Putin Foes Have an Ally in Best-Selling Author PARIS - A writer's voice has always had special weight in Russia, but it matters only when Russians are ready to listen. At least that is the experience of Boris Akunin, the best-selling detective novelist who popped up late last year as a prominent member of the political opposition to President Vladimir V. Putin. "I've always said what I thought," said Mr. Akunin, 56, whose round glasses and slight beard give him the look of an impish owl. Before, I was rarely asked about my political opinion. When I was, I would say what I thought, but no one was particularly interested. On a recent rainy evening in Paris, on his way back to Moscow, where the anti-Putin opposition is engaged in an ever riskier game of cat-and-mouse with the authorities, Mr. Akunin explained how Russian society, with its growing middle class, was finally coming of age. "If in the early 1990s, Russia was clearly not ready, now there is a chance to become a democracy, and stay a democracy," he said during an hourlong conversation over a glass of whiskey. There's a slow movement toward the democratic awareness of Russian society. It's not going fast, but that is good, because fast can be dangerous. Akunin is in fact a pen name, one of several chosen over the years by Grigori Chkhartishvili, a historian and expert on Japanese culture. Five years ago, he dreamed up two others; one was Anna Borisova, a female writer whose picture was a digitally altered version of himself and whose critical success was a secret delight he shared only with his wife and his publisher, until all was revealed earlier this year. But Akunin is the name that stuck, and it is the one he uses publicly (it is certainly easier to pronounce), mainly because Akunin is the creator of Erast Fandorin, a 19th-century Russian dandy and gambler whose swashbuckling exploits are told in 14 books that have sold about 30 million copies in Russia alone and been made into three movies. Mr. Akunin said his value to the protest movement had been precisely his contact with a broad demographic of Russian readers that reaches well beyond the traditional intelligentsia. "If my role is noticed, it is because I am a writer, a writer of mass literature," he said. My main audience is the middle class. Still, he has no intention of giving up his writer's life - quite a comfortable one, at that - to become a political activist. "Some of us are like a volunteer fire brigade," he said, "but that doesn't mean we want to become professional firefighters." In what Mr. Akunin considers a "very important" development, about 80,000 members of the Russian opposition went online last month to vote for a "coordinating council." The top vote-getter was the anti-corruption blogger Aleksei Navalny, and the second was Dmitry Bykov, a well-known Russian writer and critic. Mr. Akunin hopes this will finally give leadership and discipline to government opponents who he said had made plenty of mistakes. Luckily for them, he said, the authorities have made even more. "This face-off, I call it a contest between the "dumb" and the "dumber,"" he said. In this case, he says the "dumber" is "the power," the collective noun Russians use to describe their rulers. Mr. Akunin's political involvement dates from Sept. 24, 2011, when Mr. Putin laid claim to a third term as president. Then came the mass protests over evident fraud during parliamentary elections last December. By the time Mr. Putin was sworn in as president in May, the situation had become clear, Mr. Akunin said. "There's been an important change," Mr. Akunin said. He no longer makes any effort to appeal to educated people. For the past seven years, Mr. Akunin has divided his time between Moscow and Saint-Malo, on the Brittany coast of France, where he writes his books at an astonishing pace. Boris Akunin produces two novels a year "at cruising speed," he said. His other two pseudonyms - Borisova and Anatoly Brusnikin - produced three books apiece between 2007 and 2011.