers, to pass into a wider, hypertextual dimension, sometimes to fool my readers--because, recognising the literary source, they expect one thing, but I give the familiar story an entirely different twist. It's like playing ping-pong with another book. If the reader is able to see both players, watching is much more fun, isn't it?

"I decided on 19th-century Russia as my setting because I love the grand literary style of the period. I was brought up on Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov. Their characters are more alive for me than many of the people I encounter in real life. I also feel a kind of nostalgia for the epoch when mankind believed in the all-powerfulness of logic and technical progress.

"Erast Fandorin is unlike James Bond, Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot. They are static, always the same. My protagonist is growing, changing, getting older (and eventually old). Taken as a whole the series is the story of a man's life, its spring, summer, autumn, winter.

"In Leviathan, the ship is a classic location for a hermetical detective novel. Of course I had Death on the Nile in mind, but there are other allusions too. Disclosing them would be like revealing the culprit, so I'll abstain. I do a lot of preparatory work before sitting down to write: reading memoirs and leafing through old, brittle newspapers and archive documents is the best part of my trade.

"In the beginning the series was a disaster in Russia. Nobody wanted to buy those queer books: for intellectuals they were too simple, for fans of mass market fiction they were too literary. After the fourth novel my publisher was losing hope, despite a stack of wonderful reviews. Then the fifth title came out and a real tsunami rose. All the previous novels became bestsellers, I became the media's darling, everyone wanted to do film and TV adaptations.

"So far in Russia alone my books have sold nine million copies. Sometimes I have a suspicion that it is all a dream, that I am going to wake up and laugh at this crazy fantasy."

* Boris Akunin (translated by Andrew Bromfield) Leviathan (Weidenfeld&Nicolson, 1st April, h/b, £9.99, 0297645528)