![]() ![]() A Vengeful Longing(2009) is, by contrast, set in the humid Saint Petersburg summer of 1868 with the murder of a doctor and his family as Petrovich encounters budding revolutionaries and Tsarist spies. ![]() Porfiry Petrovich begins his investigation in the city’s squalid brothels and drinking dens but is soon led into an altogether more genteel stratum of Saint Petersburg society. In A Gentle Axe (2007) it is the freezing winter of 1866 and two frozen bodies have been found in Petrovsky Park – a dwarf neatly packed in a suitcase, and a burly peasant hanging from a tree. Morris has “borrowed” magistrate Porfiry Petrovich from Crime and Punishment for his series of Saint Petersburg-set mysteries. Jennifer Wilson, a scholar of Russian literature, wrote recently in the New York Times that today’s true crime resurgence has an antecedent in the works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Cain, Jim Thompson, Patricia Highsmith, A Yi…and many others. In Crime and Punishment Dostoevsky created the first psychological crime novel and so influenced a multitude of later crime writers around the world-James M. Instead he finds himself mired in confusion, paranoia, and self-loathing confronting the real-world moral consequences of his deed. He believes the funds from the murder will allow him to restart his life. Rodion Raskolnikov, down-and-out in Saint Petersburg, formulates a plan to kill an unscrupulous pawnbroker for her money. Well, we can’t not begin with Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866). ![]()
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