The detective yarn is back again, this time in a historical guise. Recent bestsellers included books in which Erast Fandorin, Amelia Peabody and Aristotle solved murders in Tsarist Russia, pre-World War II Egypt and ancient Greece.
Why have these books become so popular? The historical mystery is for those who want a dash of something more than the Aristotelian beginning, middle and end. History takes the reader, mired in the mundane world of making money amid a loss of civility and a longing for a genteel life, to a rich world of ideas and momentous events.

The Da Vinci Code opened the floodgates to two types of mysteries that use history. In the first type, history plays a supporting role to an action-laden mystery. Dan Brown or Steve Berry’s novels span the historical and contemporary eras where the protagonists and the mysterious villains are locked in a race to find the holy grail (a crystal or a book); to succeed, they have to decipher some element of history — a text or paintings.

In the second type of mystery, history is the star. Writers like Boris Akunin (a pseudonym for Grigory Chkhartishvili) recreate the classic detective mystery genre in historical settings — which we call the historical murder mystery. Fandorin is a fop who has astounding powers of deduction, the fighting skills of a samurai and faithfully practices pranayam — which allows him to hold his breath and escape from poison gas in one of the adventures. The cynical yet indulgent omniscience of Akunin who produces a book in six weeks (do I hear groans and gnashing of teeth from writers?) takes us on a breathtaking gallop through adventures with stern revolutionaries, dazzling feminist damsels and amoral adversaries.

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