There Are No Saints in St. Petersburg

One of the historical crime novels I’ve been looking forward to most this winter is R.N. Morris’ A Gentle Axe. It imagines analytical police detective Porfiry Petrovich (resurrected from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment) tackling the murders of a peasant and a dwarf, their bodies found in a park in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1866. So far, no kind publicist has sent me the book, but I hold out hope. In the meantime, I can dine gratefully on two new entries on the UK blog It’s a Crime! (or a Mystery ...): a lengthy interview with Morris (who has also written a previous novel, Taking Comfort, as “Roger Morris”) and a review of his new book.

My favorite two parts of the interview come when Morris says that the tale he’s concocted in Axe isn’t meant to remind readers of anything familiar from the present-day ...

“I didn’t want to come up with an abstract murder story that could have happened at any time, in any setting and was then just inserted into the setting. I wanted it to be something that came out of the ideas and themes of the time. However, it’s true, I think, that every generation re-interprets the past according to its own priorities and preoccupations, in the same way that every generation re-imagines the future. But it was not a conscious aim of mine to write something that had a contemporary relevance. I’m sure though, being a person of my time, that what I have chosen to focus on in this story somehow reflects the society I’m a product of. I just can’t tell you how!”

... and when Morris says he’s used Crime and Punishment only as a literary springboard, creating his own story using Dostoevsky’s setting, plus a character or two:

“Basically I’ve nicked a character from a masterpiece of world literature and taken massive liberties with him. If I ever do get to meet Dostoevsky in another place (though I don’t think I’ll be let into the bit he’s no doubt residing in) I will obviously be very ashamed of myself. I will have to get down on my knees and beg forgiveness. I know he has a sense of humour, though--I mean, I think he can be a very funny writer, which is sometimes overlooked because people tend to have this idea of his work being relentlessly grim. He is an incredibly humane writer and humour is part of humanity. Anyhow, it’s meant to be a playful idea, you know. And I would hope that he would appreciate that aspect of it.”

You can read the whole interview here.

A Gentle Axe has just been released in Britain by Faber and Faber. Unnecessarily retitled The Gentle Axe, it’s due out in the States from Penguin Press in late March.