Everyone knows – even if they haven’t actually read them – about the fat novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy. But The Russian Detective, a remarkable new graphic novel by Carol Adlam, takes its inspiration from more obscure sources. For some years, Adlam, an associate professor in the Nottingham School of Art and Design at Nottingham Trent University, and Claire Whitehead, a reader in modern languages at the University of St Andrew’s, have been working together on the Lost Detective Project: a collaboration that draws on the work of long-forgotten writers of crime fiction who were contemporaries of Dostoevsky. As part of this project, Adlam has created several cross-media adaptations of their stories, of which The Russian Detective is one – and it could not be more rich or more beautiful if it tried. This is a book that repays multiple readings (and, for added pleasure, perhaps a little background reading).
The fun starts with its endpapers: in the window of a fishmonger hang some huge red herrings. Take this as a warning. Adlam’s book has tons of charm, not least its journalist-detective heroine, Charlotta Ivanovna, AKA Charlie Fox, a character she has described as a hybrid of Kate Warne, America’s first female detective (Warne, who died in 1868, worked for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency), and the governess of the same name in Chekhov’s play The Cherry Orchard (a gun-carrying eccentric who performs dramatic parlour tricks). But it’s also a complicatedly plotted, intertextual visual feast: think I-Spy Russian Literature. I noted with a smile Dostoevsky’s walk-on part as a grumpy rail passenger, and the seamstress whose clients include a Mrs Karenina. But 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. The book works on a more superficial level, too: a narrative that takes you back to the deep pleasures of childhood reading (I wonder if Adlam read Joan Aiken as a child, for it was Aiken as much as any Russian that I thought of as I turned its pages). 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. Here are footprints in blanketed snow, a little dog called Igoyok, a hot air balloon headed for Siberia, glamorous masked balls, Orthodox priests and a magic lantern theatre.
But what really sets this exquisite book apart is its illustrations, so deeply atmospheric and so inordinately beautiful. Adlam is a deft caricaturist, an artist who can do a lot with a nose or a cheekbone. But this is as nothing to the way she incorporates different visual forms into her narrative, turning it, almost museum-like, into a luxuriant historical album. Woodcuts, newspaper cuttings, photogravure, even a thaumatrope: it feels like there’s nothing she cannot do with her pen and her paintbrush – and if you fall for her talent as I have, and want to know more about the sources on which she has drawn so brilliantly, I recommend you look up a fascinating conversation from 2023 between her and Claire Whitehead in the academic journal Adaptation.
• The Russian Detective by Carol Adlam is published by Jonathan Cape (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
