PELAGIA & THE WHITE BULLDOG
by Boris Akunin
Weidenfeld £12.99 pp304

The year is 1902 and the first victim of a serial killer in Vienna is the emperor’s current favourite: not a woman, but a snake called Hildegard. The body of the anaconda has been cut into three pieces in her enclosure in the zoo, presenting Inspector Oskar Rheinhardt with a very unusual problem. Scarcely has he examined the corpse and talked to her dazed keeper, however, than he is called to a much more brutal crime scene in a brothel, where four women have been savagely murdered.

Soon there are more deaths in Frank Tallis’s Vienna Blood, each more baroque than the one before. Realising he is up against something outside normal experience, Rheinhardt enlists his friend Max Liebermann, a doctor and follower of Freud, who has helped him previously by applying the new discipline of psychoanalysis to puzzling crimes. At first neither man can discern a pattern in the murders, other than the certain knowledge that the killer will strike again. The pressures of investigating in a bitterly cold Viennese winter, without modern forensic tools, are brilliantly conveyed.

This is the second novel in the Liebermann series and it lives up to the promise of Tallis’s earlier book, Mortal Mischief. At a time when readers know just about every forensic trick, Tallis cleverly takes us back to a moment poised between discredited Victorian theories about criminology and exciting new ideas about the unconscious. Liebermann’s own dilemma, whether to go ahead with a marriage he is unsure about, signals the rise of individualism even in the apparently settled society of prewar Vienna, while the link between the murders and a secret society dedicated to German nationalism prefigures the century’s two great wars.

Boris Akunin is well known as the author of a series of acclaimed crime novels featuring Russian diplomat Erast Fandorin. The Fandorin novels are a delight, cunning and completely original, with one of the most enigmatic protagonists in contemporary crime fiction. Now Akunin has branched out, introducing a new amateur detective in the form of a nun, Sister Pelagia. Like the Fandorin novels, Pelagia & The White Bulldog (translated by Andrew Bromfield) is set in the 19th century and evokes a lost world. The population of the small Russian town of Zavolzhsk is thrown into uproar by the arrival from St Petersburg of a Synodical Inspector, charged with investigating reports of pagan practices. Pelagia is drawn into this business when the Bishop of Zavolzhsk sends her to investigate an attempt to destroy three rare white bulldogs bred by his aunt.

Sadly, the novel has none of the bite of the Fandorin series, tipping over into archness and self- indulgence. It is muddled and overcomplicated, as Akunin more or less admits by advising readers that an entire chapter may be skipped. Fans of Fandorin might be well advised to apply this principle to the Sister Pelagia series.

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