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Moscow - A racy pulp fiction thriller inspired by the murder of former Russian intelligence agent Alexander Litvinenko has gone on sale in Russia in the latest and oddest attempt to cash in on his mysterious death.
The novel, entitled Breakfast With Polonium, uses the bare bones of what is known about the murder of Litvinenko last November to weave a fictional tale of jealous love, a scheming President Vladimir Putin, and a vortex of murder and violence in London.
Exploiting the fact that there are more questions than answers about the case, a husband and wife team of speed writers specialising in thrillers based on true crimes has decided that the Russian public's curiosity about the murder will mean sales.
The authors, Alexander and Natalya Pankov, put the book together in just over a month, easily outstripping British and Russian investigators who have yet to publicly say who they believe killed Litvinenko by poisoning him with a massive dose of Polonium-210 in London.
On his deathbed Litvinenko pointed the finger of blame at Putin while the largely state-controlled media in Russia have regularly suggested that the murder was orchestrated by Boris Berezovsky, the British-based billionaire oligarch who counted the poisoned man as a friend. Both Putin and Berezovsky strongly deny any involvement in the killing.
However Breakfast With Polonium suggests a far more obvious motive for the killing: spurned love. According to its authors, Litvinenko who is renamed "Litovchenko" in the novel, presumably to avoid legal action, is murdered because of an affair with the glamorous wife of an oligarch.
Pankov, one half of the writing team, said he saw nothing unethical about using the famous case as the backdrop for a work of fiction.
"We don't write anything bad about him [Litvinenko]," Pankov told the Moscow Times. "We don't offend anyone ... We changed the name."
- INDEPENDENT
