An upside-down world

Last year, with William Ryan’s The Holy Thief, detective-fiction aficionados welcomed the thrillingly horrific first instalment in a new series set in 1930s Moscow.

Last year, with William Ryan’s The Holy Thief, detective-fiction aficionados welcomed the thrillingly horrific first instalment in a new series set in 1930s Moscow. In his first outing, Alexei Dmitrievich Korolev, a detective in the Moscow militia, managed to navigate the murky waters following the fall of Yagoda, head of the NKVD, and the onslaught of Stalin’s Great Purge.

Now, in the follow-up, Korolev has the dubious honour of being trusted as a safe pair of hands by Yagoda’s successor, Ezhov, who wants the police to investigate the supposed suicide of his ‘special friend’, a film production assistant. He cannot believe she killed herself and Korolev is despatched to the film-set in Odessa to find out.
Uncovering a murder is the least of Korolev’s problems. Was the mistress of the Commissar of State Security having an affair with a counter-revolutionary? If so, the person who reveals it to Ezhov is as good as dead. Add in complications that include gun-runners, turncoat Chekists and the Moscow King of Thieves himself, not to mention Korolev’s old neighbour, Isaac Babel, always ideologically unsound, and there appears to be no way of solving the crime without risking dozens of lives.

The Holy Thief was both bleak and savage — the opening scene, describing the torture of a young woman, is not one I would willingly read again. In an interesting change of pace which suggests the author has more than a formulaic series planned, in this second instalment Ryan has produced a film-noir-ish rewrite of the old-fashioned locked-room mystery, complete with creepily gripping, and ultimately gruesome, cops and robbers chase through the great catacombs on which Odessa sits, while Stalin’s man-made terror-famine, which scorched through the Ukraine half a decade before the book opens, is only gestured at, in elliptical speech and ultimately in the characters’ motivations.