Actor Stephen Miller, known for playing Zack McNab on Da Vinci's Inquest, has made the most of his character roles for 37 years. Now he's hitting the bigtime with his new Russian historical thriller The Last Train to Kazan. Published internationally by Penguin Books, it's a double-agent's view of how and why the czar and his family were murdered in 1918.

It is a Canadian tradition to not allow anyone to outgrow their britches. The forces of Envy and Jealousy will rise up to smite you if you try to succeed in more than one vocation. Stephen Miller, for example, has written four novels-starting with his locally published Three-Day Novel Contest winner Wastefall (Arsenal Pulp, 1990)-but he is seldom recognized as a writer in British Columbia, where he has lived since 1971.

The North Carolina-born actor has recently released two novels about the Russian Revolution-but he has also carried Bette Davis down a flight of concrete stairs, improvised all day with Robert DeNiro and delivered Laura Dern's baby while accumulating almost 200 Hollywood and television credits.

Miller's Field of Mars (Penguin, 2006) introduced a disaffected Petrograd detective Peyotr Ryzhkov who, when stirred out of his apathy by the murder of a child prostitute, unravels a plot to overthrow the czar and install a puppet ruler in 1913.

Now Miller has returned with The Last Train to Kazan (Penguin $24), a longer and even more intense novel that reintroduces Ryzhkov in a more ghastly, bewildering and bloodier adventure.
Although set during the Russian Revolution, nobody is going to confuse Stephen Miller's The Last Train to Kazan with Dr. Zhivago.

"There were no dogs in the city,"; he writes, describing Moscow in 1918, "they had all been eaten.";

On the opening pages, former czarist secret policeman Ryzhkov accepts an offer from the Bolsheviks that he can't refuse: He can either face a firing squad or travel to Siberia to learn if the Russian royal family has been murdered (yet).

At the outset our man Ryzhkov is a survival artist, little else. He is seriously non-aligned, a man for whom, "Life was just a vortex of loss."; He doesn't give a damn about the Romanovs. Or Comrade Lenin.

As hostages of the Bolsheviks, the Romanovs were first sent beyond the Urals to Tobolsk, supposedly for their own safety, but mostly because the Red Army didn't know what to do with them. Then they were moved by steamer in April of 1918 to Yekaterinburg, an industrial city named by Peter the Great for his bride Catherine and designed to serve as the gateway to Siberia.

By the time Ryzhkov arrives, Yekaterinburg had degenerated into a frontier outpost where two potatoes from last year could serve as a bribe. In "a city in chaos, stupefied, not knowing to whom it should pay allegiance,"; our sullen, Clive Owen-ish anti-hero is told the czar and his entourage have been assassinated three nights before-but, if so, where's the proof?

When the White Russians take control of Yekaterinburg from the Red Russians (thanks to an invasion by Czechs), Ryzhkov ditches his identity papers and ingratiates himself to a dashing Italian named Giustiniani, joining the counter-investigation. Regardless of nationality or political leanings, everybody wants to learn the czar's fate because most European royal families are related.

If the Mensheviks, or White Russians, can rightfully claim the Bolsheviks have grotesquely butchered the Romanovs, powerful nations such as Germany and England could be hard pressed to support the Bolsheviks or their law firm of Lenin, Marx & Trotsky.

Hence the outcome of the Russian Civil War might not hinge on whether the czar and his eight family members have been assassinated, or who has offed them; but rather the destiny of Russia could depend on who gets the news first, and how that news can be manipulated for propaganda.
When a human finger is found at an abandoned mine site, along with jewelry and clothing belonging to the royal family, the scene resembles something we might see on Da Vinci's Inquest, but for the most part The Last Train to Kazan is chillingly original, with insights more akin to Hamlet than Dashiell Hammett.

"Ryzhkov had become a scientist of mud, a sort of Red Indian scout when it came to mud. He had come out of the war having lost his revulsion for mud and dirt, and maybe it was a welcome kind of knowledge.";

Having reluctantly attended a drunken orgy with the Italian and later located the missing Yakov Yurovsky-a non-fictional character who was given the unenviable task of safeguarding the czar and/or killing him-Ryzhkov's sleuthing and double-agency is just the set-up for the web of intrigue and mayhem to come.

About one-third of the way through The Last Train to Kazan, Miller pulls a big plot twist, followed by an astonishing counter-reveal, and the detective procedural aspect of the story evaporates.

Miller ratchets up the tension by revealing that nearly everyone has the potential for criminality or, at the very least, dishonesty. Those who don't are the freaks. Miller investigates the emotions and schemes of literally dozens of characters, rather than focussing on Ryzhkov alone. In this way we get a cross-section of social desperation that has a great deal more to do with Dostoevsky than a conventional whodunit or thriller.

Miller's scatter-gun approach to narration can be off-putting, and some of the early dialogue is chronically obtuse, but the reader with stamina will be rewarded with subsequent writing that is undeniably brilliant. "Rumours were the floor upon which they walked,"; he writes.

Whether he's describing a vicious stabbing on a train car belonging to a lecherous grand dame named Sophie Buxhoeveden or decoding the amorous Machiavellianism of her playboy lover Captain Tommaso di Giustiniani-both are trying to out-manipulate each other-Miller is unfailingly adept at unmasking the darkest recesses of human behaviour.

The intricacies of the final two-thirds of the story cannot be revealed except to say that Ryzhkov's brief conversation with a dreamy, stupid, beautiful girl-a genuine Russian princess, the Grand Duchess Marie-prompts him to betray his better judgment and proceed on a path that is deliberately foolhardy and remotely noble.
One hint: A forensic note in the afterword mentions that the remains of two of the nine bodies of the Russian Imperial family have yet to be accounted for-the prince Alexei and one of his sisters, "almost certainly Marie.";

Like most of Dostoevsky's novels, The Last Train to Kazan could have been shorter, but it's the unrelenting intensity, the desire to dig beneath surfaces, that resonates long after the storyline is forgotten.

The Last Train to Kazan is memorable like the movie Mephisto starring Klaus Maria Brandauer, a political drama in which a stage actor keeps transforming to ensure his survival within Nazi Germany.

After 400-plus pages, it is hard not to wonder if Miller's three decades of surviving as an actor, necessarily adopting whichever roles are assigned to him, has fuelled his ability to create a unique detective in Ryzhkov. 978-0-14305585-3

[BCBW 2008] "Historical" "Mystery" "Fiction"