Russian crime writer Boris Akunin has often mixed current intrigues into his historical thrillers, but this latest work is very eerie. ‘Special Assignments: The Further Adventures of Erast Fandorin’ is a double treat for fans perhaps disappointed by the author’s recent wordy, underwhelming ‘Pelagia and the White Bulldog’ as it contains two episodes concerning Akunin’s nineteenth-century investigator. The two halves make for very different tales, both involving suspects called Jack.
The first is what could be best termed a divertissement, with Fandorin up against the Jack of Spades, a swindler taking Moscow to the cleaners who shares some of Fandorin’s strengths: confidence, guile and a knack for disguise. It also introduces us to our supersleuth’s new sidekick, an awkward youth called Anisii Tulipov, who features still further in the second narrative. And it’s this story that is so disturbing.
Akunin posits that a Russian medical student – a suspect in the original Jack the Ripper investigation – returns from London to Moscow. While the author matches fiction to historical speculation, coincidences with recent events here are unnerving. One of the killings in the book is of a pregnant prostitute; on the same day I read that disturbing passage, it was reported that one of the Ipswich victims was pregnant. Broadcasters might drop TV screenings of ‘The Poseidon Adventure’ if there’s a terrible accident at sea; literature’s permanence – even purportedly light entertainment such as this – allows us to contemplate the darkest aspects of human nature in perpetuity.
