Books: Murder Most Exotic

America is a stoutly murderous nation--the FBI reports we had 16,204 homicides in 2002. That's not exactly something to be proud of, but you'd think it would at least give us an edge in one of our prized national exports, the mystery novel. Agatha Christie aside, we pretty much owned the genre for a goodly slice of the 20th century. But it's time to admit that the cutting edge of mystery writing has shifted overseas. Damned outsourcing--where will it end?

Sweden's murder rate, for example (167 in 2001), is downright puny compared with ours, but that hasn't stopped Henning Mankell. His latest novel, The Return of the Dancing Master (New Press; 391 pages), gives homicide a moody elegance. The victim, Herbert Molin, was a retired police officer with a fondness for jigsaw puzzles who lived in a remote, wooded part of the country. So why would somebody take the trouble to whip every inch of skin off his back and the soles of his feet? And why would that person leave behind bloody footprints in the pattern of a tango step at the crime scene?

That's for phlegmatic Swedish policeman Stefan Lindman to discover. Lindman is struggling with his own doom--he has been diagnosed with cancer--but he's dogged in his pursuit of an investigation that drags him into the world of Swedish Nazis and the eerie quiet of the deep Scandinavian countryside, where distances are vast and detectives few.

Russia (32,285 homicides in 2002) can lay claim to a worse murder rate than our own, and Boris Akunin takes full advantage of it. His fiendishly witty Murder on the Leviathan (Random House; 223 pages) begins with 10 of them: the entire household of one Lord Littleby has been slaughtered by means of mysterious injections, and Littleby's skull has been bashed in. To add insult to injury, his precious golden statue of the Hindu god Shiva has been stolen. Akunin is the pen name of a Russian academic whose mysteries--all starring stuttering, downy-cheeked young detective Erast Fandorin--are wildly popular in his country and are just catching on here.

The Littleby case is not in Fandorin's jurisdiction, but he becomes entangled in it aboard the Leviathan, a massive luxury liner cruising to Calcutta; Littleby's killer is known to be aboard, as is the Parisian inspector following his or her trail. All that is the setup for a ravishing jewel box of a mystery--the lock of which Fandorin gingerly, joyfully picks--and an homage to Christie, whose Death on the Nile is the mother ship of all nautical mysteries. Akunin also knows his Arthur Conan Doyle, and his Fandorin likes to indulge in showy displays of Holmesian observation, especially when lady passengers are around. "I have developed my powers of observation and analysis with the help of special exercises," he preens. "Usually a single insignificant detail is enough for me to recreate the entire p-picture." Fandorin is Sherlock Holmes as an endearing, overeager wonk.