Audiobook review.

Audiogeist has very kindly reviewed the audiobook of The Gentle Axe, read by Simon Vance and found it "a fabulously dark and descriptive story from the outset".

You can read it here.

The New York Times weighs The Axe.

Thanks to everyone who has alerted me to this review in the New York Times. You may have to register to see it. It's free to do so.

Otherwise you can look at the same article that also ran in the International Herald Tribune.

Late to the tag party.

Absolutely ages ago I was tagged by Nik and Lucy.

Sorry it's taken me so long to get to it, guys, but here goes:

1. Do you outline?
Yes.


2. Do you write straight through a book, or do you sometimes tackle the scenes out of order?
I write the ending first. Then write the rest of the book.


3. Do you prefer writing with a pen or using a computer?

Pen. Or quill.


4. Do you prefer writing in first person or third?
Third.


5. Do you listen to music while you write? If so, do you create a playlist, listen randomly, or pick a single song that fits the book?
No music.


6. How do you come up with the perfect names for your characters?
I steal them from Dostoevsky.


7. When you're writing, do you ever imagine your book as a television show or movie?
I’m describing a movie playing in my head.



8. Have you ever had a character insist on doing something you really didn't want him/her to do?
I just kill them off if they won’t behave.


9. Do you know how a book is going to end when you start it?

Yes. (See answer #2.)


10. Where do you write?
Mostly anywhere.


11. What do you do when you get writer's block?
Buy a new notebook and a new pen. The ones I’m using obviously aren’t working any more.


12. What size increments do you write in (either in terms of wordcount, or as a percentage of the book as a whole)?
It’s a variable, i, which can be expressed as follows i = wcI/dh. Where w=words, c=coffee, I= inspiration, d=distractions, h=hangover. In other words, about 0.2% a day, on average. Ish.


13. How many different drafts did you write for your last project?
One. Then the editor went at it.


14. Have you ever changed a character's name midway through a draft?
Unintentionally, yes.


15. Do you let anyone read your book while you're working on it, or do you wait until you've completed a draft before letting someone else see it?
No one reads it until it’s ready.


16. What do you do to celebrate when you finish a draft?
Open a bottle of wine.


17. One project at a time, or multiple projects at once?
One at a time, these days.


18. Do your books grow or shrink in revision?
Shrink.


19. Do you have any writing or critique partners?
No. Though I did swap manuscripts with Hannah Holborn for Taking Comfort.



20. Do you prefer drafting or revising?
I don’t know the answer to this. I revise as I go along.


I'm going to duck out of tagging anyone else, as I'm so late to this that I'm sure everybody else in the world has already been done!

Someone with an Axe to grind?

I've been accused of a shocking crime, compared to a Blairite government minister, described as a child of New Labour’s crass privatisation of everything. Thanks to me, apparently, Dostoevsky has been "privatised and sold off for the gain of others: a very neoconservative modus operandi".

The charges are made in a South African newspaper, the Mail and Guardian, where Darryl Accone asks:

"How many readers who have never heard of Dostoyevsky will work out, from the epigraph and “acknowledgement” [in A Gentle Axe], that the very fine Porfiry Petrovich and his search for psychological motives are really a protagonist and ideas that belong to someone other than RN Morris?"

I am even accused, slyly, of not knowing how to spell Dostoevsky's name. In fact, Mr Accone creates a spelling mistake ('Dostoesky') and inserts the term [sic], to imply that the mistake was mine. Mr Accone's preferred transliteration of the name is Dostoyevsky. I spell Dostoevsky without that 'y' in the middle, which is an acceptable transliteration widely used; I do not omit the 'v'.

Oh, and the decision to put the acknowledgement at the back was made by the publishers, not me. It is at the front in the American edition.

Leaving that petty and rather cheap trick aside, I am actually very flattered by Mr Accone's article. This quote was particularly gratifying:

"Morris has very imaginatively continued Petrovich’s career after the resolution of the Raskolnikov axe murders in Crime and Punishment. In stealing from the best, he has at least shown intimate knowledge of the original: “his” Petrovich is psychologically consistent with Dostoyevsky’s, and employs analogous methods of investigation and deduction."

Thank you, Mr Accone, that's actually the nicest thing anyone could have said.

You can make your own mind up by reading the whole article yourself.

Trailer for A Gentle Axe.

