We can tell that pastiche is very much on Russian crime writer Akunin’s mind from the opening pages of the second of his novels to be published in Britain, when we meet a Parisian manservant called Marcel Proust and a detective with the unfortunate, although apt name of Gauche. Proust himself is dead, one of 10 corpses discovered in the mansion of a wealthy expatriate collector, Lord Littleby. It appears that all have been poisoned, with the exception of Littleby himself, who has had his head stoved in, possibly with a golden statue of Shiva taken from the scene of the crime. But the pastiche gets under way in earnest when a tiny brooch leads Gauche to the luxury Franco-British liner the Leviathan, to which he believes the murderer has absconded. With Gauche playing the part of the bumbling, pompous sleuth in a witty version of Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile, the scene is set for the Poirot-style entrance of Erast P Fandorin, the hero of Akunin’s novel The Winter Queen. In between bouts of tricycling round the deck wearing gutta-percha shoes, Fandorin quickly gets to grips with the assorted suspects, who include an English baronet, an old maid, a peculiarly embarrassable Japanese man and a hypochondriac German woman. Needless to say, it doesn’t take long before the bodies start piling up, with only Fandorin’s razor-sharp powers of observation and deduction to prevent the entire ship from drowning in a sea of blood. Homage to a master this may be; it’s also terrific and hugely diverting stuff.

MURDER ON THE LEVIATHAN by Boris Akunin

(Phoenix £6.99)

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