Petersburg Mystery - Rated 
I met Roger Morris only because of the Russo-British current crisis. It is this tension between UK and Russia that prevented my Chekhov project from going ahead due to directors not being able to get UK visas. Instead I did my one-woman Dostoevsky performance based on his first unfinished novel Netochka Nezvanova.
Undoubtedly it was Dostoevsky that attracted Roger to come the New End Theatre on the opening night of my show. I say thank you to Foydor Michailovich for introducing me to this interesting writer.
To do the show me and my co-producer had to travel to Petersburg in December (exactly 121 years after the events described in The Gentle Axe).
I would argue that December is the best time to visit Petersburg, if you want to see the dark side of the city. There is very little light, it is unbearably cold, almost always windy and snowy. All people are so wrapped up, you can hardly see their faces, which makes each walking person a mystery and a potential threat. Some alleys and streets might be under-lit and will always have some Dostoevsky-an characters hovering about. There is always an air of doom and gloom, paradoxically interlinked with a strong sense of spirituality, which you need to maintain if you want to survive in the harsh unlivable conditions of this northern city.
All these essential characteristics of Peter's great city are captured in the Gentle Axe with admirable precision. St.Petersburg in December stands out very strongly like a character in itself. But Morris goes further than a regular visitor's observations and captures less easily detected sides of Petersburg, such as (in my own words) the snowy vastness of open spaces of the city being indifferent to the grand arrogance and energy of the buildings. The book is full of these kind of intelligent observations, which frankly, now became intertwined with my own memories of visiting Petersburg in December, making them richer and more intense.
So the setting for the murder mystery is chosen and described perfectly. The mystery that evolves within is quite something. It is a page-turner, this book. Be warned! The characters are very fascinating to have around you for those 5-7 hours that it will take you to read it. I had no idea who the murderer was and was desperately trying to guess, admittedly unsuccessfully. So the ending was a surprise to me, but a satisfying surprise.
Characters have genes of Dostoevsky in them, but as a third generation they go further. A dwarf philosopher, gay actor and child pornographer are at the top of the crop. But their presence is justified in this debauched twisted society full of dark secrets. You believe in them. You want to hear their stories. But you never quite work out what they are until the very end.
This is a great read. I must admit that I am now compelled to get Roger's other Petersburg mystery and will await his future work with eagerness and interest.
Brilliant - Rated
This book will grab your attention on the first page and not let you go, even after you are done.
This is first class storytelling from a man who deserves to take his place as one of the best. The characters are well drawn, sympathetic, annoying, pitiable, but realistic. The location is as cold as some of the happenings and you are drawn into an atmospheric past that both invades the present and astonishes you with its authenticity.
Porfiry has been brought back to life so successfully by his new author that it makes you not only forgive Morris for stealing from the best but also applaud him for doing so. Dostoevsky would be proud. A great detective deserves more than one outing and now, through the mastery of R.N. Morris, Porfiry gets that chance.
An experience not to be missed.
The Gentle Axe - a huge relief! - Rated
One of the things they never tell you about becoming a writer, is that you're going to have to deal with the books and stories of other writers. By which I mean, people you know, and like, will get stuff published - and you are going to have to go and read it and then say something about it. It's only polite, after all!
But ... oh, the big but! Suppose you don't like it, or it's badly edited, or you think it's a thinly plagiarised version of another work that wasn't much cop to begin with? You might think that's not very likely - but the more you write, the more writers you meet, and the more you meet, the more likely it is that you're going - one day - to have to front up to a writer whom you love dearly but whose work you detest utterly.
What you do then, I don't know. But I do know that this kind of fear goes through my head whenever I pick up a book or story by a writer I've met.
Today though, is not that day. I know R. N., he's bought me a drink - and let me tell you, it's a huge relief and a great pleasure to tell you that I sat up until after midnight, reading this novel. It's about as ambitious as it gets, given that it lifts the detective from Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and puts him in the middle of a mysterious new murder case, but it works, it really works, and I sat up until after midnight to finish the book. So congratulations R N, and if anybody out there is looking for an atmospheric page turner ... look no further.
A Hard Act to follow? - Rated 
If you are going to steal, steal from the best. And so Morris lifts his detective from no less a novelist than Dostoyevsky, extending the career of Porfiry Petrovich, the investigator from Crime and Punishment (for the less high brow among us, Porfiry also served as the original model for TV's Columbo).
Naturally Crime and Punishment casts a large shadow over Morris's belated sequel, and not just because it takes place after the events in Dostoyevsky's masterpiece. There is an impoverished student reminiscent of Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, a resemblance which does not go unnoticed or unremarked by Porfiry. Dour Russian minds are preoccupied by matters of morality, mortality and immortality, or absence thereof, characters living in close proximity are separated by gulfs of class and the intellectual appetites of Imperial Russia allow Orthodox believers to happily publish atheist philosophy
Morris does allow 21st century permissiveness to take him further than even Fyodor would have dared with prostitution and child pornography given more graphic treatment than any Victorian era author would have dared, while the crime Porfiry investigates is more grotesque than the simple bashing of a couple of old women to death with an axe as the body of a murdered dwarf is found packed in a suitcase close to where a burly peasant is hanging from a tree. An obvious case of murder and suicide, Porfiry's bosses decide, and not worth investigating. Porfiry naturally sees more to it than that, but it is only when a minor prince reports the disappearance of an actor friend that he finds another angle from which to pursue his investigation.
Sure, it is never going to join its 140- year old prequel as a cornerstone of world literature, but this is pretty impressive achievement which succeeds on its own terms as a well written literary thriller with loads of chilly Russian atmosphere and even plays fair as a murder mystery.
Porfiry, a cigarette-smoking humane and incisive investigator, will certainly be welcomed back on the bookshelves as a slightly more serious counterpart to Boris Akunin's Erast Fandorin. But if we are giving an extended life to detectives who pop up in classic Victorian novels, who come nobody seems to be looking at the daddy of them all, Inspector Bucket from Bleak House? Or is Dickens an even harder act to follow than Dostoyevsky?
credited: Calum Macleod
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