With R.N. Morris, author of The Gentle Axe

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St. Petersburg, Winter, 1866 - Two frozen bodies are found in an isolated corner of Petrovsky Park. The first - that of a dwarf - has been packed neatly in a suitcase, a deep wound splitting his skull in two. The second body, of a burly peasant, is hanging from a nearby tree, a bloody axe tucked into his belt. The detective Porfiry Petrovich, in his first major murder case since Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, suspects the truth may be more complex than others wish him to believe. 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.

– The Gentle Axe

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The Writing Show (WS): Roger Morris is a gutsy guy. He’s adopted one of literature’s most famous detectives, Porfiry Petrovich, created by one of the greatest writers of all time, Fyodor Dostoevsky. Is he crazy? The world’s most prestigious review publications don’t think so. The New York Times Book Review, The Wall Street Journal, and even The Moscow Times have awarded The Gentle Axe high praise. Meet the man who would be Dostoevsky’s disciple.

Welcome to the Writing Show, where writing is always the story. This is Paula B, here with my guest R. N. Morris. 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, “Resonance,” was published as a comic book.

WS: Welcome to the Writing Show, Roger. It’s a pleasure to have you with us.

Roger Morris (RM): Thank you, Paula. It’s great to be here.

WS: You’ve been reviewed by The New York Times and many, many other publications and venues large and small. I have to congratulate you on that. That is such a wonderful achievement.

RM: Thank you. I was amazed by the coverage, particularly in America. I’m from over here in London, and I’m sort of reliant on friends and the people at Penguin letting me know about things, and it’s been a constant source of amazement to me, really.

WS: Oh, that’s wonderful, though. I love The Gentle Axe. Tell us about the book.

RM: Gentle Axe is a historical crime novel, a mystery I suppose you could say, which I set in St. Petersburg in the 1860s. St. Petersburg in Russia, that is. I know there is another St. Petersburg in the States--several maybe. The protagonist is a detective called Porfiry Petrovich, who some people may realize is a character from another book. He’s a character I’ve taken from Dostoevsky’s great masterpiece, Crime and Punishment. So basically, that was my idea, really, to write a book in which Porfiry Petrovich is featured in a more central way than perhaps he is in Crime and Punishment. Because he’s not the main character in Crime and Punishment, but I thought he was such a fascinating character that I’d write a story with him as a sort of Sherlock Holmes-style trying to do a classic golden age-style detective story. That was my idea. It’s a bit of a cheeky idea, I guess.

WS: Tell us a little bit more about the characters and what happens. I don’t want you to give anything away, but just give us a little flavor for what happens in the book.

RM: It opens in a park. It’s very early in the morning, and an old woman finds a man hanging by the neck--a huge, burly sort of peasant fellow. Nearby him there is a suitcase, and she opens the suitcase. It’s kind of buried under the snow a little bit, and she has to sort of dig around and open it. There’s another body inside the suitcase, a dwarf with a terrible wound in his head, splitting his head open, looks kind of like it must be caused by the nasty, bloody axe that is tucked into the belt of the large hanging man. So it seems like people are quite quick to jump to the conclusion that the large man hanging by the rope killed the dwarf and then out of some sort of remorse took his own life, and that is kind of the solution that falls upon Porfiry Petrovich, the detective.

But he realizes that that’s all a little bit too simple and straightforward, that somebody wants him to think that. So he follows various leads and clues, and it brings him into contact with various characters of different strata of society. There’s an impoverished student, a prostitute, a gentleman publisher, and a well-to-do widow who has various lodgers in her house, and an intricate and quite complicated or complex plot is revealed, I think.

It’s very difficult talking about detective stories because you don’t want to give too much away. What I tried to do with the book was write in a way that was a mystery story and worked as a whodunit but also along the way paid tribute to Dostoevsky and my love of his book Crime and Punishment in particular, but in general of the work that I’ve enjoyed reading of him and other Russian writers.

WS: Where did you get the idea?

RM: Yeah, interesting. I think that Crime and Punishment, the novel, is obviously a towering work, and in a way, it’s one of those books that everybody is aware of, and maybe more people know about it than have read it. I don’t know. I first approached it when I was, I suppose, in my teens--precocious kind of teenager--and I was probably too young to appreciate everything that was in the book. But the idea of this work of Russian literature, the profound mysteries that are promised by Russian literature--explanations of the working of the human soul and things like that, coupled with a bloody murder story--really appealed to me. .

I had also heard that the character of Columbo was based on Porfiry Petrovich, so that added to the allure of it. So it always held a fascination. I think even before I had read it, I was fascinated by it. And then when I read it, it was just one of those books that took hold of me.

