Guilty as Charged

Gentle Axe (as I like to call it, to avoid the awkward A/The thing) was not an easy book to write. Or rather, it was not an easy book to start to write. I couldn’t, for a long time, get past the temerity of the idea. I mean, as The Moscow Times put it recently: “[W]hat form of grave-robbery could be worse than crafting a sequel to Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 1866 mainstay of Russian literature, ‘Crime and Punishment,’ and making it a 19th-century police procedural?”

It’s a fair question. And, after all, who was I to attempt it? At the time, I was an unpublished (and seemingly unpublishable) writer, who’d never been to St. Petersburg, didn’t speak Russian, and had no particular knowledge of 19th-century Russia and no qualifications as a crime writer. I’m the first to admit, I was no Dostoevsky. Just a guy with an idea. A big idea. A monstrously ambitious idea. I should have been scared of tackling it, and I was.

First I tried to write it as a radio play. Perhaps I hoped that the hubris of the proposal would draw less flak. A radio play pillaging a great novel somehow felt more excusable than a novel doing the same. There was a good chance it would slip under the radar unnoticed. I would maybe get away with it. Added to that, I was at the point in my so-called writing career that I was despairing of ever getting a novel published. I’d had a few attempts. In fact, more than a few. It seemed that the publishing industry was a citadel I would never storm. I’d had a depressing conversation with my agent in which he hinted that the end of the road was in sight.

I felt that I had one more throw of the dice left to me, so I’d better make it a good one.

Basically, and probably wrongly, I thought that there would be a better chance to break into radio drama than to get a novel published. This may seem like a strange belief to American readers, but in the UK, BBC Radio 4 is a regular commissioner of radio dramas and some of them come from new writers. The Radio 4 folks also seem to like crime stories. I had my Porfiry Petrovich idea. I thought perhaps I could try him out in a 45-minute radio play and that might be an easier write than a whole novel. So I worked up a script. And had it promptly rejected.

The feedback was that the idea was good but the story didn’t convince. So I spent some more time cooking the story, and came to the conclusion that it had to be a novel to do justice to the idea.

The more I worked on the idea, the more I realized that there were simply no short cuts. If I was going to do this thing, I had to do it properly. I had to research the period, for a start. That seems like an obvious thing to say, but, Christ, it is incredibly daunting to go from virtually zero knowledge about a remote time and place to the point where you have a reservoir of knowledge deep enough for you to write stories set there.

I’m an impatient person and I can’t keep my impatience out of my working method. So maybe historical crime is the least suitable genre for me to work in. Then again, maybe it’s very inappropriateness is what makes it inevitable that I would end up working within it. If what I’m doing as a writer doesn’t challenge me, I don’t think I would be interested in doing it. I should also say that one of the reasons I’m attracted to historical fiction is because I want to learn about the past. For me, there’s no better way of doing this than through the imagination. When you try to write a story set in a given period and setting, the first question you ask yourself is “But what was it really like to be alive then?”

The great problem for historical novelists is knowing when to stop researching and start writing. I tend to research and write simultaneously. I get to the point where I feel I have enough to go on, then I dive in. Then, time and again, I come to a standstill because I realize there is something vital that I need to know before I can proceed any further. So off I go again on the research trail, hunting down footnotes and references till I find my answer.

Always it’s the story that dictates what I look for. I think this may come from my background as a copywriter. You have a limited amount of time to write copy and you become used to finding out what you need to get the job done--and not bothering your head with the stuff outside your brief.

It would have been a hell of a lot easier if I’d chosen to write a historical novel set in London, or anywhere else in the UK. Then I could actually go and look at places, and I’d be able to access-- and understand--direct historical records, or any primary texts. But maybe the difficulty of the task worked for me too. It made me more reliant on my imagination. That’s not to say I didn’t do any research. But I did repeatedly come up against the unknowable--and it was at those points that I had to trust my instincts and do what novelists are supposed to do.

Of course, one of my major sources was the work of Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky. I will have more to say about this one-sided collaboration another time.