Clara B. Whitmore – författare

Rouletabille is summoned to Petersburg: someone is poisoning a general in a locked villa, the household is above suspicion, and the police are the least trustworthy people in the house. Leroux had reported from revolutionary Russia before he wrote fiction, and the terror in this book - the informers, the bombs, the Okhrana - is drawn from what he watched.

Ten-year-old Nikolenka is taken from the country to Moscow, and everything happens in the small print: the tutor's temper, the hunt, his mother's hands at the piano, the first lie he tells. Tolstoy published it at twenty-three, anonymously, from an artillery post in the Caucasus, and Nekrasov printed it immediately. Everything the mature novelist could do is already here in miniature.