I think when we write, sometimes what we’re doing is responding to the experiences we have in life in maybe a direct or indirect way, and the books that we read are just as much vital and important experiences as other things. They’re kind of encounters with other people’s minds, and if we’re inspired and thrilled by the things that we encounter there, then I think it’s valid to write our own stories or books that are our response to that.

So that was kind of going on in terms of why I wanted to do something with Porfiry Petrovich. But why I chose to write it as a crime novel was that I was coming to a stage in my writing where I wanted to write within a genre. I kind of liked the idea of genre and genre fiction, but I had resisted it because I think, and certainly it was in my mind, that it’s a lot harder to do than people at first might think, and I just didn’t know whether I could do it, I suppose. The challenges of genre and the expectations that a reader would have coming to that kind of work was something that I was eager to kind of have a go at, and I wanted to know what would happen to my writing if I wrote within the confines of a genre. Because I’ve always just written, I suppose, whatever I wanted to write and never really thought about whether it fitted into any particular genre or not. Whether that made it literary fiction or not, I don’t know. That’s for other people to say.

WS: For those of us who aren’t all that familiar with Crime and Punishment or don’t remember it, could you just give us a little background? We know that Porfiry is the detective, but can you just give us like a quick overview of it, because you do rely on it so much?

RM: Yes. I think it certainly fed into my book, but I don’t know whether you need to have read Crime and Punishment first. I would hope that those who haven’t read it first might go on to read it afterwards. But yeah, Crime and Punishment is the story of a murderer, a student called Raskolnikov who decides to kill an old woman, a sort of miserly pawnbroker who he has utter contempt for and considers that she’s an insect, a human insect. His motives are complex in the book, I think. Sometimes, they even seem to contradict themselves, but he sort of thinks of himself as a superman in the sort of Nietzschean sense. He imagines that all that is stopping him from fulfilling his destiny as a great individual is a lack of funds. So part of his motive is to get money by robbing this old woman, so he decides to kill her, and he does kill her, but unfortunately for him, he’s also forced to kill her sister, or half-sister, I think it is, who comes back to the apartment and discovers him just having committed the crime. When he commits the first crime, he has to commit another one that has less justification in his moral universe, and he then becomes ill. I think essentially he has a breakdown under the pressure of his guilt or problems. It’s a sin, Dostoevsky would probably term it, and the story really is the story of how he deals with that tremendous guilt and the various workings of the guilt through him. There are subplots with this family that he meets, a kind of drunken guy called Marmeladov, and becomes mixed up with this terrible grinding poverty that’s involved with that family. And, of course, the daughter is the prostitute, Sonia. So that’s the world that I was drawing upon.

WS: I would love it if you would give us a taste both of The Gentle Axe and Crime and Punishment by reading for us, and then I’ll ask you a bunch of questions.

RM: Okay. I thought what I would read from Crime and Punishment is where Raskolnikov actually kills the pawnbroker. He visits her, and it’s a very, very gripping piece of literature. I think it stands out, and I think a lot of hard-boiled genre writers would love to write a scene as gripping as this. I’m going to pick it up where Raskolnikov is introducing himself to the pawn broker, who’s called Alyona Ivanovna.

[Reads from Crime and Punishment.]

I will stop there maybe for Crime and Punishment just to give a little taste. Shall I read something now from Gentle Axe?

WS:Yes.

RM: Okay. This is also a scene involving an old woman. This is Zoya, an old prostitute who stumbles upon the gruesome murder scene at the beginning, and I thought I’d read something from that.

[Reads from Gentle Axe.]

So I will cut it there, I think, rather than go on and on, but that gives a taste.

WS: That’s wonderful. You did a video reading from the book. Is that still available? That was wonderful.

RM: Yes, and that’s on my MySpace page, which is MySpace/GentleAxe, and there are some videos on there.

WS: Good. I highly recommend that. That’s actually where I first saw you. It was wonderful. I couldn’t leave my computer!

RM: That’s great. I mean, that shows that it’s worth doing these things for other writers that might think, “Should I have a MySpace page?”That’s one of the things I thought, because the book coming out in America, and obviously, I’m over here in England, and it’s very difficult for me to do bookshop appearances across the States. In fact, it’s not happening, it’s not going to happen. But the Internet is an amazing thing, and I think things like doing a reading on MySpace, and it’s great to be invited to do this interview with you, it’s another fantastic opportunity, and I think writers should take every opportunity to try and spread the word.

WS: Let’s talk some more about The Gentle Axe. First of all, I just have one aside I want to ask you. Do you speak Russian?

RM: I don’t, no. I came to Dostoevsky through reading him in translation, and as I was researching the book and writing the book, I had this mad idea that what I ought to do is teach myself Russian. If you ever try to teach yourself Russian, it’s not as easy as you think it would be. It’s completely impossible, but I bought a course with CDs and downloaded it onto my iPod, and every day as I was going to work, I was listening to these Russian tapes. It never really took, I have to be honest, but I don’t know whether just hearing people speaking Russian that I didn’t really understand helped get me in the mood. I don’t know.

