Russia has always been for westerners a country that is as unknowable as it is somehow familiar. Perhaps because it straddles Europe and Asia, perhaps because its history and religion are both recognizable and strange, perhaps because Russia itself has been a friend to and at odds with much of the western world over the course of its history, we want to explore its many secrets.

Add a murder mystery to this intoxicating allure and you have something more: a search for the truth in a land where truth is hard to come by. Can we ever really know whodunit?

"When I was writing screenplays, I became slightly obsessed with Babel, and I toyed with the idea of trying to adapt his Jewish gangster stories or his Red Cavalry stories," Ryan says. I'd done all this research on the Great Terror and Soviet Russia generally, and always kind of had the idea of doing something with that."

Before this stage of his career, and before trying his hand at writing screenplays, Ryan had been a lawyer with a bank, and "hit a wall where I was writing screenplays on the side while heading a team dealing with structured products," he says. But he'd reached a point where he'd decided it was time to make a break with the overwhelming demands of that kind of life; he jumped into a part-time legal job, then studied at St. Andrews in Scotland (Ryan is of Irish descent, and lives in London) and earned a masters in creative writing. For this novel, "I thought I'd do something in a genre I liked," Ryan says. "I like historical fiction and detective novels, I thought it would be a good idea to put all of that research to use."

In The Holy Thief, Captain Alexei Korolev investigates the murder of a woman on a church altar. Korolev discovers that a controversial icon is at the heart of the mystery, as well as a possible conspiracy. Ryan used an actual case of an icon that disappeared in the early 20th century as the basis for the plot. To reveal more would spoil the surprise.

But aside from the plot, what's been captivating readers abroad (The Holy Thief was published earlier this year in Europe) is the way Ryan captures the feel of a long-ago Moscow, and the atmosphere of bureaucratic and political oppression. Ryan had to imagine the duality of life at the time: being a Russian living through the dawning reality of the Stalinist scourge yet still hoping for the best from communism. "One of the problems with research from that period, is you have to look at everything with a slight double vision," he says, since so much government propaganda in books and newspapers and magazines painted a very different picture of life than the actual life of the time.

To help with details of place, and even of how people dressed, Ryan relied on photographs. "I came across some great photographs from the Moscow hippodrome, which is where they had horse racing. Babel had fought with Cossacks and used to spend a lot of time going to the races, so I put in a scene in a racetrack." Another photo of footballs fans en route to a match, hanging off the side of a tram, inspired another scene.

The character of Alexei Korolov, as readers are discovering, is the kind of detective contemporary readers haven't encountered in a while: a tough-talking 30s-style cop. The dialogue is sharp, almost like a classic Hollywood flick. "That's one of the challenges in writing an historical novel generally, particularly one set in a foreign country," Ryan says: "creating a dialogue style that is believable. But what was interesting was that basically the Soviets spoke to each other like gangsters in a James Cagney movie."

Consider this brief sample from one character:
"Alexei Dmitriyevich, is it? Come to shut down the Voroshilov file? That rat. Ten years, would you say? If I'd my way ..."

Except for the Russian names, you could picture James Cagney barking out, "That rat..."

Alexei Korolev is also a person who's trying to do a job in the paranoid and backstabbing atmosphere of the era. "It was really interesting for me to have an ordinary person whose job it was to uncover the truth and to administer justice in a society that was essentially all about hiding the truth and obscuring the truth," Ryan says.

Korolev wants to believe in the goals of communism, but must also confront "the evidence before his eyes that all is going horribly wrong." At the same time, like many people, he keeps trudging along within the system, because "you kind of have to believe in something, because otherwise you would start to go insane."

Next up, another case inspired by a true incident, this time a case involving a suppressed film by the great Sergei Eisenstein. And at some point, Ryan hopes to send his detective to New York. "He's a useful man to have poking around," Ryan says.

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