Los Angeles, May 30: Bond. James Bond. Make room for another international man of mystery: Fandorin. Erast Petrovich Fandorin. And hold the martinis -- this guy sips borscht. Also garage the Aston Martin. Fandorin takes trains and troikas. He also wears whalebone corsets, endures harsh Russian winters and is puppy dog-like in his devotion to the czar circa 1876.
Fandorin is a big hit back east -- Moscow and the provincial capitals of the former Soviet Union plus Germany and Japan.

Boris Akunin's 10 novels about the czarist super-sleuth have sold 8 million copies since the character first made his appearance in the mid-1990s and Akunin is credited with creating a new genre in Russian literature. But he is only now being translated into English with "The Winter Queen."
This gives the bearded, deliberately droll Akunin, who in real life is Georgian-born, Moscow-raised philologist, translator and critic Grigory Chkhartishvili, a chance to smile as he basks for the first time in the California sun.
"I feel like I am at beach. I don't usually make book tours, but this one is different," he said two hours after arriving in Los Angeles for the first time.
Detective stories were never big in the old Soviet Union, because as Akunin notes, crime officially did not exist under communism. Private detectives, of course, were verboten and KGB men were debatable role models.
Bureau Report