The Gentle Axe trailer (UK edit)

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I'd be interested to know what people think!

Another one where that came from.

Just found out about another Taking Comfort review, this time on Don Capone's Hit List.

Remember Taking Comfort?

I know I've been concentrating on the Axe recently, but it's only just over a year ago that my other novel, Taking Comfort, was published in the UK by Macmillan New Writing. Taking Comfort came out in the States and Canada recently. Big territories. Easy for a little book to get lost. But I've been lucky to have a couple of very generous people take a chance on it and pass on their impressions. One of those is the writer Ben Dooley, a contributor to the literary website The Millions.

He says:

A novel about materialism may sound, at first, cliche, but it's carried off with a deft touch, the material presented in a way that is at once fresh and familiar. Morris plays a dangerous game with his narrative, constantly switching perspectives and focusing the action in each chapter on the relationship between a character and an object. The gambit pays off, as we're shown the inner life of a multitude of characters, both incidental and essential to the main action of the story, a tactic that allows Morris a hard-to-achieve combination of introspection and brisk pacing.

Read the whole thing here.

My thanks also to the writer Ania Vesenny who was kind enough to plug Taking Comfort in an interview on Kelly Spitzer's blog. The interview is really worth reading (aside from the mention of TC) because it's a great introduction to Ania. Apart from anything else, she lives in an extraordinary place called Baffin Island, which I would imagine has an interesting effect on her writing. And the novel she's working on sounds amazing.

A sunny day.

Two new reviews today. One in The New York Sun, which finds the Axe "a smart, hypnotizing tale of crime and duplicity." Read the whole thing here.




The second in I Love a Mystery. This one concludes:

"I would hazard a guess that even the Russian literary master himself would find Morris' debut entertaining, or at least amusing. In fact, Dostoevsky might be inclined to give Morris a pat on the back for not only grasping the underlying personality traits of "his" detective but also giving Porfiry center stage in his own novel.

R.N. Morris is an exciting new talent with a very promising future. Regardless of whether or not you are familiar with Dostoevsky's work, it would be a crime not to read this highly entertaining novel."

The whole thing's here.

And it was a sunny day. I sat in Soho Square at lunchtime reading my current paperback, Kafka on The Shore by Murakami - which, I have to say, I am enjoying very much.

The Hungarian Axe.

I have it on good authority, from
David Llewellyn's Hungarian cleaner, that A BALTA means THE AXE.

Bookgasm review.

The Axe has been reviewed by Mark Rose in a US blog called bookgasm.

It's an interesting review because it seems to indicate how 'hype' can affect a reader's, or blogger's, receptiveness to a book. He says: "This book has received so much mainstream hype that I began to worry about its likability. Other reviewers seemed to care a little too much about the Dostoyevsky angle, and because it featured a shining star in the modern academic literary canon, it was sure to be praised."

Well, actually, I would take issue with the last point. I think the Dostoevsky connection may well be what is getting the book noticed. But not all reviewers have looked kindly on my presumption. Any how, I'm pleased that Mark Rose follows this up with: "Thankfully, Morris does not pretend to be Dostoyevsky. Instead, he takes a character study and a locale, and crafts a very passable murder mystery out of the whole thing. If he can use Porfiry Petrovich as his foil to get attention, then more power to him."

His final line is one I'm very happy with: "It’s an excellent first novel that bodes well for the future."

I've had my first Dutch review, or the first that's been brought to my attention. It appeared in NRC HANDELSBLAD, which, according to my Dutch editor "is just about the most renowned Dutch newspaper around."

I believe they liked it. "The Gentle Axe makes you long for more work by Morris, who is intelligent enough not to place too much intellectual weight in his novel, thus ensuring that it is smart without being pompous. Serve with cabbage soup and plenty of vodka."

The full bookgasm review is here.

The Mystery Bookstore in LA.

I was delighted to see that The Mystery Bookstore in Los Angeles has added my virtual axe reading to their myspace profile page.

See it here.

Thank you Mystery Bookstore!

You're all invited.

I'm back from The Rap Sheet. I thoroughly enjoyed myself over there, though I have to say it was a bit stressful, trying to post something new everyday and look after the kids on Easter holiday.

I've had some positive feedback, which makes it all worthwhile, and J. Kingston Pierce, the editor, was pleased enough with my contributions to make me one of his Usual Suspects - i.e. occasional contributors.

