The Lithuanian Axe

I have to say, I love the cover my Lithuanian publisher has produced for their edition of A Gentle Axe - evidently Svelnusis Kirvis in Lithuanian.

It's just been published, I'm told.

Back from Italy

Just got back from our holiday in Italy - a week in Umbria followed by three days in Rome.

While we were in Umbria, we met up with Mike Jacob and Daniela de Gregorio, the husband and wife team who together write as Michael Gregorio. I'm now reading their latest release, A VISIBLE DARKNESS, a copy of which they very kindly gave to me. It's the third outing for their Prussian detective of the Napoleonic era, Hanno Stiffeniis. So far, it's a brilliant read. The authority with which they summon up the period is breathtaking (especially the descriptions of the excrement-flooded streets), added to which it's a riveting murder story with some gloriously gruesome details. Mike and Daniela put the finishing touches to the fourth book in the series while we were out there. I had the privilege of seeing, and touching, the raw manuscript on their desk.

We got to know Mike and Daniela last year when they invited me to the Trevi Noir Festival which they organised. They are lovely, warm people - with incredibly dark and twisted imaginations.

Mike and Daniela very kindly organised an event for me in Perugia. Amazingly a fair few people turned up! Given the heat, this really was a miracle.

My daughter Claire took the pictures:


The poster advertising the event.



Mike Jacob, RNM and Daniela de Gregorio.



We're joined at the table by the Perugian bookseller Alberto Mori, who sponsored the event.

Plantagenet Queen twitters

I just noticed this article in the Guardian about Philippa Gregory's venture onto twitter. The Guardian describes it as "the latest in a series of recent literary experiments on the micro-blogging service which have run the gamut from the comic to the literary".

I was pleased to see I get listed as one of those recent literary experiments, though they don't make clear which end of the gamut I'm at.

Proof preshure.

I've been reading the proofs for my next novel, 'A Razor Wrapped in Solk'. Sorry, that should be 'Silk'. But believe it or not, that was actually how the title was set on the title page. I hasten to say that that particular typo had already been picked up by someone at Faber, but it just goes to show how things can go awry.

The thought of proof-reading terrifies me in advance, though I'm always grateful to have had the chance to read through the pages one last time before they go to print. At least I've spotted a few clangers. Inevitably, I'll have missed many more.

The temptation is to start rewriting the whole thing. That's not allowed, thankfully - otherwise I think I would go mad. There were a couple of sentences that I did rework slightly, and a couple of word choices that I modified. Mainly that was due to correcting egregious grammatical or sense atrocities, so I hope I will be indulged by Faber.

Anyhow, I think I'm pretty much done. Which means it will be going to print before too long.

The New York Times pronounces. Twice.

The New York Times Book Review ran the briefest of reviews for the US paperback of A Vengeful Longing on Sunday. Except that in the print edition they reviewed my earlier Porfiry Petrovich novel, The Gentle Axe, under the title of A Vengeful Longing. The online edition of the supplement carried the correct review, and this correction:

A brief description in the Paperback Row column on Page 16 this weekend, about “A Vengeful Longing,” by R. N. Morris (Penguin, $15), was published in error. It describes a previous book by the same author. A correct description of “A Vengeful Longing” follows:

In this sequel to “The Gentle Axe” — “CSI: St. Petersburg,” our reviewer, Liesl Schillinger, called it — Morris returns to the city in the late 1860s. His protagonist, once again, is Porfiry Petrovich, who solved Raskolnikov’s crime in Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment.” Here, Petrovich discovers a link between three apparently unrelated murders in a book that is richly evocative of its time and place.

Ellen Meister, the author of The Smart One and Secret Confessions of the Applewood PTA, who is a friend of mine from the writing website zoetrope.com, very kindly scanned in the print edition, which carries the mistaken review:

New trailer for Cocteau in the Underworld

This is the new trailer for the opera Cocteau in the Underworld. The footage was shot at the Brighton performance in May. The trailer was put together by the film maker David Newell.



If you can't see the video, possibly because you're using a mozilla firefox browser, you can watch it on Youtube, here.

What you get when you win a New Covey Trailer Award

More details here.

Red room features my cat

The writers' site Red Room has pulled out the video of me struggling with my writing demon, or cat, and featured it on their homepage. It seems they think my pain is entertaining.

And the winner is...

My trailer for A Vengeful Longing was picked as the best author-produced trailer in the monthly New Covey Trailer Awards for May. Chuffed, I am.

Twuffer's gone mad

Apologies to all my twitter followers. It seems that the application I use to schedule my tweets has gone mad. I set it up to send out an instalment every hour, but it has been bombarding people with tweets in strange clusters. I think it's probably lost me a few followers, who are getting hacked off with the inundation.

Possibly this could be the end of the experiment. I can't contend with the technology issues. For one thing, the tweets I scheduled were meant to keep the story going over a couple of days, but twuffer has spewed them all out at once. So all that work entering them has effectively gone to waste, plus the ill will that it has probably created is very unfortunate.