WS: Well, the names. I don’t understand how the names work. I’m sure you understand that.

RM: Yes. Basically, the names are in three parts. There is the first name, which, for instance, would be Porfiry, and then you’d have the middle name, which is called the patronymic, which, depending on whether it’s a male or female, either means “son of” or “daughter of.” So the “son of” endings for the “vich,” Petrovich means “son of Peter.” And the female names are the ones that end in “ovna” or “evna,” so Petrovna means “daughter of Peter.” So you can have “Porfiry Petrovich,” and then you would normally expect a third name, which is the family name, which is kind of Raskolnikov or Razumihin or something.

But Porfiry Petrovich is unusual in that in Crime and Punishment no family name is given, so I kind of stuck to that as well in Gentle Axe. So I didn’t invent one for him. I just kept him as Porfiry Petrovich. So those are the conventions. And it’s also complicated because the Russians love to use the diminutive form, so Rodion becomes Rodya, and things like this. They like to shorten the names to make them into little pet names, and sometimes they just refer to people by their patronymic, so Petrovich is very confusing, or it can be. Because you can read a Dostoevsky novel, and you can actually think that he’s talking about three different people, but he’s just using the different forms of the name at different times. So it did take me a while to kind of get my head around that.

WS: And also, people address people differently, either at different times or according to how well they know them.

RM: Yes. There’s formal and informal, and I think class comes into it so that you’d always be very respectful of someone who you thought was a social equal or social superior, but for someone you thought was your inferior, you might just be very familiar with. For instance, the yardkeeper is Boria, and that’s basically the diminutive of Boris, so he just calls him that rather than giving him the benefit of his full patronymic and family name as you would do to someone you are more respectful toward.

WS: A minute ago you referred to yourself as being rather cheeky, I guess, in attempting to pick up where Dostoevsky left off. I just wondered if you could elaborate on that. How do you feel about continuing the story of one of the most famous characters in literature by one of the best authors of all time? I’m glad I’m saying that to you after the fact rather than ahead of time, because it could be a bit intimidating to think about.

RM: Yes. Well, when you put it like that, what was I thinking? I think it’s true: there is a sort of temerity, if that’s the right word, or sort of audaciousness about it, but I suppose it’s kind of like you have these ideas, you have to go do them or they’ll drive you mad. And there is the fact that you shouldn’t really do it and that you are going to get a certain amount of flak from people, “How dare you?” Actually, I think I got off pretty lightly, and there hasn’t been too much “how dare he” stuff going on, but there has definitely been some. I haven’t escaped that totally, but I think that’s why I would say that Gentle Axe is a very different book than Crime and Punishment. I didn’t try, I didn’t set out or set myself up to say I’m going to write another masterpiece of world literature, which would have been a ridiculous thing to do anyhow. But what I did do was say I was going to write a crime novel and have a bit of fun with the idea. I suppose I kind of naively thought that… looked on Porfiry Petrovich a little in the way that you have these kinds of mythological characters that take hold of the collective imagination and so therefore he’d gone beyond Crime and Punishment and was kind of out there [in the public domain]. And another way of maybe bringing it into perspective is to say that it’s a little bit like an exercise in fan fiction and I’m such a lover of the book that it was just me trying to express some sort of admiration and love of the book. So I think if I thought more about it, I would have probably been too scared to do it, but it was slightly rash, and I just kind of do stuff and then sort of think, “Oh, should I have done that?” after it’s done.

WS: What sorts of issues did you face once you started working on it and having Dostoevsky there, even if you weren’t trying to copy him or even be like him?

RM: I think that there were a number of difficult things. One was that the book was set in St. Petersburg in the 1860s, and I live in London in 2007, well, 2005 when I was writing it, I suppose, or was it 2004 or 2005? So the remoteness of the culture and the remoteness of the time were challenges. And then getting taking on the character of Porfiry Petrovich in particular. Where are you coming at with the question?

WS: Well, not just his character. Obviously, that’s a big part of it, but everything. For example, Dostoevsky has a whole philosophical infrastructure that he works with.

