From the Publisher
Just before Christmas, in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1867, police investigator Porfiry Petrovich faces his most challenging murder case since the events made famous by F. Dostoevsky in the novel Crime and Punishment-a case with disturbing parallels and even darker implications
Stumbling through Petvosky Park one cold morning in search of firewood, an elderly woman makes a horrifying discovery. A burly peasant twirls in the wind, hanging from a bowed tree by a rope about his neck, a bloody axe tucked into his belt. Nearby, packed neatly into a suitcase, is the body of a dwarf, a deep axe wound splitting his skull in two.
It does not take long for the noted police investigator Porfiry Petrovich, still drained from his work on the case involving the deranged student Raskolnikov, to suspect that the truth of the matter is more complex than the crime scene might suggest. Why do so many roads lead to the same house of prostitution and the same ring of pornographers? Why do so many powerful interests seem intent on blocking his efforts? His investigation leads him from the squalid tenements, brothels, and drinking dens of the city's Haymarket district to an altogether more genteel stratum of society. As he gets deeper and deeper in, and the connections between the two spheres begin to multiply, both his anger and his terror mount.
Atmospheric and tense from its dramatic opening to its shocking climax, The Gentle Axe is a spellbinding historical crime novel, a book that explores the darkest places of the human heart with tremendous energy, empathy, and wit. As lucky as St. Petersburg residents are to have Porfiry Petrovich in public service, we are equally fortunate to have R. N. Morris on hand to chronicle his most challenging case to date.
About the Author:
Born in Manchester in 1960, R. N. Morris now lives in north London with his wife and two young children. He sold his first short story to a teenage girls' magazine while still a student at Cambridge University, where he read classics. Making his living as a freelance copywriter, he has continued to write, and occasionally publish, fiction. One of his stories, "The Devil's Drum," was turned into a one-act opera, which was performed at the Purcell Room in London's South Bank. Another, "Revenants," was published as a comic book.
The Washington Post
The Gentle Axe is a deftly plotted, enjoyable literary thriller.
The Philadelphia Inquirer
The anti-Sherlock Holmes.
The New York Times Book Review
A satisfyingly grisly yarn, mawkish and macabre. CSI: St. Petersburg
The New York Sun
A smart, hypnotizing tale of crime and duplicity. . . . Genuinely pleasurable.
The Washington Post -
Patrick Anderson
Morris is said by his publisher to have previously written a story that was made into an opera and another that was published as a comic book. That is perhaps not bad preparation for attempting 21st-century homage to 19th-century Russian literature, which always struck me as incorporating elements of both genres. Morris may have made a tactical error by inviting comparisons to Dostoevski's opus, but The Gentle Axe is a deftly plotted, enjoyable literary thriller. It's not another Crime and Punishment, but it's a novel that, once begun, you're likely to read all the way through.
The New York Times -
Liesl Schillinger
The Gentle Axe in many ways feels less like a modern tribute to Dostoyevsky than a translation of an overlooked novel by one of his contemporary imitators, transported into the present. It’s a satisfyingly grisly yarn, mawkish and macabre — “CSI: St. Petersburg.”
Publishers Weekly
British author Morris deserves credit for a clever premise-using the deceptively stolid Porfiry Petrovich, the detective in Dostoyevski's Crime and Punishment (who helped inspire TV's Lieutenant Columbo), as the central focus of a period whodunit. A year and a half after the events of Crime and Punishment, two men turn up dead in St. Petersburg's Petrovsky Park. Petrovich, a senior member of the Department of the Investigation of Criminal Causes, quickly suspects that the official version of the tragedy-that one of the men killed the other and then took his own life-is mistaken. In the face of opposition from his superiors, the sleuth doggedly pursues clues that lead him to an underworld of brothels and pornographers. Unfortunately, this Petrovich doesn't have that distinctive a personality and the plot doesn't offer much complexity or psychological depth. Still, the author does a good job of depicting Russian society in the 1860s. (Mar.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
Doug Southard
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Library Journal
This historical crime novel adopts the setting and explores many of the themes of Dostoevsky's classic Crime and Punishment. It opens in 1866 with a gruesome scene in St. Petersburg's Petrovsky Park: a man's corpse hangs from a tree, and the dead body of a dwarf lies nearby, his skull split in two. An autopsy determines that the dwarf has been poisoned, raising suspicions about the presumed murder-suicide. The case is assigned to Porfiry Petrovich, Raskolnikov's prosecutor in Crime and Punishment. As Petrovich follows leads through the city's brothels, taverns, and tenements, a number of Dostoevskian characters emerge as suspects. The investigation quickly centers on Virginsky, an impoverished student whose life closely parallels Raskolnikov's. Morris, actually a pseudonym for Roger Morris, author of the novel Taking Comfort, portrays Virginsky with particular empathy and sensitivity. Readers with an appetite for the occasional lurid scene will enjoy; for public libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ11/15/06.]
Kirkus Reviews
The audacity of the premise-a sequel of sorts to Crime and Punishment-sets the bar for this debut novel way too high. British writer Morris demonstrates well that he's no Dostoevsky in this otherwise routine detective novel featuring the return of Porfiry Petrovich, still renowned for solving the case of Raskolnikov a year and a half earlier. Here, an old prostitute who serves as a mother figure to a younger one stumbles upon a horrible sight in the middle of Petrovsky Park. She sees two corpses: a very large man hanging from a tree and a very small man who has been bludgeoned to death, apparently by the larger one. The horror turns out to be a windfall for the elderly woman, who discovers a fortune in rubles in the pocket of the hanged man. For police and prosecutors, the deaths appear to be a simple matter of murder and suicide, particularly once it is learned that the two men had argued vehemently the day before their bodies were found. Yet Petrovich, sensing otherwise, orders an autopsy that confirms his suspicion that the obvious explanation is a little too pat. (The doctor performing the autopsy is one of the many minor characters who seem more like caricatures; one of Morris's previous publications was a comic book.) The complications of the plot soon come to envelop both the older and the younger prostitute, a photographer of the risque, a Russian prince, a vanished actor, a young student (compared by the characters to Raskolnikov), a publishing house that specializes in both translations of philosophy and erotica aimed at pedophiles and the entire household where both the very large man and the dwarf had lived. Petrovich ultimately solves the case through a literal process ofelimination, as one major suspect after another dies in suspicious fashion. Morris's Petrovich is more like Sherlock Holmes with a psychological bent, and his novel is closer to genre pulp than to the classics. Russian Lit Lite.
What People Are Saying
Alan Furst
Lush, and exceptionally compelling, but take your time—R. N. Morris's The Gentle Axe has a vast depth of Russian soul: mysterious, compassionate, and utterly irresistible. (Alan Furst, author of The Foreign Correspondent)
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