We shall have to see, but I don't seem to be able to get into twuffer to see what's going on, or to correct it.

Bookhuggers unite!

There's a new website called bookhuggers, which I think is well worth a look. Okay, I'll declare an interest. I'm on it. I've taken part in a 'virtual panel' about crime writing - exploring both the factual and fictional varieties. The other panellists are Armand Cabasson, a psychiatrist and novelist working in the North of France, and Jay Dobyns, an ATF undercover agent (!!!) who infiltrated the Hells Angels after faking a murder (even more exclamation marks!!!!!!!).

Check it out here.

The guilty one

This was the line-up in the Waterstones Islington shop window. That's me on the right. The guilty one. I was caught red-handed inside the shop taking the photo below - a picture of my book, A Vengeful Longing, on display, complete with a bookseller's recommendation. "Excuse me, we don't allow photographs of the displays!" came the cry from the sales assistant. "But it's my book!" I pleaded. She softened. Smiled. "Oh that's different," she said.

I pointed to myself in the line-up poster as proof. "See, that's me."

"We'll do our best for you," she promised.

Here's the offending shot, which I was not made to delete:

Waterstone's Fresh Blood

Waterstone's are doing a major promotion for crime fiction this summer, and I was lucky enough to be included in it. You can see me as large as life in Waterstone's windows at the moment, in a window poster. It's reproduced on the Waterstone's website here, and above. That's me at the end on the right.

Leaving aside my own deep misgivings about posing as the Kevin Spacey character from The Usual Suspects (not my idea, honest!), still this is great news!

A tale of two covers

Interesting. The French edition of A Gentle Axe, which goes by the title L'Ame Detournee, seems to be available in two different covers:





Presumably one's aimed at male and the other at female readers.

I wonder if even more alternative cover designs will start to appear as the publication date (1.9.09) approaches?

Watch the book

Watch The Book is a blog that features book trailers. They've very kindly posted my trailer for A Vengeful Longing. Go see!

Stupid Whoosit

If you've ever played the Chad Valley game Whoosit, you'll know it's very good training for developing the skills of young detectives. Each player conceals the identity of a mystery person from the other player, who has to use deductive reasoning to eliminate characters from their playing board. You must have played it. the players take it in turns to ask questions, usually based on the physical attributes of the characters, such as hair colour, sex, or whether or not the person wears glasses or earrings.

We were playing it in the garden on Sunday, but it fairly quickly deteriorated into a variant of the game invented by my wife, called Stupid Whoosit. In this version, the questions you ask are almost impossible to answer with any certainty, and when you have the answer you are generally none the wiser as to who you should eliminate. A couple of examples that were asked in our games: "Does this person own a boxed set of the second series of Star Trek?" (asked by my son Luke); "Is this person an aspiring playboy model?" (asked by daughter Claire); "Has this person ever had an affair but been forgiven by their partner or spouse?" (asked by wife Rachel). Surprisingly, a couple of times the correct character was actually identified, as after a while you do feel like you get to know the people on the boards and you are able to make some calls about what their tastes and personal histories are.

It's a good game. I recommend it.

Overheard in Somerfield

He was wearing camouflage shorts and a pastel vest. What was strange was how calm, how natural, how easy within himself he was. He was not at all abashed, or agitated. He spoke clearly so that there could be no misunderstanding. He didn't seem to mind that everyone in Somerfield could hear his half of the mobile phone call: “Just push her out then lock the door. Right? If she comes back don’t let her back in. Try not to let the police in if they turn up. Just turn out the lights and don’t let on there’s anyone in. But don’t resist arrest... if they do get in, don’t resist arrest. No, listen. I know you. That’ll only make it worse. If they arrest you, don’t cause any trouble. I know you. I’m serious. It’ll be worse if it gets to court. You could end up in jail. No seriously, don’t resist arrest. That’s big trouble that, mate. Don’t cause trouble. All right?”

He bought a Ginsters meat pasty. No petrol. Just that. "Do you want a bag?" asked the woman serving. "No, I'm going to eat it now," he replied.

The New Covey Trailer Awards

I've entered the trailer into an on-going awards scheme called the New Covey Trailer Awards. It's in the 'author-produced' category, which will be judged by a panel of experts.

However, it's also in open competition for the 'most intriguing trailer', which anyone can vote in. There's a poll here. The voting panel is on the left. My trailer, A Vengeful Longing, is listed at the bottom, #20, so you have to scroll down a little to find it. Should you wish to vote for it, that is. Oh go on, you know you want to!

The trailer is also appearing on bookscreening.com.

Spot the difference...

This is a new version of the trailer for A Vengeful Longing. I wonder if you can tell how it differs from the last version I posted?!

A free copy of the book to the first person who gets it right.

The surrealism of detective fiction

A short piece I wrote for the Strictly Writing blog.