There is a long history of authors commandeering the characters of a deceased writer and creating new adventures for the fans. There are now at least 20 times more Sherlock Holmes stories than ever were created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. But to my knowledge, no one has ever appropriated a Fyodor Dostoevsky character and featured him in a mystery novel. Until now.
R.N. Morris has chosen to write a sequel to Dostoyevsky’s CRIME AND PUNISHMENT, and so Porfiry Petrovich walks the mean streets of Russia once again, this time in the adventure of THE GENTLE AXE.
In the St. Petersburg of 1867, times are tough. So when a poor woman with three mouths to feed finds thousands of rubles in the park, she decides to keep them. It doesn’t matter that she found them on a corpse, with another dead body lying nearby. But it does matter to Porfiry Petrovich, who finds a dead dwarf and another man hanging from a tree as if he committed suicide.
The prokuror is attempting to close the case, claiming it to be a murder-suicide, and done is done. But Porfiry Petrovich is not so sure. And when a famous actor goes missing, someone who is connected with the dead man, the case must be reopened.
This book has received so much mainstream hype that I began to worry about its likability. Other reviewers seemed to care a little too much about the Dostoyevsky angle, and because it featured a shining star in the modern academic literary canon, it was sure to be praised. Thankfully, Morris does not pretend to be Dostoyevsky. Instead, he takes a character study and a locale, and crafts a very passable murder mystery out of the whole thing. If he can use Porfiry Petrovich as his foil to get attention, then more power to him.
Morris’ style is clear and uncluttered, with a sensitive eye for detail and a scriptwriter’s feel for dialogue. His plot is a bit too outlandish and involved, though, and could have used further development. But really, that’s a small price to pay to be able to read more about Porfiry Petrovich and the suffocating society of late 19th-century Russia. It’s an excellent first novel that bodes well for the future. –Mark Rose
