‘A bad person not without certain principles’: Russian Detective Fiction and B. Akunin,

This article is divided into two parts: the first draws a brief outline of the history of Russian detective fiction up to the present day. The second part is devoted to the analysis of the «Fandorin cycle», a series of crime novels published from the end of the 1990 which opened a new season in Russian detective fiction. Under the baffling pseudonym of B.Akunin hides Grigorij Cchartišvili (born in 1956), a scholar author of a ponderous book on "The Writer and Suicide" (1999) and translator from Japanese of a number of novels and essays. The action covers a time span from 1876 to 1911 and takes place both in Russia and abroad. The protagonist of the novels is «an unlikely hybrid of Sherlock Holmes and a Japanese samurai […] [with] a distinctly Bondian feel». As the author declares on the back cover of his books, the Fandorin cycle contains «all the genres of the classical crime novel». It is a post-modern «literary bricolage of re-worked scenes, motifs, characters, and styles» taken from classical Russian and European literature which offers ample enjoyment for all kinds of readership.