RM: Okay. I think possibly my technique or my method was basically to encounter and enjoy the sort of themes and characters of Dostoevsky. I mean in Crime and Punishment but in other books, too, The Brothers Karamazov. And there are other Russian writers, too. I mean, various things fed into me, and I just absorbed them in some way, and then they kind of came out. It’s very hard to talk about how you write stuff. I don’t know if you find that. I mean, in some ways, I’m a sort of instinctive writer. I just kind of work it out as I go along, and I never sort of know what the answer is. But I think having to conjure the world of that period into some sort of existence was a challenge, and it was hard, but I just sat down and just sort of got it from somewhere. I don’t know. But I wasn’t too conscious, I wasn’t trying to ape or pastiche or parody or use Dostoevsky in a kind of…I didn’t have a plan like, “Oh, I’ll do this and do that.” It was kind of like more a way of having, as I was saying, absorbed the things. I have this image which I’ll share with you, and whether it makes things clearer or not I don’t know. But it’s kind of the analogy of painters, and actually, I was surprised that a review that I read recently had used this analogy of painters, which sort of really slightly spooked me, because that was the way I was thinking all the way through. It was almost like I had wandered into Dostoevsky’s studio and found that he had just been at work when he’d left for the day, and his palette still had all his colors laid out on it, and his brushes were there, and I kind of picked it up and just sort of painted my own picture with it. That’s kind of the image that I had in my mind while I was writing it.

WS: Oh, my God.

RM: Does that make sense?

WS: It does. It’s a wonderful image, so evocative and so perfect. Wow.

RM: It kind of helped me, if you can understand that. And one of the reviews, maybe a couple of them had said that it’s like he’s the master and I’m one of the lesser artists in his studio. I have no problem with that. Obviously, I’m not Dostoevsky, and I’m not trying to set myself up to be another Dostoevsky. That would be just insane. But you know, I think we can all respond to great works of literature in our own way.

WS: You mentioned that the setting was a bit problematic for you. What kind of research did you do? How did you go about that?

RM: Well, I think there are two kinds of research that I find I have to do in terms of trying to get as much general background knowledge and historical knowledge as I can. That involves reading books on the social history of the period and general history and trying to get in my head just enough of an understanding of what the main intellectual ideas were, what the main issues were, the political issues, and what was going on in people’s minds at that time. So I read nonfiction history books. Also, I read novelists of the period, not just Dostoevsky but Tolstoy and Turgenev and things like that and tried to absorb as much in that way. And then once you start writing, you sometimes come up against specific details that you want to put in the book that you think…well, sometimes you think, “I’m sure I read something about that; I need to go and find that again.” And you go back to your reading, or you have to track it down through footnotes and things, and you go on a trail to find things. The Internet is helpful, but I don’t like to rely too much on the Internet, because I feel you’ve got to know who’s putting the information up there in terms of reliability, or you’ve got to check it against other sources and things. Although I did have one very useful thing that I got through the Internet. I found a Web site that is an academic library where you can buy downloads of Ph. D.’s, and I discovered that someone had written a Ph. D. on the Russian legal system of the period I was writing about. So that was very helpful. And you just build it up like that.

WS: You didn’t go to Russia?

RM: I have been since, but I didn’t go before writing the book. It may seem strange to people, but in a way, I suppose my St. Petersburg is a city of my imagination. And in a way, I feel that it was great to go there. Actually it was a little bit like [I’d seen] inside my mind and built the city that I imagined because it corresponded to how I thought it would be in a very intense way, and it was quite overwhelming to go there having written a book set there. I met and became friends with a Russian guy, Andrei, who took time to show me around the city. He’s since read the book--I sent him a copy--his English is perfect--and he’s emailed me that he was very impressed with how authentic and St. Petersburghian the book was. So I thought I managed to do it well enough to please an actual citizen, a resident of St. Petersburg. So that was good enough for me.

WS: Wow. You must just be so happy.

RM: Yeah, that was the best, most important review to me--to know what he thought of it. So I was delighted when he said that he enjoyed it, but also that he commented on the authentic atmosphere of the city. If he had said, “Well, it’s a good story, but you know, it’s not really my city,” I would have accepted that, but he actually said that he thought it was authentic.

WS: That’s wonderful.

RM: Thank you.

WS: Porfiry Petrovich doesn’t really appear much in Crime and Punishment. I was very surprised. I reread it, and I found that he wasn’t in there much. How did you flesh out his character? What clues did you use?

RM: There were a number of key scenes. Basically, I think I counted up…I think you’re right, he’s in something like three chapters. But the idea of him--I don’t know if you felt this--was introduced before the character was introduced. And you had this idea of this magistrate who was going to occur, who Raskolnikov starts worrying about. And then he encounters him, and he becomes almost obsessed by the idea of him after that and everything that he’s thinking all the time. “Why did he say that?” and “I wonder what he’s doing now,” and “He must be on to me, he’s on to me,”sort of thing.

But there were a couple of scenes. The character of Raskolnikov’s friend, Razumihin, I don’t know if you remember him, but he describes himself as a relative of Porfiry’s. It’s he who suggests to Raskolnikov that they should go round to see this guy, Porfiry Petrovich, and to clear things up, and he gives a description of his character to Raskolnikov before they go round. He says… Shall I just read what he says, because it’s quite interesting.

[Reads.]

