Detective work

What’s the story of The Russian Detective?

It’s about Charlie Fox, a liar, magician and undercover journalist. She’s sent to a town in Imperial Russia to solve a locked room murder mystery and solves not just the murder, but the riddle of who she is herself. The story of the killing is retold from multiple different angles through a mixture of different visual languages and each time something different is revealed.

I really set out, if it doesn’t sound immodest, to make the book as beautiful as possible” — Carol Adlam

When did this project begin?

I used to be a lecturer in Russian and in 2019 a former colleague of mine got in touch to say she was working on a book of early Russian crime fiction, from 1863 to 1917, all completely unknown and untranslated. I did the book cover and an exhibition illustrating some of the stories and then I took one of the texts, by a man called Semyon Panov, called Murder at the Ball, from 1876 and started creating my own story around it and putting in place a female protagonist.

Where did the character of Charlie come from?

Right at the beginning she says, “Where I come from, who I am, nobody knows”, which is a line from Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, from a character who has a walk-on part as a governess and a magician. She’s a character I fell in love with many years ago as a student and always thought somebody should write a book with her as the lead character.

And why did you make her a journalist?

I was reading about the early stories of women in journalism, when there was a porous boundary between journalism and detective work. Officially, there were no female detectives in Russia at this time, but there were many undercover journalists, who would go in disguise and crack sex trafficking rings and that sort of thing. So that’s where Charlie came from, and she was also inspired by US journalists like Nellie Bly and people like Kate Warne, the first female detective in the States. I decided that she would be fundamentally amoral, doing whatever was necessary to get to the truth.

The book is clearly a labour of love…

I wanted it to be something you want to revisit, and I started to think about it as a sort of performance. So one of the centrepieces is a peep show full of highly coloured pictures and I actually made a four foot-deep real world version of it that I then photographed for the book [pictured top right]. There’s one page which has an anamorphic distortion on it which you can only make out if you place a mirrored tube on it, a 19th century device called the Magic Mirror. I really set out, if it doesn’t sound immodest, to make the book as beautiful as possible. I wanted to say something about artwork that shows craft and labour and deliberation. Too often comics get associated with very rapid throwaway visual communication, and I’m interested in stuff that people will linger on a bit.

The Russian Detective is published by Jonathan Cape at £20. Carol Adlam is running a ‘How to be a graphic novelist’ class for DG on 28th September 2024, with discounted tickets for subscribers, see slow-journalism.com/classes for details

Posted on Monday, June 24th, 2024 - Categories: #54 - Jan-Mar 2024, App Issues.