Reviews for The Gentle Axe

The average rating for The Gentle Axe based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-02-23 00:00:00 Romain Gilson I'd somehow never even heard of this 2007 novel - in which English author RN Morris has the demented/inspired idea to use Porfiry Petrovich, the weirdly relentless detective from "Crime and Punishment," as his historical-mystery protagonist - and when I recently found it at a thrift shop, I had to give it a try! And amazingly, Morris makes the idea totally work: not only is this the SAME Porfiry Petrovich as in Dostoevsky (he's not strengthened or idealized at all), but the Morris also does an uncannily convincing job of re-creating not 19th-century St. Petersburg but DOSTOEVSKY's 19th-century St. Petersburg. And the book's actual mystery plot is very well done. I loved it.

Review # 2 was written on 2008-02-13 00:00:00 Marie Steckbeck As a native speaker of Russian, I was suspicious of this novel at first. When Roger Morris, an Englishman, pulled out Porfiry Petrovich, the investigating magistrate of Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment," from his literary hereafter, I was afraid of getting into yet another Potemkin village. And, of course, Dostoevsky is mine. What right do foreigners have to exploit his characters? After all, in their ignorance of Russia, they often create what we call "a spreading cranberry," a tall story. I'm glad I was wrong. The result of Morris' impeccable work is a literary mystery, a matreshka doll with more sequentially smaller dolls nested inside than there are peas in a pod. [Read the rest of my review in The Literary Review magazine]