Armando Iannucci, librettist

I heard on Radio 4 the other day that the comedy genius Armando Iannucci has "written an opera", as they put it, although as he himself admits, he has actually provided the words. The composer is David Sawer. Traditionally, an opera is the composer's piece, and it is the composer's name that is associated with it. The librettist does not usually get a look in. It's Verdi's La Traviata, not Piave's. But the Today Programme package I listened to failed to even mention the composer's name. Skin Deep, we were told, is a new opera by Armando Iannucci. I wonder how David Sawer feels about that!

I haven't seen it yet, though I am hoping to do so soon, when it transfers down to London. I was very interested to read this article by Iannucci about the process in The Times. As I've also written a libretto for an opera, I identified with a lot that he said, particularly this:

Somebody asked me to write an opera. I wasn’t expecting that. Being asked to write an opera is like being asked to demolish a power station or go in a rocket with Al Pacino: it’s not something you’d ever expect to do in your lifetime. You’ve got to say “yes” no matter the amount of trepidation that soon follows once you’ve agreed.

This too struck a chord:

it’s always a useful constraint on the ego to wallow in a line you’ve written only to be told that it needs to be four syllables shorter. You realise that you are there to service the music, not the other way round. Your words are like costume and scenery; part of a larger experience.

I would add that it is an amazing experience to hear words you've written set to music by a brilliant composer and sung by fantastically talented singers. It's an enormous privilege that's strangely humbling too.

And as an extra treat, here's a clip from Armando Iannucci's previous operatic work, Ibiza Uncovered: The Opera

Will the giving frenzy never cease?

Another chance to bag a free copy of A Vengeful Longing over at It's a Crime...

Bearded bloke writes about bearded bloke

Rowan Williams, author of a recent book on Dostoevsky.


Fyodor Dostoevsky, subject of a recent book by Rowan Williams.

In honour of this wonderful event, I have grown a beard. Photo will appear soon.

Seriously, though, the book - Dostoevsky: Language, Faith and Fiction - sounds fascinating. I have to admit that I did not know Rowan Williams was an authority on Dostoevsky. He speaks Russian too, which is very impressive.




Here's the blurb from amazon:

This is an extraordinary book, which through the lens of Dostoevsky's novels enables the reader to consider the nature of God in the 21st Century - a societal landscape fraught with tensions and social inequalities.When an Archbishop of Canterbury takes time off to write a book about Dostoevsky, this is a sign of great hope and encouragement for The Church of England and for all those who seek God.The current rash of books hostile to religious faith will one day be an interesting subject for some sociological analysis. But to counter such work, is a book of the profoundest kind about the nature and purpose of religious belief. Terrorism, child abuse, absent fathers and the fragmentation of the family, the secularisation and the sexualisation of culture, the future of liberal democracy, the clash of cultures and the nature of national identity - so many of the anxieties that we think of as being quintessentially features of the early twenty first century and on, are present in the work of Dostoevsky - in his letters, his journalism and above all in his fiction.The world we inhabit as readers of his novels is one in which the question of what human beings owe to each other is left painfully and shockingly open and there is no place to stand from which we can construct a clear moral landscape. But the novels of Dostoevsky continually press home what else might be possible if we - characters and readers - saw the world in another light, the light provided by faith. In order to respond to such a challenge the novels invite us to imagine precisely those extremes of failure, suffering and desolation.There is an unresolved tension in Dostoevsky's novels - a tension between believing and not believing in the existence of God. In "The Brothers Karamazov", we can all receive Ivan with a terrible kind of delight. Ivan's picture of himself we immediately recognise as self-portrait. The god that is dead for him is dead for us. This Karamazov God of tension and terror is often the only one we are able to find. This extraordinary book will speak to our generation like few others.

About the Author
The Rt. Hon. and Most Reverend Rowan Williams is Archbishop of Canterbury. He was formerly Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Oxford and Archbishop of Wales.

When I told my wife this news she suggested I should get a copy of either A Gentle Axe or A Vengeful Longing to him for a quote. Well, it worked with Lorraine Kelly, another fan of Dostoevsky! (That sounds like a good pub quiz question, doesn't it? What connects TV presenter Lorraine Kelly and Archbishop Rowan Williams? They are both fans of Dostoevsky.)

This is a very lazy blog post, I admit - although surely I deserve some credit for working in both Rowan Williams and Lorraine Kelly. My excuse is I'm desperately trying to finish my latest novel. I really am nearing the end, which is making me incredibly tense and bad-tempered. I feel like it could all fall apart in my hands. There is the faint hope that it might not.

One more winner to announce

All the winners' books have gone off now, including one to Fiona Robyn, who I forgot to mention in my last post, and who is also running a FREE BOOK GIVEAWAY MADNESS FRENZY FEVER type thing on her own blog.

Lucky winners!

The three lucky winners of my Paperback Giveaway Madness Frenzy are:

Sarah Fox

Peter Devonald

Clare Clarke

Philip Amos

Iasa Duffy

Mary Akers

Jen Persson

Sharon Scinicariello

Mack Lundy

Rachel Green

Gerry Byrne

Alicia Gifford

Bonnie ZoBell

Miranda Morris

Carol Reid

Morgan Hayton

Martina Schwiebert

Loveina Khans

Justine Taylor

Gerry Byron

Hang on a sec, let me count that again.

Oh, looks like I miscounted first time. Never mind. Everyone's a winner. No more books, or jiffy bags, now, so I'm afraid the competition really is closed.

But, what's this? Another chance to win copies here!

I feel a special mention must go to Morgan Hayton, who contacted me on behalf of the 'Books for Fiji' project.

This is the message Morgan sent me:

The [Books for Fiji] group started about 6 months ago, I am 16 and went on a school trip to Fiji to do volunteer work at some schools there. One school we went to only had a few books for the whole school and village, when we got back to Australia my teacher Mrs Dawson set us 5 students a task of how to help on our own, I came up with the idea of building the library one book at a time via people just sending one book when they got my email, I contact authors like Jackie French and Garth Nix and they sent a book but also suggested to put the request on Facebook as most author have a page there, well thats how its has grown and got to be on Pass it on and also on a local community radio in Melbourne.