That’s quite chilling. That’s sort of ominous, isn’t it, when the link between the last year he investigated and solved a case and another murder and he’s very, very anxious to make your acquaintance. You know, you think, “Oh, that’s a very sort of subtle and clever way of doing it.” When Razumihin takes Raskolnikov round to meet Porfiry Petrovich for the first time, there’s a description in the book, physical description occurs which was very important to me. Again, I’ll just read that, if that’s okay?

[Reads.]

So I think it’s obvious that he’s not a dashing, handsome detective type but nevertheless a formidable and fascinating character. There are other things as well. For instance, at one point, they talk about him, Razumihin again talks about him as a prankster and talks about how one time he told everyone that he was going into a monastery, and another time he said that he was going to get married. He led people to believe that he was going to do these things and even got a new suit of clothes for his supposed wedding, but it turned out that there was nothing in either of these things. They were just kind of tales that he was telling to people. Nothing more is made of this in Crime and Punishment, but they were just kind of little snippets that I thought, “What’s going on here?” This is quite intriguing that not even his colleagues trust him, really, because he just tells them stories and things, and this unreliable and not entirely scrupulous, maybe, character was coming through to me.

So I took those snippets as crumbs that I fed on but went with it really. And there had to be a point where I wrote my Porfiry Petrovich. I wasn’t engaged in an academic exercise; I was trying to write a book for the modern reader and not necessarily for someone who was a real fan of Crime and Punishment who knew that book inside out. So I suppose, again, an analogy is a little bit like a film of a book character, that it takes on a different life. So I had to allow myself some latitude because that was the only way I could have done it.

WS: How did you work on his character? Did you write a profile of him?

RM: I did flesh it out in some ways. There are scenes where I hinted at his background and things, but I didn’t sit down and formally write a profile, no. I just kind of felt my way, if that makes sense. I think I was saying earlier about this kind of thing of just sort of encountering things and then allowing them to affect me and then working them through in my own way, and I think I was doing the same thing with Porfiry Petrovich. It’s just the kind of writer I am. If I had been too slavish or trying to do it in a sort of schematic way, I can’t really write like that. I have to feel my way a bit more.

WS: Did you hit any snags when you were working on either Porfiry’s character or the book in general?

RM: Well, it took me quite a long time from having the original idea to finishing the book, and the snags, I suppose, were developing the story to the proper extent that it needed to be developed. I did a lot of planning and plotting, more than I had done on other work that I’ve written before. So because I had everything, by the time I came to write it, I had everything pretty well worked out. I knew by then what I wanted to do in terms of the writing.

The snags were that I would suddenly find that I needed to know more about a particular part of St. Petersburg, for example, or that I wanted texture and detail that I wanted to put into the story that I felt when trying to write that particular scene I didn’t have. So I would have to go away and try and find that detail and that texture somehow. It could have taken me a month to read certain books, track down books, read them and stuff so I could write something that was perhaps a page or a half-page long. You have to do so much looking and searching for things that you don’t necessarily use. I think there is a temptation in some historical writing that you think, “I know this stuff, so I’m going to put it in the novel.” I tried to avoid doing that. There are a lot things you find out, and you really search for the lovely gems and nuggets. But if they don’t have a part to play in the story, then I try to be quite ruthless and keep them out because I’m trying to find things out that serve the purpose of the story I’m trying to tell.

WS: Both Crime and Punishment and The Gentle Axe are crime novels. Yours is a whodunit, and with Crime and Punishment, we know who the perpetrator is. Can you talk about the differences in approaching a crime novel where the perpetrator is known and where the perpetrator isn’t known?

RM: My novel is a whodunit, so part of the tension and suspense comes from that game the writer plays with reader in terms of setting up the mystery and putting forward a number of alternative possibilities and playing games. That creates a kind of engine for the story, I think, that will keep people reading, because hopefully they will want to know the solution of the mystery that you’ve set up.

When the perpetrator is known from the start, there has to be a different way of creating suspense and tension. I think in Crime and Punishment, it’s through the psychological, forensic psychological analysis of this perpetrator’s mind, and it’s incredibly compelling and fascinating. And I suppose, to put in kind of a simplistic way, it might be rather than a whodunit, it might be a whydunit. What drove the person to do it? That is the thing that the reader wants to get to the bottom of.

There are crime novels, crime films, and drama on TV where the perpetrator is known from the beginning, but there is still a detective working things out, and the interest could be how is the detective going to crack the case and solve it. I think Columbo was always like that, wasn’t it? He always knew who the murderer was, and there were always those battles of wits between Columbo and the people who underestimated him and thought that he was some sort of shambling buffoon, and he would always obviously get the better of them and work something out. That’s kind of an interesting motive.

But as I was saying earlier about wanting to write within the crime genre, I just made the decision that I would do it in terms of whodunit because that is the classic form, and I would try to be respectful of some of the conventions within that. It was a good exercise in fun, and I enjoyed approaching it that way.

