A COUPLE OF WEEKS AGO the Ukrainian mafia, broadly defined, paid Boris Akunin an elaborate compliment. It produced a book bearing his name. He didn’t write a word of it, but someone did, by all accounts extremely badly. It has sold a few thousand copies and put Akunin in illustrious company: the Kievan mob is also doing a brisk trade in something called The Last Merovingian, “by” Dan (da Vinci) Brown.

Akunin relates this story indulgently, as well he might. Any damage being done to his reputation by Ukrainian conmen will be easily outweighed by the English publication of The Death of Achilles, the fourth translated volume in a series starring a foppish but tungsten-tipped tsarist detective who has already made Akunin rich, envied, happy and free to roam the real world in as much style as he used to roam the literary one.

For those who haven’t heard of this prodigiously productive pioneer of period post-Soviet crime fiction, a little background: he wrote his first novel, in six weeks flat, in 1998. He has since produced ten more in one series, four in two others and three in a fourth, the latter all written on a three-month P & O cruise last year. He writes in a blur of speed: two hours a day, after which he reckons to have ten typewritten pages ready for his publisher. He then reads (strictly nonfiction), drinks with friends and plays computer games.

Akunin’s finest creation and the star of his first 11 titles is Erast Fandorin — genius, gentleman, polyglot, kickboxer and all-round inordinately lucky bloke. In Russia, three Fandorin books have been made into films so far and two of them into television series as well. Outside Russia, Fandorin is coming sooner or later to a screen near you; Paul Verhoeven, who directed the notorious Basic Instinct, has the rights.

Whatever you make of his writing, Akunin (real name: Grigory Chkartashvili) is a phenomenon; the only Russian writer to reach a mass audience abroad as well as domestically since the Soviet collapse. Each of his three titles already out in English (The Winter Queen, Murder on the Leviathan and Turkish Gambit) has sold more than 50,000 copies in the UK alone. In Russia, meanwhile, he has shifted more than 10 million books in seven years, and his success there says much about his perspicacity but even more about his country. It was all minutely planned on a premise that the new Russia has produced a new type of Russian who craves a new type of reading. That’s the perspicacity bit.

And then the premise turned out to be correct. The middle class emerging from perestroika and the Yeltsin mess had Tolstoy and Dostoevsky on the one hand and pulp fiction on the other, but nothing in between.

“In Russia nowadays the middle class is the revolutionary class,” Akunin says. “It did not exist before. It’s very energetic, very active and in need of everything a class needs, like ideology, ethics, aesthetics and, well, easy reading.”

He’s 49, married without kids, and looks in profile like a slimline, youthful Alfred Hitchcock. He talks quietly, with the fluency and concision of someone who’s had time to organise what’s in his head.

We meet not in Moscow, where he lives, but in London, where he has been driven nuts all morning by a demolition crew bringing down an office block next to his corporate apartment near St Paul’s. He peers round a blind and mutters that he “never thought British workmen could be so industrious”. Not that he has any such illusions about his fellow writers. Not any more.

When he identified the gap in the Russian book market that he has since filled, it was the mid-1990s. He was an intellectual, supplementing a laughable wage as a literary editor by translating foreign fiction into Russian at ten pages an hour. Loath to sully his own keyboard with the breathless whodunnits he had in mind, he asked his mates to give them a try. “They were talented writers, poets, critics, and at first I simply wanted to organise them to write this sort of fiction . . . But these Russian writers, they are so lazy.”

So he offered to construct their plots for them. Still no takers. “After a while I’d had enough and decided to set an example, to write just one novel in the style that I mean, and that is how the first one appeared.”

Russia has plenty of crime and crime writers, but no one had come up with anything like the Holmes-Bond-Oblonsky mix that is Fandorin.

Akunin thinks this is because his creation embodies so much that modern Russians aren’t. He’s “understated, dignified, reserved”. He’s also the straight-up action hero whom Akunin never found in his own voracious reading of the Russian classics as a boy, unable to pick the wrong pistol in a duel and so spiffing at martial arts (picked up on a six-year attachment to the Russian Embassy in Tokyo from which he returns at the beginning of The Death of Achilles) that he can do back-flips off the ceiling and whack you in the back of the neck on his way down.

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