I was so impressed, I sent off a copy of both A Vengeful Longing and A Gentle Axe. If anyone else would like to donate a book, please get in touch and I will pass on Morgan's details.

Oh and I had some more ink on Sunday, in the Sunday Times, from Joan Smith. I shall post a quote when I get a chance.

In today's Guardian!

A great review of A Vengeful Longing by Cathi Unsworth.

As fans of Morris's previous A Gentle Axe will know, this author not only has the nerve to lift his lead character from Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment but also the skill to bring that distant Russia and its inhabitants to life, while drawing parallels with our own world.

A great start to the weekend!

COMPETITION CLOSED

I think it's only fair that I declare the competition closed now as I have had more entries than I have books to give away. There will be another competition on another blog next week, which I will give details of as soon as I have them. So if you are not a lucky winner this time, you will have another chance.

I am now going to sort through the entries and notify the winners. With any luck I will be posting the winners' names here later.

While we're on the subject of giving giving away free books...

I thought this was very interesting. My thanks to Mary Akers for the link.

FREE books!!!!!! Paperback giveaway madness!!!!!!!

Hey, do I know how to write a headline! You can't argue with FREE, can you? And for those of you who like reading, 'books' is a pretty good pull too! In fact, what could be better? It's such a good offer I'm now wondering if I really needed all those exclamation marks, or 'screamers' as they're known. And maybe 'giveaway madness' doesn't quite hit the right tone. Ah well, too late now.

Here's the deal, to celebrate the official publication day of the UK paperback of A Vengeful Longing (shortlisted for the 2008 CWA Duncan Lawrie Dagger, longlisted for the 2008 CWA Ellis Peters Award for historical crime fiction, runner up for New York Magazine's best thriller of the year) I have three signed copies to give away as prizes in my FREE TO ENTER competition (never hurts to slip in an extra 'FREE' now and then). All you have to do is email me at rogernmorris at blueyonder dot co dot uk with the name of the investigating magistrate from Dostoevsky's novel Crime and Punishment who is the protagonist of my books A Gentle Axe and A Vengeful Longing.

Also, you'd better tell me where you'd like the book sent.

It's as easy as that!

Happy New Year... let's hope so.

Jeepers, how the New Year creeps up on you. All of a sudden we're in 2009. A new year means a new edition of A Vengeful Longing, the mass market UK paperback, which comes out a week today on the 8th of Jan. Here's what it looks like:



It should start appearing in the shops around now, but it's already available for pre-order here.

Of course, the downside of having another book out is that it gives me something else to obsessively google and rank-check. Anyone know a good hypnotherapist?

Christmas past post.

I hope everyone had a happy Christmas. Ours was very quiet but fun. I only dozed off once, briefly, during Dr Who. Don't tell the kids.

It's Boxing Day now. I spent the morning sorting out ipods and wiis. Well, one ipod, one wii. Everyone's occupied, so I thought I would try to get some work done. Obviously, it wasn't as easy as I had hoped, which is why I am on the blog.

I did a bit of festive googling and found this from Darryl Accone in the Mail and Guardian of South Africa:

Place and time are crucial also to RN Morris, who brings Dostoevsky's investigating magistrate Porfiry Petrovich brilliantly to life in A Vengeful Longing (Faber), the second in the self-styled "A St Petersburg Mystery" series. Paying due acknowledgement to Dostoevsky this time round, Morris's filigree recreation plunges us into 19th-century St Petersburg and a rash of poisonings and deeply hidden motivations.

I remembered a previous article from Accone, in which I'd been criticised for not sufficiently acknowledging my debt to Dostoevsky. It seems I got the balance right this time.

New York Magazine Best Thriller 2008

... was won by Child 44 by Rob Tom Smith.

Runners up: A Vengeful Longing by RN Morris and The Likeness by Tana French.

Full story here

Here's what they said about AVL:

Morris resurrects one of literature’s all-time greatest characters: Porfiry Petrovich, the detective from Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. The result reads like an episode of Columbo, but with feverish Russian psychology and the filthy overflowing canals of 1868 St. Petersburg.

Cardiff event approaches

Historical Crime Fiction Evening
Borders, The David Morgan Building, 14 The Hayes, Cardiff
6.30 pm Thursday, 4 December, 2008

Don't forget, I'll be taking part in the above event this Thursday in Cardiff with fellow histcrimefic authors Andrew Taylor and Bernard Knight.

I hope I don't forget!

Christmas rush?

Not that I check out my amazon page very often, you understand, but I must have accidentally clicked on it today whilst looking for some other book. I discovered this message:

Only 2 left in stock--order soon (more on the way).

What has prompted this sudden surge in demand for A Vengeful Longing, I don't know. Could it be that people are snapping it up as a Christmas present for the discerning reader of historical crime fiction?

If so, I hope amazon are as good as their word and get some more copies in. Pronto.

Cocteau in the Underworld

Soprano Jacqueline Varsey as Eurydice. Photo by John Lloyd Davies.

I got some photos through of last week's workshop at the People Show Studios. They were taken by John Lloyd Davies, our brilliant director and head of Opera Genesis at Royal Opera House 2. I hope they give you some idea of the workshop production.


Baritone Owen Gilhooly as Cocteau at the beginning of the opera. He is struggling to write, but cannot overcome his grief for his dead lover. Writer's block. Photo by John Lloyd Davies.




Cocteau and his mysterious visitor, The Princess, played by mezzo-soprano Victoria Simmonds. Photo by John Lloyd Davies.


Encouraged by The Princess, Cocteau is about to kill himself. Photo by John Lloyd Davies.


Orpheus, played by tenor Andrew Mackenzie-Wicks, is summoned by Cocteau for advice on journeying to the underworld to bring back a loved one. Photo by John Lloyd Davies.


At Orpheus' bidding, Cocteau accepts the Princess' symbolic "gift", "one petal from a blood red flower". This blurs the boundary between this world and the underworld. Photo by John Lloyd Davies.


Cocteau's dead lover, Raymond Radiguet, played by counter-tenor Andrew Radley, appeals to Cocteau. Photo by John Lloyd Davies.


Having chosen art over love, and in the process rejecting his lover, Cocteau is able to overcome his writer's block and returns to work. Photo by John Lloyd Davies.