WS: Your final perpetrator: I was so surprised by the ending. You just brought it together so beautifully.

RM: You’re not going to give it away, are you?

WS: No, of course not. I wouldn’t do that. I’m just wondering, did you know ahead of time who the murderer was and how it was going to work out and how you were going to bring all these threads together, or did you just go along and figure it out as you went along?

RM: No, I knew. What I did with Gentle Axe--and I did the same thing again--I’ve written another Porfiry Petrovich crime novel; I was contracted, if that’s the right word, to do two. My UK publisher wanted it to be a two-book deal, and they wanted both to be using Porfiry Petrovich, so I was obliged to do that, and I was happy to do it, as well. But I used the same technique both times, which was to work out what was going on basically, and as a result of that, to plot a timeline and then to write the story in a fairly developed synopsis form. So that you might imagine each chapter of the book would have, say, half a page to a page written until I got to the ending, and then I wrote in each case the confrontation scenes and the ending. I always knew where I was going and what was going to happen. So for me as the writer it worked. Whether it works for any given reader is down to the reader, it’s out of my hands.

One of the hardest things, I think, about writing crime fiction mysteries, is that element of are you giving too much away, or are you not giving enough. One of the comments that was made to me by one of my editors was that the book is ahead of the reader in quite a challenging way. It’s a few steps ahead, but that was the way I wanted it to be. I didn’t want it to be ponderous and full of exposition. I wanted it to be quite sprightly and you have to kind of keep up. Because I do enjoy that kind of crime book, and I think that’s where crime fiction is going.

I think it’s the film influence, as well. You watch those twisty movies that really keep you guessing all the time, and you are having to really pay attention. But I don’t know whether I could do it without knowing who was there. I was thinking about the way the subconscious mind works. Maybe people who write whodunits like that and say, “I don’t know who’s done it until the end,” maybe their subconscious does, but it never tells them until the end. But I need to have it plotted out on paper in front of me, because I just need that kind of security blanket.

WS: Even though you knew who did it, did you need to go back and adjust the clues, or did you have that all figured out ahead of time?

RM: I think that I had it figured out to some extent. I mean, there is some going back, and there is some adjusting the balance, and it’s a little bit like a mixing desk in a recording studio. You have to maybe put some things up and some things down, and some of that I did myself.

And then other times, the editor is crucial because the editor is kind of like your ideal reader who just reads it and says at some point, “I don’t think you prepared for this enough”or “This was a too little signaled.” That’s what I think you need writing as a crime writer. You need someone else’s reaction because you know what you want the effect to be, but it’s hard to know whether you are delivering the effect that you have in mind as a reading experience without having someone read it and feed back to you. You just can never know. You can do your best shot, but you just don’t know whether you’ve got it right until somebody else reads it. There are balances and readjustments, and that’s kind of the process that it was.

WS: I am really curious to know how you got published and particularly by Penguin, which is, of course, like the crowning achievement.

RM: Yeah, I always say this to people, that I have written far more unpublished novels than I have published ones. I have been plugging away at this for many, many years, and I’ve been told that I came close on a number of occasions. But the publishing industry and breaking through is very, very tough, and I know a lot of great writers--very good writers who are still waiting and hoping that they can make the breakthroughs to get a publishing deal. So I feel that I have been very fortunate about the way things have worked out.

I got my current agent about nine years ago. He’s a UK agent, very well-known figure within the British publishing scene. Once I got my agent, I was very excited, and I thought, “That’s it. He’s going to take that book, the manuscript in question way back in the 1990s, and he’s going to go out to lunch with some publisher, and they are going to say yes, okay, we’re going to negotiate the advance, and that’s it, I’m a writer” sort of thing. But it didn’t actually work out like that. He continued to believe in my work and be very supportive over the years, but he was unable to sell any of the books that I wrote and presented him with. It was coming to a point where we went out for a coffee, and he looked me in the eye and said, “I think there are some writers who have to accept that they may never get published.” And I looked behind me thinking, “Who’s he talking about?” But he had me in mind, and at that point, I thought, “I’ve got one last throw of the dice, really, so I’ve got to do something sort of outrageous that will get the attention, and I’ve got to just go for it,” because this idea had been haunting me for years, really, but I thought there’s no way I can write it.

What we were talking about earlier…I was overwhelmed by the sheer difficulty of the task for many, many years, and it was only because I thought I had reached the end of the line that I thought, “I’ll do something crazy like this.” And I had two last stories, really. There was this book and another book that I wrote which is called Taking Comfort, which was published over here in the UK only in 2006. That was a contemporary novel, very different from The Gentle Axe and written very much in an intense, insane sort of energy burst--quite quickly actually, but again, it had been cooking for quite a few years.

