Indulge me.

I had a couple more foreign editions arrive in the post today, the Romanian (Sicurea Blanda) and the Finnish (Murha Petrovskin Puistossa). I was overcome by the desire to lay out all the different editions of the book so far, including the original UK trade paperback, the special edition Goldsboro Books-exclusive hardback. This is what they looked like:



Still a few more editions to be published, including the German, the Russian (when oh when will they get round to publishing that?) and the French.

Here's the shelf shot:

Spot the difference.

I've discovered today that the cover for the UK mass market paperback is now up on Amazon. My name got bigger I notice! Though actually I think it's just that the book got smaller.


Interesting anyhow to compare it to the original large format trade paperback.



And the American paperback.



If anyone can explain these subtle differences to me, I'd be very grateful.

Still no sign yet of a cover for this one.

Bookslut! Bookslut! Bookslut!

Steady on. It's just a literary website, a rather good one, mind. And there's an interview with me in it.

My thanks to Kelly Spitzer for some brilliant questions. Mind you, if you've ever checked out her regular Writer Profiles, you'll know that Kelly has cornered the market in author interviews.

Bookslut, though. What a great name.

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!

Fedexed from New York.

I received an unexpected delivery this morning. A package from America which contained two boxed sets of three books: The Gentle Axe by R.N. Morris, Fangland by John Marks and Giraffe by J.M. Ledgrand. It was a sample of a package Penguin Press are sending out to draw attention to their fiction publishing.

The accompanying letter has twelve signatures, from the President & Publisher Ann Godoff to the Editorial Assistant Lindsay Whalen.

Here's what the letter says:

Dear Reader,

We at Penguin Press have been delighted to play matchmaker since 2004 for remarkable works of fiction, from Zadie Smith's On Beauty, Mark Helprin's Freddy and Fredericka, and Carlos Ruiz Zafon's The Shadow of the Wind to Marina Lewycka's A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian and now Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day. We don't call attention to the strength of our fiction publishing, preferring to let our work on behalf of each book speak for itself. But the three novels you'll find in this box are so distinctive, so resistant to easy pigeonholing, that we decided to do something a little out of the ordinary.

These novels couldn't be more different each to each. One asks you to imagine an office environment so poisonous, so competitive, so...evil, that it can't recognize real evil, Old World evil, when it's staring it in the face. In another, the world's largest captive heard of giraffes suddenly arrives in a small Czech town, changing nothing and everything. In the third, we catch up with Police Inspector Porfiry Petrovich, made famous by Fyodor Dostoyevsky in Crime and Punishment, as he faces a murder more sinister than anything he's ever known. We loved these books so much we felt compelled to publish them. That's our only compact with you the reader, our only grounds for asking for your attention. You might not respond to all of these novels, but one of them just might rearrange the furniture in your head permanently. Which one? Well, that's what makes it interesting. Enjoy.

Perhaps encouraged by this I decided, at last, to join the Society of Authors. Sent off my application form today.

A or The Gentle Axe?

Funny how these things come about. But 'A Gentle Axe' will be published as 'The Gentle Axe' in America. I'm told there are very good marketing reasons for the difference. The publisher in the States is The Penguin Press. The publication date is March 22, I think. There will also be an American audiobook, from Tantor.

The book's also coming out in Russia. Don't know when. And I don't know what the title will be. But I am very pleased about it. The Russian publisher is U-Factory, for whom I cannot find a link.

In fact, not wishing to leave anyone out, the complete list of countries is:

USA (Penguin Books)
Israel (Keter Publishing)
Holland (de Bezige Bij)
Germany (Droemer)
Italy (Rizzoli)
Finland (Otava)
Greece (Psychogios)
Brazil (Planeta)
Romania (Editura Polirom)
Poland (Literackie)
Hungary (Partvonal)
Czech Republic (BB/Art)
Russian (U-factory)
Estonia (Eesti Paevaleht).

New year, new diary.

Last year I had the Redstone Happiness diary. This year, I've gone for the Granta Diary 2007, 'Classic Crime'.

First significant date of the year: February 1. That's when my own crime novel, A Gentle Axe, is released in the UK. Crikey. It's only about a month away! I should be excited, but actually I'm petrified. I'm re-re-reading Crime and Punishment to try to calm my nerves. It seems to be working, which is a surprise given the feverish psychological atmosphere of the book.

A Gentle Axe by R.N. Morris.

I've been a bit busy recently. Very distracted. And now it turns out I've completely forgotten to mention the fact that I've got another book coming out. It's called A Gentle Axe, written under the name R.N.Morris.

I got an email from Lucy, the press officer at Faber, today and she said: "Start shamelessly plugging A Gentle Axe on your website." That reads to me like an order, so here am. I'm nothing if not obedient.

It's a historical crime novel, which has Porfiry Petrovich, the detective from Crime and Punishment, as its hero in a sleuthing yarn. Yeah, I know. A mad idea. Cheeky isn't the word.

It comes out in the UK on February 1st 2007. You can pre-order it on amazon now. (The US edition, which will be published by The Penguin Press, comes out March 22.)

I really hope that Dostoevsky, wherever he is, has a sense of humour.