Composer Ed Hughes on set - photo by me.

Day four of rehearsals

Today was day four of rehearsals for our opera workshop. And tomorrow is the performance. I can't begin to say how impressed I am at the way it's all come together. The singers have been amazing. There's a set and even lighting.

Yesterday I learnt that the studios we're rehearsing in used to be the gym where the Kray Twins boxed.

I'm really looking forward to tomorrow. It's going to be great to see the workshopped scenes from beginning to end. Watching the piece take shape has given me a real taste to see the whole opera produced. I just keep thinking of the bits we're not workshopping and wondering how they would look and sound.

We all hope that one day a full production will come out of this week's hard work.

In the meantime, I heard from Kristen at We Be Reading about a fab review she's written of A Vengeful Longing.

In rehearsal

This week I'm spending my days in Bethnal Green, at The People Show Studios. We're workshopping the opera Ed Hughes and I have written. He did the music - I did the words, just in case you were wondering. And thankfully, people other than me are doing the singing.

The workshop is being run by Opera Genesis, which is an initiative run by Royal Opera House. Our opera, Cocteau in the Underworld(scroll down after clicking for info), has been commissioned by The Brighton Festival.

It's pretty bloody mind-blowing to have people singing your words, that's all I can say! And I turned up today to discover a set had taken shape. Also mind-blowing.

We're working towards putting on a performance for an invited audience on Friday. Not a lot of time. But the performers are brilliant and the director (John Lloyd Davies) is a genius. So, we shall see. In the meantime, I'm having a great time!

Cardiff here I come

Historical Crime Fiction Evening
Borders, The David Morgan Building, 14 The Hayes, Cardiff
6.30 pm Thursday, 4 December, 2008

While we're on the subject of Christmas shopping, I'm thrilled to be taking part in the above event in Cardiff with fellow histcrimefic authors Andrew Taylor and Bernard Knight. They're both stellar writers so I feel very honoured to be in their company, and I owe my place at the party to Rhian, aka Crime Fic Reader, who has organised the event.

Rhian has been fantastically supportive of me over recent years and I'm enormously grateful to her for that, as well as for doing such a sterling job putting this event together at a very difficult time for her.

Paperback writer

Just a quickie to preview the cover of the paperback edition of A Vengeful Longing.

It's not officially published until January 8, 2009, though I've been told that Faber will be releasing some stock early to catch the Christmas shoppers. So feel free to mention it in your letter to Santa.

Trevi Noir

I was lucky enough to be invited to the very first Trevi Noir festival in Umbria, Italy at the weekend.

Many thanks to the event organisers, Michael Jacob and Daniela de Gregorio, the husband and wife writing team who are together Michael Gregorio, author of Critique of Criminal Reason and Days of Atonement. Two fabulously dark and gripping books, by the way.

I did a full round-up of Trevi Noir for the Rap Sheet and there's the definitive summary from Mike and Daniela themselves on the Michael Gregorio blog. I thought here I'd just post a few photos from the event:


Rachel and Mike.


Daniela.


Laura Wilson and Maxim Jakubowsky


Caroline and Andrew Taylor.

I think it's fair to say, a fabulous time was had by all.

Revenants - a story for Halloween

I'm off to Italy now, to attend the Trevi Noir festival. I'm really looking forward to it!

As I won't be around for Halloween, I thought I'd post a Halloween story now. This was something I wrote ages ago, for a competition run by a small comic publisher called Warpton. They put some evocative images on their website and asked people to script a comic strip for those pictures. The winning story would get made as a comic book. I was lucky enough to win.

The illustrations were done by an artist called Simon Mobbs, and here's the page on his website that shows the whole of the comic strip. You can click through the story from the top, left to right.

Here's the story without the pictures:

Revenants

By
Roger Morris

'It's strange,' said Kneale as we hovered at the bottom of the subway stairs. 'When I was alive I didn't believe in ghosts.'

We took the stairs in one bound. At the top we sensed the presence of other dead in the air, thickening the darkness. For a moment, we too dissolved and became a part of it.

'Now that I'm dead I find it hard to believe in the living.' The distant light drew us to it. Then suddenly I sensed that Kneale was gone.

I knew where he would be. Back in the subway, chasing echoes. Passing through the vibrations of drunken cries and laughter, mingling with the smell of freshly spilt piss.

I waited by the light for his return, watching the blank wall for moving shadows. 'I don't know why you torture yourself like that,' I said when I felt him back with me.

'You're not so different,' he said. 'You think the living are going to show themselves to you here, like some kind of movie.' He shot away and I followed.

'I don't need to see them to know they're there,' I protested. He led me through the city, building speed.

Now we were shooting through the empty streets like electrons in a particle accelerator. 'I mean, look around you. Who built all this if it wasn't the living?' I screamed.

'Don't try to trick me with logic,' snarled Kneale, as he sped towards a concrete pillar. 'We've gone way past logic.' As if to prove his point, he passed through the pillar, zig-zagging between its atoms with arcade precision.

'We don't have long,' I warned. 'As soon as the sun's up, we won't even be able to see the buildings.'

'It makes no difference,' said Kneale. 'I could find this place when I'm day-blinded.'

'Like I said, I don't know why you torture yourself like this. First the place where they knifed you. Now your flat.' But he had already passed through the front door.

I found him in the kitchen, mingling with the smells of her breakfast. 'No one asked you to come along,' he said glumly.

There were voices in the living room. The TV was on, but the images of the living were hidden from us, just as they were themselves.

We were alone in the flat now. 'It's not the fact that I can't see her that tortures me,' said Kneale. 'It's the fact that I can still smell her.' And for a moment we both danced in the lingering scent of her perfume.

At last, the Russian Axe (Благородный топор)!

This is a great thrill for me. The russian language edition of my St Petersburg-set novel - Благородный топор. It was one foreign rights sale I really wanted, and hardly dared hope for.

The idea of my Dostoevsky-inspired mystery being translated into the language of Dostoevsky is just mind-blowing. In many ways, I imagined the book as a translation of a lost Russian novel. It's almost as if the original has now turned up.

The headless gambler

Photo Credit: The Michael Gregorio Collection.

