The Turkish Gambit by Boris Akunin

Source of book: Borrowed from the library

 

I first read Boris Akunin eight years ago (where did the time go?), when I picked up The Winter Queen based on a recommendation from…somewhere? I can’t even remember. I enjoyed the book, and wanted to read more, but got sidetracked and forgot to return. 

 

This time, I continued with the Erast Fandorin series, which was still being written when I read the first one. I also took a look at the wikipedia article on the first so that I could remember the plot of the last one, since it had been eight years. 

 In looking back, I also ran across some of the backstory for the series, which explains why the books are so different from each other. Akunin decided there were essentially sixteen subgenres of detective stories, as well as sixteen character types. And thus, he wrote sixteen Fandorin novels, each in a different genre, and presumably (although I wasn’t able to find specifics) with each having a different character type for the villain or a supporting character. 

 

The Winter Queen was of the “conspiracy mystery” subgenre, with a secret anarchist society that the detective (Erast Fandorin, of course) must uncover. 

 

In contrast, The Turkish Gambit is a “spy novel,” set during the Russo-Turkish War in the 1870s. Haven’t heard of that war? Most Americans haven’t, even though it was in many ways the first of the dominoes to fall that led to the clusterfuck that is now the Middle East. (See David Fromkin’s excellent A Peace to End All Peace for a fairly exhaustive history.) Before Russia finally won the war (more or less), it had a near-catastrophic setback when it failed to occupy a strategically important town, underestimated the Turkish forces, and got its ass whipped. Akunin centers his story in this setting, and blames the events on a secret Turkish spy, whose identity will have to be uncovered by Fandorin.

 

The novel is interesting in that Fandorin is in many ways not the main character of the story. Rather, it is Varvara Suvorova, an impetuous young woman. The story is told in the third person, but very much from her point of view. Here is how the book describes her:

 

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. 

 

So, what has happened is that she, deeply involved in a revolutionary group, has fallen in love with another revolutionary who has now been drafted to serve as a cryptographer for the Russian army. Their status is…murky. 

And there, in the general army headquarters, was Pyotr Yablokov, Varya’s… Well, actually, it is not quite clear who he is. Her fiance? Her comrade? Her husband? Let us call him her former husband and future fiance. And also - naturally - her comrade. 

 

Essentially, they lived together for a while, platonically, then decided that they loved each other. Being revolutionaries, they eschewed “conventional” arrangements, until it appeared that marriage would be helpful for them to stay together, except he got drafted and they got separated, and now she is traveling disguised as a boy to the front thousands of miles from home.  

 

Her judgment isn’t the best, so she ends up needing rescuing by Fandorin, who is, as it turns out, on assignment from the secret police to find a Turkish spy. Varya hates him at first. But then, it appears that her fiance has been charged with treason when a message goes wrong, and she will be deported back home, unless she agrees to Fandorin’s request that she be his “secretary.” (Not that he expects her to do anything for him - he would just as soon she leave him alone so he can do his work without distraction.) But, they kind of form a connection, and eventually a partnership in counter-intelligence. By the end of the novel, she has grown up a lot, and has come to have doubts about her future with her fiance. 

 

The book is populated with a bunch of crazy characters, from the debonair French journalist, to the stolid Irish journalist, to the arrogant and unpredictable (and deeply in debt) Romanian Colonel, to Fandorin’s boisterous friend Count Zurov. And more. 

 

I won’t spoil the plot, obviously, but I can warn that, as with the other book, do not get attached to any character other than Fandorin, because many people are not who they seem, and many fail to survive until the end of the novel. 

 

The books are definitely a bit unusual. They show the influence of other detective writers - and there are a lot of sly references if you are paying attention. But they are distinctive, and have that Russian vibe of fatalism and senseless honor-based violence that you don’t see as much in, say, British mysteries. There are also plenty of references to Russian classics. 

 

Fandorin is also almost an anti-hero. He survives in part because of his good luck rather than his skills, he seems unengaged a lot of the time, even though that is in part an illusion. He is deeply cynical - although who can blame him, after the author killed his wife on their wedding day in the last book. 

 

I didn’t find the twists and turns that surprising in this book, but it did provide the requisite twists required by the genre. The interest came more from the characters and the military intelligence strategy, and the all-too-easy manipulation of the often-dense army leadership by a clever spy. That’s probably pretty realistic. 

 

I am thinking I should put this series in my regular rotation going forward, at least the ones which have been translated into English. They are a nice, somewhat lighter, addition to my reading.