While I was over there, I put a virtual reading up on myspace. It's an extract from the first chapter of the Axe. Please check it out, if you have a moment.

Just go here and scroll down until you see the video screens. You can view the American version (which features The Gentle Axe) or the English version (A Gentle Axe). The reading is the same. If you're logged in to myspace, you can even leave a comment. Please do!

My thanks to Clive Parsley who directed and art directed the shoot.

My debt to Dostoevsky.

Part One.

And Part Two.

This week I will mostly be blogging at The Rap Sheet.

I'm honoured to have been invited over to The Rap Sheet, where I will be posting all week. Aside from my ramblings about Gentle Axe, I can promise you a number of great interviews with great writers. And a few other surprises, I hope.

My thanks (again!) to David Isaak for drawing my attention to this review in the Washington Post.

Some pull-out quotes:

R.N. Morris's lively, literate "The Gentle Axe"

"The Gentle Axe" is a deftly plotted, enjoyable literary thriller. It's not another "Crime and Punishment," but it's a novel that, once begun, you're likely to read all the way through.

I google trawled another review too. From a site called BookLoons. The reivewer there calls it a 'top-notch mystery'.

See you at The Rap Sheet!

Every author is a local author somewhere...

So the surreal conversation I referred to in the post below, between Mark Budman and the Barnes and Noble sales clerk, went like this:

Mark: "Will you put my book here one day?"
Clerk: "We don't put every book here."
Mark: "But I'm a local author."
Clerk: "Local authors are all print on demand. We don't carry them."
Mark: "No, my book will be out from a major publisher."
Clerk: "Even major publishers, like Random House, publish local authors only as POD."

That's so illogical it's genius. Thanks to Mark for reporting the exchange and allowing me to use it. And congratulations on not slapping the fool.

The kindness of Zoetropers.

Zoetrope.com is a place I go sometimes, a place where writers post work, review other writers' work, and get together, in a virtual way, to talk about writerly stuff, and occasionally some unwriterly stuff. I've made many very good friends there, some of whom I have now met in person. None of us has yet turned out to be an axe murderer. I am possibly the closest, having written a crime novel with Axe in the title.

Many Zoetropers are American or Canadian. And some of them have been out and about, visiting bookstores, looking for copies of the Axe and reporting back to me. I got news of a sighting in Kauai, the northern most island of the Hawaii chain - described by the spotter Mary Deal as 'the most remote place ON EARTH'.

Lisa McMann spotted it in Tempe Arizona, and even took a picture:



In case there are any members of staff of Borders Tempe reading, Lisa assures me that she had nothing whatsoever to do with standing that book up. No way. Nor did she place that rogue copy you might have found on the recommendations wall.

There have been other sightings too. Mark Budman, the editor of Vestal Review, spotted it in Vestal, NY. He had a rather surreal conversation with the sales assistant about his own book, MY LIFE AT FIRST TRY, which has just been snapped up by Counterpoint.

Jason Shaffner picked up a copy in Borders Boston.

Hannah Holborn has been turning out copies in Canada.

Louis Catron was making a nuisance of himself at his local libraries and bookstores on my behalf.

My thanks to all of these generous souls and all the other zoetropers who have expressed their good wishes, and especially those who have taken a chance, either with the Axe or Taking Comfort (Don Capone, Patti Auburn to name but two).

I'd also like to give a special thanks to the techie suprema Ellen Meister who made my covers rotate on myspace.

Interview in Eclectica.

Yes, I've been interviewed. The interviewer is the great Jim Younger, author of the acclaimed High John The Conqueror. I've had the honour and pleasure of sharing the odd tipple with Jim on occasion. However, the interview was conducted in the utmost sobriety. Actually, I can't speak for Jim. But I was nowhere near a drink at the time.

My thanks to Jim. He came up with some great questions and managed to make me look considerably cleverer than I actually am.

The interview appeared in an online literary zine called Eclectica, and it was commissioned by Elizabeth Glixman, who is the interviews editor there. I hope the good folk at Eclectica won't object if I quote from their 'about Eclectica' page, just for those who may not be familiar with the site:

Eclectica was founded in October 1996 with the goal of providing a sterling quality literary magazine on the World Wide Web. We were not able to find a forum that would be the net equivalent (in terms of content) of Harper's, New Yorker, Granta, The Atlantic, and other publications providing quality material for the appetites of a wide variety of demanding readers. Although some of these magazines even had their own web-sites, they were conceived as companions to the print items rather than sites that stood completely on their own.