Inspired by the Israeli cover of A Gentle Axe, Michael Jacob - who happens to be one half of crime author Michael Gregorio - sent me the headless photo above from his collection of Victorian photographs and daguerreotypes. He has very kindly given me permission to use it here.

Here's what Michael said about the image:

Double-exposure trick photography of this sort first began to appear in the 1860s. The more common examples featured men drinking, playing chess or cards, the same sitter appearing twice, and thus – to the great amusement of our Victorian forebears – playing with himself!

‘Beheaded’ portraits are extremely rare, so I thought you might like to see another one from my collection of Victorian photos.

This example was made by Enrico Andreotti, a photographer who was working in Florence in the 1860s. It portrays a card-player who has lost everything – including his head – by betting on the lowest card in the pack.

Don't forget, I'll be talking to Michael and his wife Daniela (the other half of Michael Gregorio) at the Trevi Noir Festival, on the first of November. Book your tickets now!

And I thoroughly recommend 'A Critique of Criminal Reason' - a wonderfully atmospheric and grisly tale.

News dump.

Aaargghh! The problem with neglecting your blog is that all of a sudden there's a ton of news to report.

First off, it seems I narrowly missed making it on to the shortlist for the CWA Ellis Peters Award for historical crime fiction, though I'm pleased to see my fellow North London Historical Crime Writer, and Faber stablemate, Andrew Martin made the cut with his latest Jim Stringer novel, Death on a Branch Line.

The full short list is:
Ariana Franklin, The Death Maze, Bantam Press
Philip Kerr, A Quiet Flame, Quercus
Andrew Martin, Death on a Branch Line, faber and faber
C J Sansom, Revelation, Macmillan
Andrew Taylor, Bleeding Heart Square, Michael Joseph
Laura Wilson, Stratton’s War, Orion

If you go to the CWA site and scroll down below the excellent and well-deserving short-listees (see, I'm not bitter), you'll find this little addendum:

Longlisted novels

This year has brought an unprecedented number of excellent historical crime novels. The CWA Ellis Peters judging panel has asked for the following books from their long list to be published in recognition of their merit:

Marjorie Eccles, Last Nocturne, Allison & Busby
Ann Granger, A Mortal Curiosity, Headline
H R F Keating, Inspector Ghote’s First Case, Allison & Busby
R N Morris, A Vengeful Longing, faber and faber

That's me, that is, at the end.

Le Spie del Male



You may be interested to know that two of the short-listed authors, Andrew Taylor and Laura Wilson, will be taking part in a festival of historical noir (hey, what a great idea for a festival!) in Trevi, Umbria (what a great place to hold such a festival!), November 1-2. The festival is called Le Spie del Male, and I will be there too.

I was invited by Michael Jacob and Daniela de Gregorio, a husband and wife writing team, who pen superbly gothic historical mysteries under the name Michael Gregorio. Their series is set in Prussia in Napoleonic times and features the detective Hanno Stifeniis, with two books published so far, The Critique of Criminal Reason and Days of Atonement.




Michael and Daniela are not only great writers, they're lovely people too, so I am very much looking forward to the festival. I'll be in conversation with them on Saturday at 11.30 discussing crime in a historical context.

There's more about the festival on the Michael Gregorio website. "Mister Noir", Maxim Jacubowski, author, editor and owner of London's foremost crime fiction bookshop will be taking part too.

Seeing stars

There's a new interview with me up on the Faber site.

I was also interviewed this week by an Israeli journalist. It seems the Hebrew edition of A Gentle Axe has either just come out or is about to. The interview was for the Maariv newspaper and hasn't appeared yet.

The Israeli journalist asked me about the cover for the Hebrew edition, which I had not seen, and had nothing at all to do with selecting. It's an interesting image, which I suspect may be highly controversial in Israel. After all, it does depict a severed head. But, I repeat, I had nothing to do with selecting it.

I can only trust that Keter, my Israeli publisher, know what they are doing, though this article, which I don't understand, seems to suggest that it has provoked some discussion. Why otherwise do they show a close-up of the severed head.

A friend located the book's page on Keter's website and I was able to judge it for myself. I have to say, striking as it is, the image seems to have very little to do with the book I wrote. I found myself wishing I had written the book for which that would be an appropriate image.



And now a cautionary tale for all internet-obsessed, meddling authors. Whilst I was looking at the Israeli publisher's page for my book (without being able to understand it, of course) I saw this line of numbers, one to five, and wondered what they did. Thinking that maybe they led to other pages about my book, I clicked on the number two. The next thing I knew, my book had a two star rating. Surely the first ever instance of an author giving his own book a crappy rating.

My own question to myself is, Why? I mean, it's not as if I would have understood the "other pages" I thought I was navigating to anyhow. I was just meddling and that was the price I paid.

Of course, I tried to redress the balance by clicking on five, but it seems the software has something written into it disallowing the same computer to rate twice. The following morning, I looked at the page on my other computer. As that is networked to the laptop I had been using, and the laptop accesses the internet through it, I expected it to be the same story. But even so, meddler that I am, I couldn't resist clicking those numbers again, just to see what happened. Well, they worked this time, though I hadn't expected them to. Yes, I confess, it was a five I clicked on.

Feeling enormously guilty, I contacted the Israeli publisher saying, "Look, there are two ratings on your site for my book, one two star and one five star, but they are both my me, and I didn't really intend to do either of them. Could you please delete them and clear the rating."

The sound of laughter reached all the way from Tel-Aviv.

That'll learn me.

An honourable mention

Sarah Weinman, she of the idiosyncratic mind, has written an article for the Barnes and Noble Review, in which she includes me in a round-up of historical crime writers. It's the briefest of brief mentions (and she did get the title of Gentle Axe wrong, but what the hell), but I'm honoured to find myself in such distinguished company.

London weighting?

I had to travel to Brighton yesterday for a meeting about the opera. Being a man of a certain age I found I needed to use the loo when I arrived at Brighton Station. If only I'd gone on the train (oh, wait - I did) because it cost 20p to take a leak.

Daylight robbery, I thought. Until later in the afternoon when I arrived back at Victoria Station and found myself once again needing to take a leak. The cost of urination in London turned out to be 30p.

They must think Londoners are made of money.

The meeting took all morning and I went to the toilet twice. It was free.

