The Telegraph has this interview with the author of The Winter Queen (discussed here recently) and Murder on the Leviathan (just got my copy in the mail, reading it now...):
"'Boris Akunin' is not his real name. Before he embarked on a life of crime writing, Grigori Chkhartishvili was deputy editor of a literary magazine, a distinguished philologist, translator of Japanese fiction, a critic and the author of the scholarly tome Writers and Suicide. This being Russia, home of the writer-as-sage, it is little wonder that he had almost a Japanese sense of shame that he was dabbling in a new-fangled, low-brow form of writing scarcely able to call itself literature. Hence the disguise. 'In the world that I belong to,' he explains, 'writing detective novels was just unthinkable. Even now, some of my old acquaintances look at me as if I were a defrocked priest or something. My mother often asks me, 'When are you going to finish writing this and return to serious writing?' She was a schoolteacher of Russian literature.' "