Thus Eclectica was born. The vision we shared was that of a magazine not bound by formula or genre, that harnessed technology to further the reading experience rather than for the sake of flashy gimmickry, and that was dynamic and interesting enough content-wise to keep readers coming back for more.

Ten years later, quality is still the sole criterion in our editorial process. If it is outstanding writing, then we want to share it with our ever growing, global readership. We provide broad categories for convenience's sake, but we love to get material that just doesn't fit into them. And while there are many, many online publications now that succeed, to greater or lesser degrees, in doing what we set out to do in 1996, we pride ourselves on being one of the longest-running and most consistent literary ezines on the web.

Reviewed by and on amazon.com.

Thanks to LF for letting me know about his really generous review on amazon.com. And thanks especially, Len, for ""The Gentle Axe" manages to be an entertaining novel on its own while doing no disservice to the memory of one of the great novels of all time."

I also spotted that amazon had added their own review, by Valerie Ryan. She says: "In a wonderfully atmospheric novel, Morris has created a world-weary protagonist in Porfiry, a man still exhausted from his last case, joined by a collection of absolutely believable characters to flesh out the novel... [Porfiry] follows clues, hunches, people, and stories to get to the bottom of the mystery--and when he does, it comes as a complete surprise, but one that makes perfect sense. This carefully written and entertaining novel will satisfy lovers of mystery, historical crime, and just plain good novels."

The last time I looked at my amazon.com page I was twinned with Ruth Downie's novel MEDICUS. I met Ruth at the Heffers event I did in February. She was very nice (so nice she even bought a copy of A GENTLE AXE!) and her book seems to be doing very well.

I've also been told that the book was reviewed in the Sydney Morning Herald but as the review doesn't seem to be online, I have no idea what it said. Anybody spot it?

The Moscow Times reviews the St Petersburg novel.

I was thrilled by this one. It's a wonderful review by Saul Austerlitz. I say wonderful not just because it's positive, but because the writer just seems to get what I was trying to do. What's more, he's really engaged with the book. So I'm very happy.

It's been a crappy day in other respects. A lot of stress, mostly self-induced and in fact still on-going (I shouldn't really be here). But I had to share.


Oh, and another truly marvellous thing happened - possibly even better than getting a great review in The Moscow Times. Daughter Claire and her friends won the overall egg decoration prize in their school's eggy diorama competition. You may remember it was for Yoka from Egg Wars.

the san francisco chronicle reviews the axe (HELP MY CAPS HAVE GONE MAD!!!)

Sorry I don't know what happened with that header - I couldn't get the pc to do caps, then everything was in caps. It's been a long day.

Somewhere around the midpoint of it, a couple of emails pinged into my inbox from New York. One from my American editor and one from my American publicist. Both telling me about a review in the San Francisco Chronicle - my first US newspaper review. (I was reviewed by a US blogger here.) I sort of hoped the simultaneous transmission was a good sign. But you know, I don't assume anything and I am naturally pessimistic.

Anyhow, they seemed quite pleased. One of them described it as a 'rave' review. The other used the word 'fantastic'. Yeah, yeah - I know how people in publishing tend to exaggerate. I could tell they were just trying to build me up so I wouldn't take the bad bits to heart. Still, it gave me the confidence to take a peek.

The SFC reviewer is Stephen Lyons. And yes, he seemed to like the book: "The story is told ably in the classic whodunit twisty-arc style, reminiscent of the sleuthing of Nick Charles, Sherlock Holmes and Columbo, the mussed-up character based partly on Dostoevsky's trench-coat-clad Petrovich. Dirty Harry could easily be referenced, too..."

Have to say, I'm very pleased with those references, though if I'm honest the Dirty Harry one strikes me as a bit left-field! But hey, I'm not complaining.

He does a quick summary of the story, then observes: "In addition to the splendid dust-off and resurrection of Petrovich, the strengths of "The Gentle Axe" are its characters and scene construction." He then goes on to quote from a scene that he particularly liked, calling it "wonderfully written". The scene is sort of about gambling, which allows him to conclude: "Tip to readers: Bet on Petrovich."

I've read the review through a few times now. Haven't found the bad bits yet.

The terrible knotted feeling in my stomach relaxed slightly today.