We did drink a lot of coffee is my excuse.

The general view is that the libretto draft that I have provided will generate between two and half and three hours of stage time. As we were aiming for around 80-90 minutes, there will obviously have to be some cuts. I'm fine with that. The only problem is that Ed Hughes, the composer, is reluctant to lose a single word!

My first podcast!

To hear an extract of the interview I did with Muthamma on Phoenix fm, press the green arrow on the virtual player below.

A special big thank you to my writewords buddy, Shellgrip, aka Jon Gritton, who supplied all the technical advice and assistance - even tidying up the file and converting it to the right format. Suffice it to say, that without Jon's help I wouldn't have had a clue how to do this!

Powered by Podbean.com

Getting back into it

The kids went back to school today, which means I was able to pick up the pieces on my wip. I'm about 30,000 words into it but I had the feeling over the summer that it was falling apart in my hands. Not that I was working on it, just fretting over it.

I now realise that I need to re-order some of the early scenes and that that will call for revision to the rest of what I've written so far. I'm one of those who edits as I go, so I can't progress in the story till I have fixed what I think needs fixing.

Thing is I am resisting the temptation to read through what I've written. This feeling that the scenes need reordering is just that - a feeling. If anything, it's based on the fact that I had reached a wall. I was finding it very difficult to get past a point in the narrative, which made me think that something had to be wrong with what I'd written already.

I have an instinct that the story will be more dynamic and interesting if I move a chapter that was coming later to an earlier point in the story. However, this will also call for a major shift in my timeline. This is not a problem as one of the things that was worrying me was that the timeline wasn't quite right.

This is going to be the autumn book of my proposed 'four seasons' quartet (though I am writing them out of seasonal sequence and they take place in different years). I had had it starting in early September, 1870. I wanted lots of swirling mist and fog, but I was unhappy because September, from what I can gather, is not a particularly misty month in St Petersburg. (Any St Petersburgers reading this, feel free to correct me!) The fog doesn't get hold until October, when the weather starts to get more wintry in general. I really wanted to shift things later, and now I can.

I didn't manage to get much written today, but I think the work I have done, which included buying Jonathan Dimbleby's Russia - the book of the series - will help me get down to it tomorrow. There is always tomorrow.

Yes, I'm still alive.

Blowing away the dust, brushing off the cobwebs in my little corner of blogger.com, I'm back. You may be wondering what happened to me. The school summer holidays is what happened. The weeks flew by in the blur of a themepark rollercoaster. No time for blogging, certainly. A few stolen hours for reading and a bit of writing. I will be getting back into the routine from Wednesday, when the kids are back to school.

If I'd had the presence of mind, and time, I would have given advance notice of my appearance on the Phoenix FM book club, last night. The show is hosted by Muthamma Prasad (above), who did a wonderful job of putting me at my ease. Reading between the lines, I get the impression that I may well have been the most nervous guest she's had, though I did relax into it and the hour long show flew by. I really enjoyed myself, though I had been incredibly stressed about it in anticipation. My first ever LIVE radio broadcast. Well, actually, my first ever radio broadcast of any kind, alive or dead.

Muthamma is great - how refreshing to have an interviewer who actually reads her guests' books! - as is her show. It's broadcast from 7-8 pm Firdays, out of Brentwood on 98 fm, but is available worldwide via the internet. Give it a listen, if you get the chance.

My one regret is that I didn't get a chance to do the 60-second pitch for a must-read book, which is part of the show's format. We just ran out of time. The book I was going to recommend was Sally Hinchcliffe's Out of A Clear Sky, which I hear is going to be Radio 4's Book at Bedtime next month. Some of you may remember I interviewed Sally for Vulpes Libris a while back.

So I guess I'm back in action.

I need therapy.

I seem to be addicted to setting up internet pages for myself on various social networking or writing sites. Here's the latest, over at the red room.

Please don't tell me about any other similar sites. Otherwise I will feel obliged to go there and set up a page.

Perhaps my addiction to setting up author pages will cure me of my addiction to checking my amazon ranking. It's the methadone to the heroin of amazon watching.

Around the world in 80 detectives (take two).

The article originally appeared in The Independent, it seems. Thanks to Ken aka Sibelius of WriteWords and Diane for pointing it out.

Around the world in 80 detectives.

Great fun piece on the booktribes blog, with some excellent suggestions for crime holiday reading to suit your destination. I particularly liked their St Petersburg recommendation.

38. St Petersburg

Another period piece, this time by the British author RN Morris, who cheekily borrows Dostoevsky’s detective Porfiry Petrovich from Crime and Punishment. He has written two novels so far, showing St Petersburg snowbound by winter, and stinking by summer.

Kids broke up today, which will explain my low blogging activity. I've desperately been trying to get as much novel and libretto written while I have the chance. Not much will get done for the rest of this week.

I've been crime writer by day and librettist by night.

Review radars, human and otherwise.

My automated review radar - google alerts - and my human review radar - Maggie my publicist at Penguin - have alerted me to a couple of interesting book sites, both of which seem to have featured AVL.

First there's Mostly Fiction, which actually has a double review of both A Vengeful Longing and The Gentle Axe (being an American site, they reviewed the American edition).

And then there's Book Browse, which not only features A Vengeful Longing on its home page as one of its recommended reads of the week, but pulls together a few of my best reviews so far!

And the winner is......

... not me, but Frances Fyfield for Blood from Stone. Congratulations to Frances and to all the winners at last night's CWA dagger awards. Special congratulations to my table companion Amer Anwar who won the Debut Dagger for Western Fringes. As yet unpublished, but I'm sure the offer will come soon. Well, as soon as Amer has finished it!

Right. Now on with the new one.

The Inspiration Machine, Part 2.

A DESCRIPTION, WITH PHOTOGRAPHS

The Inspiration Machine is essentially a tube which presents the user with a series of four inspirational stimuli, a combination of words, letters, images - both abstract and figurative - as well as some Egyptian hieroglyphs. These stimuli are revealed through revolving windows in independently movable paper sleeves. To use the machine, the person in need of inspiration may either think of a random number, or roll a die to generate a number. A preference for 'up' or 'down' is also either expressed or randomly generated by means of a coin toss. The first rotating sleeve is then turned the requisite number of times in the indicated direction, revealing the first of the inspirational stimuli. This process is repeated until all four windows have revealed a stimulus. It is then up to the user to interpret those stimuli in whatever way they wish.

