Ben Creed (2024) Man of Bones.

Man of Bones is the third in the murder-mystery series featuring Revol Rossel. Setting is everything. It returns to the bleak, frozen landscape of Leningrad, winter 1953. Lowly militiaman Rossel has miraculously survived the NKVD and being part of a punishment battalion during the siege of Leningrad and following The Great Patriotic war, (Soviet casualties around 20 million), been deported to Siberia, which is a death sentence in all but name, and got on the wrong side of Beria (MGB), state torturer and second to Stalin in the Kremlin (or so Beria believed). Now he faces Stalin himself in unearthing his Georgian past.

Joseph Stalin. ‘I trust no one, not even myself’.

Stalinist purges such as ‘The Doctor’s Plot’ and  Case of the Generals’ (the 1937 purge of Field Marshal  Tukhachevsky ‘The Red Napoleon’ and his peers) pale in comparison with the Toll of the Holodomor (Ukrainian Holocaust).

The death toll of the Holodomor (1932–1933) is a subject of significant historical contention, more so now with Putin’s ‘Special Operations in Ukraine and the Holdomor disappearing from Russian text books. The Soviet government actively suppressed the data for decades. Estimates range from 4-5 million.  But if famine deaths in the North Caucasus and Kazakhstan occurring at the same time (also due to Soviet grain requisitioning), the total toll rises to 7 to 10 million people across the USSR.

The Bones of the Story are the millions of un-personed.  Deaths officially denied by the state and erased, but whose ghosts are now returning to people the streets of Leningrad in a staged murder mystery.  

Rossel remains haunted by the loss of his twin sister who disappeared into the System. He has some familiar allies in raising the dead.

Previous books used Shostakovich or Tchaikovsky as thematic anchors. Man of Bones uses Sergei Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf as a literal and symbolic map for the murders.

The Staging of Victims follows a pattern from previous book. Bodies found at the Finland Station (and subsequent scenes) are staged to represent specific characters from the musical suite. The killer uses the distinct musical motifs—the bird, the duck, the cat, the wolf—as a chilling signature.

Prokofiev Connection. Historically, Prokofiev died on March 5, 1953—the exact same day as Joseph Stalin. Creed uses this historical coincidence to heightening the tension. As the state mourns the Great Leader, whose past he exposes as traitorous to the cause of Leninism (but not power-politics), the musical world is losing a genius, and Rossel is using Prokofiev’s work to track a predator  hiding in plain sight.

The narrative serves as a metaphor for the Soviet state. In the music, the Wolf is the obvious threat, but the Hunters (the MGB/Secret Police) are often just as dangerous and they too are hunted. Rossel is forced to figure out which character he plays in this murderous and torturous arrangement: the clever Peter or the expendable Duck whose role it to quack it.

Rossel has become superman in his survival. I’m wondering if the team of Ben Creed can find enough musical motifs to resurrect him for yet another murder mystery? I suspect they will, but I’ll leave him here.  Read on.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CVBVVGD6