Erast Fandorin

Erast Fandorin

Erast Petrovich Fandorin (Russian: Эраст Петрович Фандорин) is a fictional 19th-century Russian detective and the hero of a series of Russian historical detective novels by Boris Akunin.

The first Fandorin novel was published in Russia in 1998, and the latest was published in December 2009. More than 15 million copies of Fandorin novels have been sold as of May 2006, even though the novels were freely available from many Russian web-sites and the hard-copies were relatively expensive by Russian standards. New books in the Fandorin series typically sell over 200,000 copies in the first week alone, with an unparalleled (for mystery novels) first edition of 50,000 copies for the first books to 500,000 copies for the last.

In Russia, the Fandorin series rivals The Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter in popularity. The English translations of the novels have been critically acclaimed by, among others, Ruth Rendell.