Team D

This is my very first book—a trial run made during my student years almost a quarter of a century ago, in 1998. The book was written exclusively for money and to test my strengths as a writer. By genre, it’s an action thriller—strictly within the canon accepted in the 1990s: “The action has to happen in Russia. Novels about going abroad aren’t being bought today. If the hero leaves for a short trip to drive an imported car over from Europe, then all shootouts with road bandits can’t be farther than Belarus. The hero must not be a soldier or a cop—only an ordinary guy, an ex-cop or a former paratrooper. People hate cops, soldiers, and bus inspectors—no one buys books about them now. There should be 20–30 corpses in the novel, but remember: in an action thriller, for every 6 corpses there should be about 1 romantic scene. If it were a romance novel, it would be the other way around. The rest let your imagination suggest. The first book by an unknown author will be published in a print run of no more than 25,000 copies, but for it you’ll earn—wow—2 or even 3 thousand dollars. So you’ll write another couple of three books and easily buy an apartment in Moscow…” My publisher Beck advised me before I started work.

The book was planned as a prequel to an entire series of books that other authors would write using the specified characters’ material. That’s why the events don’t even take place in the era in which it was written, but ten to fifteen years earlier—during the forgotten era of Perestroika, which I had to reconstruct carefully by consulting eyewitnesses. This was probably logical for a prequel, but it made the book neither truly historical nor modern—it was only morally outdated by the time it came out.

It’s no surprise I don’t like the book at all. On my website, I keep it in the section “the trash bin.” Later, when I started looking for my style and my place in the science fiction genre, some of the heroes mentioned in this novel became heroes of new science fiction works. But that’s a weak reason to reread the 1998 action thriller.

To my great disappointment (and now I think—thankfully), the book was released under the name “Sergey Kuterigin.” I was told that this is a shared pen name used by the publishing house for the entire action-thriller series. We didn’t agree to it, but, in secret, insider acquaintances told me the truth: publishing the book under the name “Leonid Kaganov” was forbidden by a director of book distribution at AST whom I didn’t know—who, to my misfortune, turned out to be a complete namesake of mine: Leonid Lvovich Kaganov (with the only difference that I am Alexandrovich). “How am I supposed to look my regional wholesalers in the eye? How do I sell them my book? How do I explain to them why it suddenly turned out that I started writing any old crap?”—that was his argument. I can understand him, and besides, he wasn’t a bad guy. Years later, we met in person.

But at that moment I was furious and demanded that the publisher at least write me a certificate stating that the released book was mine. The publishing house issued me a certificate without any questions, but typically it wrote “given to Kaganov Leonid Lvovich,” and I just shrugged off these offenses—thankfully, by then I had already been working on my debut science fiction collection.

Five years later, in 2003 or so, the publisher offered me to reissue this action thriller again under a proper name. I set about editing the text trying to make it a bit more modern, got stuck in the old Perestroika-era Komsomol people, realized I couldn’t make anything normal out of it anymore, and erased all the editing. The reissue didn’t happen. And the original text is in front of you.