Here's a photo, showing the inspirational windows in series:



The following sequence of four images shows more detail of the inspirational stimuli, giving an example of the kind of inspiration that may be produced by random turning. Apologies for the poor focusing, blame the camera man. I will describe what each window shows, just to clarify.


The first stimulus (above) is verbal. It presents the words RACE MIND in blue, overwritten with yellow letters that can be read either as CHIN ANT or CHINA NT, or however the user wishes.


The second stimulus (above) is visual, representing a sail boat on the sea.


The third stimulus (above) shows a pair of hieroglyphs. The first is suggestive of a pair of tongs, the second of a hook of some kind.



The fourth stimulus (above) shows butterflies and flowers, etc..

You get the idea.

Obviously, it's up to the user how loosely or literally the various stimuli are interpreted. They are intended to work in conjunction with the imagination of the user, who is expected to open his or her mind to the possibilities suggested. For example the sail boat on the sea could plant the seed of a journey of some kind, the precise nature of which is left up to the user. Or it could literally inspire a story about taking a boat to sea.

I'll post some more permutations again soon.

The Inspiration Machine.

My ten year old daughter is in an inventors' club at school. She spends most of her spare time jotting down ideas for inventions, and the rest of it trying to actually make them. She says she's quite good at coming up with inventions but what she finds hard is thinking of problems people might have that need solving (by means of a new invention). So she is always asking us to tell her the problems we face in our lives, so she can think of an invention to help us.

Yesterday I gave her a few of my own problems to work on. I was trying to think of things that might conceivably be solved by something a 10 year old could invent and successfully make. That turned out to be a big mistake, because when I stopped patronising her and told her a real live problem - one that I was convinced would be impossible to solve - her face lit up immediately and she said: "I can invent something for that!"

The problem I gave her was the difficulty of coming up with ideas for stories.

Her invention, which seemed to pop fully conceived into her mind, was an "Inspiration Machine".

She seemed to have a pretty good idea of how she was going to solve this and straightaway rushed off to get the materials she needed, without even sketching a blueprint.

The first thing required was a long cardboard tube, the kind you find inside rolls of wrapping paper. We'd taken all our cardboard to the recycling centre so we didn't have any old ones hanging around. No problem. Only the day before, her mum had bought a new roll of birthday paper, which now - with Dad's controversial consent - no longer has an inner tube.

The next thing was to cut some paper into 12cm wide strips, make some mysterious marks on the cardboard tube, and then ponder the question, "How am I going to do this?" This last part, the pondering, took the longest time.

It was at that point that my help was enlisted, but I have to say that my role was purely as a technician. The concept and design for the Inspiration Machine came totally from my daughter. We discussed how it was to work and what needed to happen. She had very precise requirements and I suggested a few ways they could be achieved.

It then came to creating a prototype. My daughter got busy with the important part - programming the machine with inspiration, while I produced the mundane mechanical elements necessary.

It didn't take long to put it together and put it to the test. To our amazement it worked!

I mean it really did work, and in ways which neither of us had imagined possible. It has certainly helped me, because today I was inspired to write 1,000 words, a target I haven't hit since I began work on this new novel.

In the next blog post I will describe how The Inspiration Machine works and I may even provide a photo.

Another American sighting.

My thanks to writer Alicia Gifford
for this snapshot taken in the Mystery section, Vroman's Bookstore in Pasadena, California. Not bad for a mobile phone picture.

It's the kind of shot, like the ones taken by David Isaak that lifts a lonely writer's spirits.

Something else that lifts the spirits is to see A Vengeful Longing listed by The Sunday Times as one of the 100 best holiday reads. Amazingly, I happen to know two of the other authors similarly favoured - my fellow North London Historical Crime Writers, Frank Tallis and Andrew Martin.

Photo of my forehead.

My daughter thinks my 'big' forehead is hilarious. She took this picture of it to show just how big, and hilarious, it is.

Had a nice bookseller review of A Vengeful Longing on the Waterstones website. Apparently, the book has been 'criminally' overlooked by the buying public. Hopefully, Nicholas Cunliffe-Jones, the reviewer, will help to put things right, at least in Maidstone. Thank you, Nicholas.

Check out the new Faber site. If you look hard enough, you might find me.

Rachael King on lists.

Fascinating post from New Zealand novelist Rachael King on how she uses lists in the creative process.

Her novel, The Sound of Butterflies, is absolutely wonderful, by the way (see my review on her amazon page). And now available in paperback.

Vengeful Longing in America

I've just realised I let the US publication date of A Vengeful Longing go by without remark. It was last week, the 12th. What did I do to celebrate? I went to London Zoo with my daughter's school trip. It was exhausting, but Claire said it was 'the best school trip ever', so it was worth it.

Anyhow, luckily for me, David Isaak was not so inattentive. True to his usual generous form, he was out book-spotting, despite being, as he puts it, in the middle of nowhere. More pictures, and other news of what David's been up to, on his blog.

Oh, by the way, I have no idea who those lovely people holding copies of AVL are. If they'd like to identify themselves, I'd be more than happy to send them a signed bookplate each.

Have your say.

The CWA have set up discussion forums for this year's CWA Duncan Lawrie Dagger shortlisted books. Why not pop over and join in the debate. Well, actually, start the debate more like, as no one has said anything about my book yet.

Off to the British Library tonight...

... to get a plaque for being on the CWA Duncan Lawrie shortlist. The shortlist is supposed to be announced at the event, but there was an article in the Times on Saturday by Natasha Cooper reviewing the shortlisted books. So it seems the cat is out of the bag.

Ms Cooper found AVL a little "too impressed with its own cleverness", apparently. Which is weird, because the last time I talked to it, it told me that it wished I had made it even cleverer.

Gas lit in Wood Green

Thanks to Lee Jackson for the splendid ad!

