Salon

Just in time for Halloween, CoLibri, an imprint of the well-established Inostranka publishing house, launched its new nonfiction line the other week with an fittingly spooky book called "Cemetery Tales" (Kladbishchenskiye Istorii). On its cover, a tombstone bears two names: Boris Akunin and Grigory Chkhartishvili.

It has long ceased to be a secret that Akunin and Chkhartishvili are one and the same person. But while Chkhartishvili is a literary scholar, a translator of Japanese and English prose, and an essayist, as Akunin, he writes something quite different: crime stories with an intellectual twist, usually set in the past. The authors' first joint project -- apart from being a cunning marketing ploy -- is an interesting expression of what some critics jokingly call literary schizophrenia.

The book is divided into six sections, each dealing with a famous cemetery, whether in Moscow, London, New York, Paris, Yokohama or Jerusalem. The first half of each entry consists of an essay by Chkhartishvili dedicated to the cemetery: its legends, its history, its famous dead. He is not interested in graveyards that are currently active. "I am not a necrophiliac," he writes. "I am a lover of cemeteries."

Akunin takes charge of the second half of each entry with six short novellas about ghosts and vampires. At Moscow's Donskoye Cemetery, the ghost is Saltychikha, the notoriously rich lady of the 18th century who tortured and killed hundreds of her female serfs. At London's Highgate Cemetery, the vampire is, understandably, its most famous tenant, Karl Marx. Yet another story features an audacious grave robber, a former student of literature obsessed with Oscar Wilde. Akunin fans will be happy to know that detective Erast Fandorin makes an appearance in the Japan segment.

In spite of its monumental look, the book is quite short -- an hour's read, give or take. The informative half of each section is usually interesting, though lopsided as a rule, since Chkhartishvili is more fascinated by his own relationship with the cemetery than the cemetery itself. The novellas are gripping and inventive, if a bit schematic, with their low point being Fandorin's Japanese investigation. The essays are illustrated with Chkhartishvili's photographs, while the stories feature drawings by Tatyana Nikitina. Compared with an otherwise typographically perfect book, both photos and graphics come off poorly.

With popular interest in nonfiction on the rise, "Cemetery Tales" is doomed to be a success this Halloween -- which both Chkhartishvili and Akunin doubtlessly deserve.