I got that out of my system, and then I sat down to write the book that became The Gentle Axe. We took it in its synopsis and three chapters and the outline form to some publishers over here, one of whom had been--well, actually, no--both of whom had been interested in my writing and had not completely written me off and said, “Don’t ever show us anything by this guy again.” They were reasonably good responses that I had had from a couple of editors, and I pushed my agent to try these people with it. And I actually got to meet these editors and have coffee and stuff with them, and that was the first time in many, many years of trying to get stuff published that I’d actually being inside publishing houses and sat down with editors and talked about things. So I knew that I was onto something because they were interested in the idea. But those two publishers that we were talking to--I say we, it was myself and my agent--ended up not being interested in the book as it developed because one of them, I think, wanted it to be more genre, more crime and not so literary, and the other one was also put off by the literary aspect of it.

And then my agent took it to Faber and Faber. It was actually given to the chairman of Faber and Faber, and he read it and liked it and gave it to one of his editors, who also liked it, so I was called in for a meeting. Faber and Faber wanted world rights, which meant that they would then sell the rights to other publishers. That was great; I had no problem with that, signed up to that. So it was all due, really, to Faber selling the rights to Penguin.

I can’t remember whether it was the London book fair or the Frankfurt book fair, but it was going on, and I heard from someone that there had been some interest from some American publishers. And from what, somebody within Faber--not my editor, one of the rights people--emailed me and let something out of the bag. I got quite excited about that, and I was nagging people and saying, “What’s going on, what’s going on?” And they went very quiet and said, “We don’t know yet. We’re just waiting.” And then I was told that Penguin had made, I think it’s called a preemptive offer. They didn’t want to get into a bidding war, so they just made an offer that they thought would see off any other bidders, and it did. And that was Penguin. And for me to be published by Faber and Faber in the UK and Penguin in the US, I still can’t believe it, and I think it’s probably not quite real. I suspect it’s an elaborate practical joke that somebody’s playing on me, but things like this interview help to confirm the reality of it a little bit.

WS: Did Penguin or Faber and Faber get you all those reviews you’ve had? You’ve been widely reviewed.

RM: In the States, America, that’s due to Penguin, the press office over there. They send out advance review copies all over the place, and you just hope that you get some interest. I must admit when they told me, and they said, “You’re going to be reviewed by The New York Times and The Washington Post have said they are going to do a review, The Wall Street Journal. I really got very, very, very nervous and apprehensive, because they are all very high-profiled places, and it’s great to get coverage in these papers, but in a review, you cannot predict what people are going to say.

I feel that I’ve been very, very fortunate. When they started to come through, again, I was like, “Really?” It sent me back to the book just to check that it was my book that they were talking about. But I was talking about it with my agent. I think that we sort of feel that the reception and coverage in America has been much bigger than over here. To have a full page in The New York Times Book Review is amazing. Over here, as a crime novel, you get lumped in with all the other crime novels released that month, so you might have four or five books reviewed together, and you get a paragraph or maybe two paragraphs if you’re lucky, which is fine. That’s what I was expecting to happen in America, but I think what was quite interesting is that Faber marketed it very much as a crime novel, and Penguin chose to present it to the world more as a literary novel, and that’s maybe influenced the way that it’s been received. Because I think that Penguin said the problem with presenting it as a crime novel through and through is that it wouldn’t get taken seriously by the big newspapers, so they made that decision, and it seems to have been a very good decision.

WS: That’s really interesting. I wonder if any of it has to do with readers in the two areas of the world, or if it’s strictly a publisher’s--I don’t want to say whim, it’s obviously more than a whim--but I’m just wondering if Faber and Faber had presented it as a literary novel in the UK how that would have affected things, changed things, maybe? But of course, that’s just guess work. Do you have any feel for that, for how the audiences are different?

RM: I think that they are a very experienced publisher. I think the markets are different, and I think that there is a potentially huge market for crime fiction over here. Relatively, obviously The overall market is smaller in the UK than it is in the U.S. and a quite significantly smaller market for literary fiction. What Faber are doing actually is they are developing a crime fiction stable, and it seems to me that quite a few of the authors they have are historical crime fiction. So I kind of fitted into that, and therefore I became part of the strategy that was in place already. I’ve no regrets or complaints. I think they probably made the right decision for this market. I think the problem with the UK literary scene is that there aren’t that many opportunities for books to be reviewed. There are only a certain number of papers that carry serious book reviewing sections, so you’re competing in the literary world. If one of the big guns, like Ian McEwan or somebody, has a book out at the same time as a first-time novelist, you’e not going to get the coverage at all. You’re just not going to be in the paper. But there’s a bigger chance if you’re in that kind of crime roundup, and you’re still getting in there. I think they know what they’re doing, but it’s just these mysterious calculations that are carried on, and the writer just has to trust that the publisher knows what they’re doing.