The North London Historical Crime Writers will be taking part in the inaugural Wood Green Crime Festival. The festival runs from Monday June 9 to Friday June 13 (oops!). The line up so far is:

Monday 9th at 6.30pm

Danny King and Rebecca Gray

Tuesday 10th at 6.30pm

Gaslit Vices: Lee Jackson, Andrew Martin, RN Morris and Frank Tallis talk to Barry Forshaw

Thursday 12th at 6.30pm

Alison Joseph

Friday 13th at 6.30pm

Chris Fowler and Adrian McKinty

Venue:

Big Green Bookshop

unit 1, Brampton Park Road,

Wood Green,

London,

N22 6BG

Tel 020 8881 6767

Not bad, eh? See you there!

Interview with Sally Hinchcliffe.

Something a bit different for me. I'm promoting someone else's book! Feels weird, but you know I quite like it. I quite like being a little less self-centred for a day.

The book is Out of A Clear Sky (see above) and it's brilliant. The author is Sally Hinchcliffe.

Last week I cyber-interviewed Sally over several days. You can read the result on the fabulous Vulpes Libris blog, here.

At one point, Sally told me that she felt like she was being given the South Bank treatment and she imagined me asking the questions in a Melvin Bragg voice. Or should that be Sir Melvin Bragg? Or is it Lord, or Dame...? It's something, I know.

Man against cat.

This really happened today. Several times. I stopped her climbing on my lap so she climbed on my shoulder. Unbelievable.

It's a heroic struggle, writing, sometimes.

Summer reading for Christians?

The Gentle Axe reviewed from a Christian perspective.

Chicago Tribune's paragraph of the week...

... is one of mine!

They say:

Some nerve. British author R.N. Morris gets credit for gall: In "The Gentle Axe" (2007), a thriller recently released by Penguin in paperback, he channels Fydor Dostoevsky to come up with a sequel to "Crime and Punishment"—and more than gets away with it. This novel gives a vivid portrait of Russia in the 1860s.

A detective named Porfiry—you remember him from the original—tracks a mysterious killer:

Read the selected paragraph here!

Booklist review...

The American Library Association's journal Booklist ran a review of A Vengeful Longing yesterday. Here's a quote:

The Gentle Axe was a solid debut, a reincarnation of Dostoevsky’s character from Crime and Punishment. But here Morris seems to have hit his stride. His characters come alive in all their destitution, pretension, madness, fractiousness, and humanity. His portrait of the city, abandoned by the well-to-do in summer, offers a rich, palpably fetid sense of place, and his depiction of nineteenth-century Russian society, festering with revolutionary notions and old grudges, is compelling.

— Thomas Gaughan, Booklist

Kirkus have spoken.

I loved this article by a Kirkus editor who was insane enough to write a novel - and then had to suffer the stress of waiting for the Kirkus review to come out.

Anyhow, in tomorrow's issue of Kirkus there will be a review of A Vengeful Longing. I was sent a preview of it, but I held off posting until the review was available online. I see now that Barnes and Noble have added it to the reviews of the American edition of AVL, so I think it's okay to post it here.

I'll confess I was very worried. But as my UK editor said, I couldn't have asked for a better appreciation of what I've been doing:

Kirkus Reviews

Morris (The Gentle Axe, 2007) again resurrects police inspector Porfiry Petrovich from Crime and Punishment for a second rousing crime mystery.

The story bursts open with a poisoned box of chocolates and the violent deaths of Raisa and Grisha Meyer, wife and son of Dr. Martin Meyer, a reclusive opium-eater. On his strained first day at the job, opinionated, idealistic Pavel Pavlovich Virginsky begins an apprenticeship under the older, wiser Porfiry Petrovich, and together they dispatch to the crime scene. The case appears to be open-and-shut, but in the following days, amidst the stifling heat and stench of drab, gray 19th-century St. Petersburg, a series of curious, seemingly unrelated murders occur. With mounting evidence tying the crimes to an insurrectionist cell plotting against the Tsar, a labyrinthine web of evidence begins to unravel. Each new lead becomes a dead-end, but the coincidences-so various, yet so exact-eventually lead the policemen toward the culprit. Richly colorful and alive, Morris's characters brim with texture, whether they are hard-nosed cops or seasoned prostitutes, cantankerous slumlords or bespectacled bureaucrats. None escape the piercing intellect of Petrovich, who opens every individual's closet of vice and hypocrisy. Forcing all to admit their deepest shames, he provides them a psychological conduit for personal revelation and redemption. Equally powerful (and parallel) to this Virgil-like probe of the human psyche are Petrovich and Virginsky's forays into the city's deepest shames: a hospital for the mentally insane and a tenement infected with cholera, where the only sounds are that of wailing for the dead. Musing on questions of love, regret, misery,injustice, disillusionment, etc., Morris seamlessly and brilliantly segues from intensely grave to laugh-out-loud funny.

Provocative, satirical insights into humanity's darker corners.

500 bastard words...

... into my new work and I'm struck by the thought that it's a lot easier to read a book than write one.

You can see by looking at the post below that it was - let's see, when was it? - exactly a week ago that I was boasting about starting the bloody thing. 500 words in one week. Works out at about seventy words a day. Not a great rate. I will certainly have to pick up the pace if I hope to finish it anywhere near the agreed deadline (June 1st 2009).

To tell the truth, I have made progress, even if it hasn't resulted in a great flood of words. I realised that I didn't have the opening right. Or to put it another way, I'd got it wrong. But at least I could see it. And now I think I've sorted it. I have a crucial aspect of the opening pinned. I know where my character is, and what he can see, and how he feels. I also know, more or less, what's going to happen to him. And I think I know why. Hey, all I have to do is write the thing.

I was gently chastised by a fellow writer at the weekend for my lack of focus. He asked the question, "Don't you worry about focus?" Yes, I do, actually. Very much.

Aside from writing the novel, I'm also working on the libretto for an opera. That is the project I mentioned in a mysterious way some weeks ago. Things have been notched up a serious level or two in that, and now it seems that I may be called upon to provide some words for the thing. I think I may have until the end of May to do that. Can't quite remember exactly what I agreed to. Thing is, people seem to be acting as though it has some chance of being produced.

Then every day my kids remind me that I started writing a story for them. And demand another chapter.

