Success translates

New York

It’s 1876 and Erast Petrovich Fandorin is working as a low-level clerk in the Criminal Investigation Division of the Moscow Police Department. But the very public suicide of a wealthy heir will soon lead the ambitious 20-year-old on the trail of a shadowy organization bent on world domination. Using luck, pluck, a sharp intuitive sense and some tools of the new forensic sciences, Fandorin crushes the plot and lives to pursue more evildoers another day.

Fandorin’s wild exploits, which seem heavily influenced by the florid Victorianism of Wilkie Collins and the hairbreadth escapes of “The Wild, Wild West,” are the creation of Boris Akunin, the Russian author who has written 10 crime novels featuring the young sleuth -- a series that has been hugely successful in Europe, where it has sold more than 8 million copies. And now Fandorin is available in America.

While “The Winter Queen,” published this month by Random House, is the first of Akunin’s books to appear in English, the new title has already been optioned for the screen by director Paul Verhoeven (“Basic Instinct”).

Akunin’s work is only the latest in a mini-wave of foreign crime writers whose books are receiving killer reviews and strong stateside sales. “The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency,” the first in a series of novels written by Scotsman Alexander McCall Smith about a female detective from Botswana, has, with nearly a half-million copies in print, become one of the major publishing phenomena of the decade. And Swedish author Henning Mankell -- whose books about a phlegmatic detective named Kurt Wallandar have sold more than 12 million copies in Europe -- has received unanimous raves in this country and is attracting serious reader attention thanks to a series of paperback editions released by Black Lizard Press.

“These books take readers into a culture they don’t know much about,” says Barry Martin, co-owner of Book ‘Em Mysteries in South Pasadena. “They are also character-driven. They aren’t your classic whodunits; you’re investing yourself in the character.”

The popular problem solver

The 800-pound gorilla of the group is the McCall Smith series, featuring Precious Ramotswe, who opens a detective agency with the proceeds from the sale of 180 cattle left to her by her father. More a problem solver than a detective -- she deals with errant husbands, missing children and local con men -- Ramotswe’s whimsical, culturally quirky adventures are a word-of-mouth success story driven by independent booksellers, who have been behind the series since the first novel was published by Columbia University Press in 1998 (the rights were later sold to Anchor Books).

Sales of the four-book series -- the newest, “The Kalahari Typing School for Men,” published in April -- also spiked when the first novel was chosen as a selection by the “Today Show” book club. And now “The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency” has also been optioned for the screen by director Anthony Minghella (“The English Patient”). The books are also doing well in Australia and Britain and have been published in 15 other languages.

“It seems to me the readers have gotten very involved with the characters and are responding to their moral qualities,” said McCall Smith by phone from Miami Beach, where he was on a book tour. “In Precious, these books are about a very decent and direct person. I think that’s what’s striking a chord.”

His instincts seem to be right on the mark.

“The books are very charming and the character is one every one of us would want to know,” said Meg Keenan of New Orleans’ Maple Street Book Shop, which has sold more books by McCall Smith over the past two years than any other author. “And although they’re simply written, they deal with very big issues: right and wrong, moral responsibility. They’re very humorous, very witty. And they feed a need to learn more about other cultures.”

Indeed, McCall Smith says he had just wanted to write “a small book” about Botswana, where he had lived, for his existing readership. But the basic decency of his characters launched it into another realm.

“Most people are, at heart, well-disposed to their fellow people, and they think this emphasis on a cynical approach to life isn’t what they’re about. That’s why they like characters who treat each other with moral courtesy. You do find that in Botswana,” he says. “People have the time for each other; it’s quite striking.”

Light years removed from the charm of Precious Ramotswe are Mankell’s Kurt Wallandar books, which follow the trials and tribulations of a detective in the southern Swedish city of Ystad. In addition to his police duties, Wallandar is beset by a father sliding into dementia, an unstable daughter, rocky romantic relationships and the onset of diabetes.

Essentially police procedurals, the novels (there are now six in English) also have a sociopolitical context as Wallandar is forced to deal with a rising tide of immigration and crime, problems new to his native land. In “One Step Behind,” for example, the latest Mankell to appear in paperback, Wallandar tries to find out why a Dominican woman has killed herself. His investigation ultimately uncovers corruption and depravity at the highest levels of Swedish society.

The Wallandar books are interesting for “the kind of tension Mankell keeps between the kitchen-sink ordinariness of the detective life, and the extraordinary things that happen,” says Ebba Segerberg, who has translated two of Mankell’s books into English and is working on a third. “It is the socially critical police novel. There is something Swedish about that kind of book, the understated, not dreary, but realist look at society and the world.”

Others find the character himself to be driving the appeal. “There’s a quietness and a doggedness” that make him interesting, says Georgie Lewis, who works for Powells.com, an online bookseller in Portland, Ore. “He’s unpretentious. The books remind me of downbeat European crime films like ‘The Vanishing’ and ‘Insomnia.’ ”

This sober style is a 180-degree departure from the flamboyant nature of the Fandorin novels. Speaking in fluent English during a recent publicity tour, Akunin, a translator of Japanese literature whose real name is Grigory Chkhartishvili, said he decided to begin the series after he discovered his wife hiding the cover of a trashy crime novel she was reading on the Moscow subway. He simply wanted to write something his wife wouldn’t be embarrassed to read.

The winning combination

“Fandorin combines three historical types which I find most attractive: the Russian intelligentsia, which is gone; the British gentleman, which is gone; and the Japanese samurai, which is also gone,” says Akunin.

He chose to write about the 1870s because “I like the way they dressed, the artifacts they used, the way they behaved, and I feel a certain kind of nostalgia for that period when people used to believe in the all-powerfulness of the human mind, and they believed paradise on Earth could be built very quickly. It’s also crucial for me that it was the epoch when Russian literature was great.”

In fact, Fandorin is based partially on characters from classic Russian writers like Dostoevsky, Bulgakov and Lermontov. The books are also filled with literary jokes and allusions, and Akunin admits that the series is “an encyclopedia of different genre novels. The first book is romantic; the second (due next February), a spy thriller; and the third an Agatha Christie-type thriller.”

If this sounds over-determined, it’s not. “The Winter Queen” reads as if it were adapted from a movie serial, with an on-the-edge-of-your-seat plot device ending almost every chapter. They’re old-fashioned in a very specific sense, and that’s the point.

Akunin sees today’s Russia at the same kind of crossroads it encountered in the 1870s, a period of reform that preceded the country’s slide into anarchism and Bolshevism. In a contemporary culture marked by organized crime, super-rich vulgarians and political opportunism, Akunin hopes that Russian kids will want “to be like Fandorin, and not like other heroes they see in the movies or on TV, whether the cops or the mob, they both look equally disgusting. And I think Fandorin has become so popular not because he’s similar to modern Russians, but quite the opposite. The key word is dignity.”

Will themes concerned with modern-day Russia play to an American audience? If the successes of McCall Smith and Mankell are any indication, Fandorin will have a long shelf life.