WS: Movie rights? Movies?

RM: Not yet.

WS: Not yet?

RM: No options. Not yet. No. It would be nice, but again, a lot of books get written, a certain proportion get optioned, and of those that get optioned, a very tiny number get made into films. But as far as I know, unless somebody sold the movie rights and hasn’t told me, there’s been no movement on that at all. So when my agent sold the rights to Faber, the world rights for the book, he said, “B ut I think we’ll hang onto the movie rights.” So he negotiated for those to be taken out, so we retained the movie rights. It would be nice if something like that happened, but in yet another way, it’s a little bit like when you win lottery, I suppose. It doesn’t happen to that many people.

WS: Anything else you’d like to talk about before we close?

RM: I’d hope that it could be said that I have taken on some of the philosophical, religious, moral, and social issues that Dostoevsky deals with. For example, I’ve given Porfiry a religious faith, which comes from Dostoevsky. As far as philosophical issues, I think the book is concerned with good and evil and the status of the soul. I think these issues were essential to the intellectual climate of the time, and there were schools of thought between believers and rationalists. There were all these kinds of intellectual ferment that was going on. I tried to be informed by that and have it come through in the story. And the idea of the soul is something that I wanted to deal with in a crime novel, which I thought was quite interesting, really, to have a crime novel that had a conception of the soul and dealt with ideas like sin and the spiritual aspect of the investigation and the role of Porfiry as a confessor. That comes, I think, from Crime and Punishment, the idea of Porfiry as Raskolnikov’s confessor, although strangely, Raskolnikov doesn’t confess. He deliberately chooses not to give Porfiry that final triumph and confesses instead to Salytov, which is sort of an interesting irony. I think it’s possible that you can read Crime and Punishment as a religious analogy or parable, even, and I think that the central issue is Raskolnikov’s salvation. He has to confess to be saved, and I think the religious epilogue or ending of Crime and Punishment is possible that modern readers maybe struggle with a little. I’ve heard some people say that it’s tacked on and it goes against the whole thrust of the narrative, which they feel is the story of a man who has gone to the devil, who’s beyond salvation. But I always thought that it was central to Dostoevsky’s conception, and I wanted to take that on and explore it somehow in my book without it overwhelming what was essentially a mystery story or crime story. I read in a review, sorry to keep bringing these reviews up, but somebody talked about the fact--this pleased me, as well--that Crime and Punishment explores the metaphysics of murder, but my book explores the metaphysics of investigation. I was very pleased with that, and I thought, “Yeah, that’s what I was trying to do.” It’s great when you read a review that explains your own book to you. I think that’s what you really want from a good review.

WS: What would you say to readers who are intimidated by the idea of reading Dostoevsky?

RM: It’s purely and simply he’s a great writer, but more than that, a writer of great humanity. I think his compassion and his understanding of humanity illuminates everything that he does. I think there are also moments of unexpected humor. I think maybe he has a reputation for being a very grim writer and has miserable scenes of grinding poverty and desperation, and yet he doesn’t flinch away. I think what’s amazing about Dostoevsky is that he was a religious believer, a devoutly religious man, but he’s not afraid of putting the things that challenge his God into his fiction and saying, “This is part of God’s universe, too” and stare looking unflinchingly at the world around him, and that I find very compelling.

But I go back to the humanity which comes through in little scenes. I thought what’s amazing in Crime and Punishment is when Porfiry Petrovich talks about this magazine article that Raskolnikov had written, which he had read, and Raskolnikov remembered writing the article but didn’t realize that it had been published. And I think as a writer, this is really interesting. And then his mother has bought the journal and shows it to him, and in the midst of everything that’s going on, the fact that he’s murdered these people and he’s being hounded by this strange detective, he’s having a look at the copy of the magazine and thinking, “Oh, right, I feel quite good about that sort of thing.” He writes tremendous set piece scenes as well and is a quite dramatic writer. I’ve sort of read a critique of him that he’s quite a dramatic writer in the sense that you can sometimes imagine that he is writing for the stage as much as writing for a novel.

WS: How about some Web addresses? You mentioned your MySpace page. Can you just give us your Web site and your MySpace page again?

RM: Okay. MySpace is MySpace.com/gentleaxe. I’ve put a page up on the Internet now which is www.rogernmorris.com. That’s a very simple page, but it has links to the two strands of my writing, the contemporary book that I was telling you about earlier, and it’ll take you also to The Gentle Axe MySpace page. So if anyone is interested in going and checking these things out, then please do leave a message if you can, and that would be great to know that people are out there and connecting. That’s what it’s all about.

WS: Thank you so much for being with us today, Roger. I was really looking forward to this interview, and it’s been everything that I imagined.

RM: Well, thank you very much. I’ve really enjoyed it.

(C) Paula Hollywood, Inc. 2007

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