Oh, and I also agreed to contribute something to The Abstracta Project. What is The Abstracta Project, I hear you ask? Well, it's going to be a novel, or a something, constructed out of "found texts", the contributions of a number of writers working independently, which the entity that is "The Abstracta Project" will stitch together into whatever it ends up being. Sounds crazy, doesn't it? Which is precisely why I wanted to take part.

So far, to my knowledge, the following writers have agreed to contribute:

Steven Hall
Carlton Mellick III
Ray Robinson
D. Harlan Wilson
Ben Myers

And me, of course. I sent my fragment in today. The Abstracta Project (the name of the person, or persons, behind it is unknown to me) seemed very pleased with it. It will be interesting to see how this shapes up.

Now then, where was I on the novel? Focus. Must focus.

News from the keyboard.

I've started writing. The new book. I mean actually writing, as opposed to researching and planning, and generally fretting about the damn thing. The first words were scrawled in green ink in a paperblanks notebook in Sable d'Or cafe in Muswell Hill, while I was waiting for my kids to have their back-to-back piano lessons. An hour to kill. One sentence written, and re-written, and re-written and crossed out and abandoned. Then resurrected and reshaped.

Later, at home, other sentences were tried out. Some were modified. Some were ditched. Something like an opening paragraph began to emerge. After that, the second paragraph was easier.

It's a breakthrough. I may carry on.

My starred review!

The Publishers Weekly review is now online. You can find it here.

The less said about this the better.

Me on Meet the Author.

A Very Good Friday.

I heard today that A Vengeful Longing has received a starred review in the US industry mag, Publishers Weekly. This is apparently felt to be a very good thing in itself, as the publication is highly influential within the book trade. I don't think I can link to the review, not yet at least, as it doesn't seem to be available online, but it is a great review. Almost overwhelmingly, unbelievably so. The reviewer uses the word "superb". I don't think I've ever had a superb before. It ends with this:

...this novel stands out from a number of fine czarist-era mysteries — by Russians and foreigners alike — like a Fabergé egg at a yard sale.

Oh, and I happened to buy a copy of The New Yorker today. Spotted the following, well placed in an article about Barak Obama's church minister:

Reviewed in The Economist.

Once again I've been reviewed alongside a fellow North London Historical Crime Writer, this time in The Economist. Frank Tallis and I were previously both reviewed by Joan Smith in the Sunday Times - though that time it was Frank's newest novel FATAL LIES that was under discussion. This time it's A DEATH IN VIENNA (as it's known in America - in this country it's VIENNA BLOOD). And not so long ago, Lee Jackson and I were both reviewed in The Telegraph.

Fortunately, the reviewer, who is not credited in the online version of the mag, seems to like both our books. Frank's is an "enthralling narrative", while A VENGEFUL LONGING gets: "Full marks to the author for bringing Petrovich back to life in this ambitious work that is a real pleasure to read."

The eggs have it.

Remember Yoka from Egg Wars? That was the eggy diorama that my daughter and her friends created for their school decorate-an-egg competition last year. If you go back and read that post, you'll discover that their entry won the prize for their year. Well, competition time came round again. The pressure was on. Not only that, her younger brother was also eligible to enter this year.

The entries were judged last week, but in a move reminiscent of the Zimambwean elections, but obviously so much more trivial that I almost feel ashamed making the comparison, the relevant authorities have only just announced the winners today.

It turns out that both siblings were placed, and not only that -- to their father's great delight -- their placings were identical: both came second for scenery in their year.

My son continued the Egg Wars theme initiated by his sister last year, with Egg2D2:



Sis and friend went for a scene closer to home, or rather school, depicting some kiddy eggs in class with their teacher, Ms Eggsworthy, whose name is very similar to my daughter's teacher's. Not only that, I can personally verify that the likeness is uncanny:



In other news...

I had a weird -- I might almost say "Kafkaesque" -- appointment with my GP today. At least I think I can call her "my GP", though I have never actually seen her before and doubt I'll see her again. She was asking me about my asthma, which I assume was the point of the appointment. I hadn't actually asked to see her - she'd insisted I saw her when I called in for a prescription renewal. I told her I was fine, no problems. She looked at my notes on her computer screen and continued to ask me routine questions:

"What's your occupation?"
I hesitated a beat before replying: "I'm a writer. Full time, now."
She cocked an eyebrow at that. "Really? What do you write?"
"Fiction."
"Under what name?"
"R.N. Morris, mostly."
I swear all this was being entered into my medical notes, either that or she was googling me during the appointment.

If she was googling me, she might have discovered, as I just have, that The Gentle Axe is now available as a Kindle book, and in other eformats elsewhere. It's great that the ad that google generates with that last link is

Can't Pull Back Foreskin?
Fix your tight foreskin - Treat it with a GFS device - The Gentle way

I really hope it's not an axe they're recommending.

Over to David.

I've decided to hand this plog post over almost entirely to David Isaak, author of the gloriously outrageous high concept thriller Shock and Awe.

Once again, David's been out Axe-spotting:





David writes:

A couple of pictures of the US paperback version of Axe at the biggest local bookstore, the Huntington Beach Barnes & Noble, which is a building about the size of the Pentagon.

Being in the New Mystery section is a good thing, an honor conferred on few paperbacks, but they only had one copy. On the other hand, they don't put you face-out in the New section if they only ordered one copy, so that implies they only had one copy left. That also seems like a good thing.

A young lady who worked in the store asked me, politely, what I was doing with the camera. "I know him," I said by way of explanation, pointing at your book, "he's from London. I'm going to send him the pictures." She seemed suitably impressed by one or more of those three facts, and stood by while I got on with my photos.

He was even kind enough to devote a whole post on his own blog to the paperback edition of The Gentle Axe. I share his frustrations with American amazon.

Nothing to do with me or my books (hey, come on, David!) his latest post on Oregon place names is hilarious.

All I can say is thank you David, for all your sterling work.

In the meantime, there was a review of A Vengeful Longing in The Telegraph on Saturday, alongside (well, just underneath) a review of my fellow NLHCW* Lee Jackson's The Mesmerist's Apprentice.

Apparently I have "a knack for showing the dark side of the city", which "bristles with depravity and deception, lunatic bureaucracy and melodrama..." Nice to have a knack for something.

*North London Historical Crime Writer