Creator: Carol Adlam
Jonathan Cape, June 2024
The creator of this title has a curriculum vitae that would put almost all creative talents to shame: “Carol Adlam holds a PhD in Russian and an MA in Illustration from the Cambridge School of Art. She won a World Illustration Award in 2018, and was shortlisted in both 2016 and 2015. She was a writer-in-residence at the University of St Andrews in 2020 and a Visiting Fellow at the University of Cambridge in 2021.”
Ms Adlam is plainly no academic slouch. Here is the publisher’s promotional copy:
“In this stunning reimagining of a nineteenth-century Russian crime thriller from the world of Dostoevsky, Carol Adlam presents Charlie Fox, stunt journalist, magician, liar and thief, who reluctantly returns to her hometown of Nowheregrad to investigate the murder of Elena Ruslanova, daughter of a fabulously wealthy glass manufacturer.
“In Nowheregrad Charlie finds herself caught up in a multi-layered story that is told through the richly varied visual devices of the time. With the unwitting assistance of her lover, Netochka, Charlie unravels the mystery of the Bobrov family, only to face the truth about herself.
“Exquisitely drawn and compellingly told, Adlam’s complex, elegant narrative brings to life the lost legacies of early crime fiction and the first women journalists and detectives.“
“Exquisite” is the correct term. Each panel could be its own Delft blue ceramic tile, beautiful and pristine. The negative space throughout the book suggests snow, the chill of a distant and unfriendly Russian province. There is very little to flaw in respect of the way this title is presented. Even beyond the pale, luminous art, the paper quality and the sheer heft of the book conveys that no expense was spared in putting this title together. Perhaps the only thing from the artistic perspective which even vaguely disappoints is the use of Latin script throughout the book. Cyrillic has an alien charm to people who are not familiar with it (the best description of that phenomenon is on Wikipedia – Faux Cyrillic – Wikipedia ) and having the lead character, Charlotte Ivanovna Feniksova (also known as Charlie Fox), march through the rickety bleached streets of Nowheregrad surrounded by Cyrillic signs would have very quickly cast us back to 1876 Tsarist Russia.
The Guardian‘s review of this title was ebullient. But even The Guardian’s reviewer, Rachel Cooke, had to confess, “I must admit that some of Adlam’s other allusions – including a dream of Charlotta’s that’s taken from a passage in Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin – passed me by at first. No matter… It has an exciting – occasionally hard-to-follow – plot, in which Fox, a magician and a liar as well as newspaper reporter, grudgingly returns to her home town of Nowheregrad to investigate the murder of Elena Ruslanova, the daughter of a wealthy glass manufacturer.”
[our emphasis.]
And at Bookmunch ( “Should be twice its current length” – The Russian Detective by Carol Adlam – Bookmunch ) an anonymous critic says:
“But, for this reader at least, it was a mite too brisk and there are occasions throughout the rest of the book (when Charlie has a relationship with a maid, for example) where you think – just let things breathe for a minute, not everything has to happen on one page, please make sure to bring all of the readers along with you.”
Herein lies the problem. The plot is indeed very hard to follow. We are so distracted by the dazzling art, we do not at first recognise that the story dips and whirls like a murmuration of swallows: a delight to behold, but nigh impossible to fathom. We have read this title five times so far, not in the hope of eking out more wonder from the text, but just to try and understand what on earth is going on. In blending the source material (Chekhov, Dostoevsky), and truncating the story so it is not, in fact, War and Peace, Ms Adlam loses those of us who do not have an PhD in Russian.
The twist at the end however is not startling. Charlie is the illegitimate sister of a murderous sociopathic aristocrat? But why? It seems a loose bow at the end of an Alexandrian knot. And why does Charlie run away at the end, off to Siberia on a balloon? Is there something Russian about all of this which we are missing?
As source material for an illustrator, The Russian Detective is a masterclass. As a text, it demonstrates that even the cleverest of writers can make her work inadvertently inaccessible: a writer who sticks too close to the source material, who revels in its elegance, can leave her audience very far behind in the pale snow, lost and bewildered.
