Dostoevsky on 'literary types'

From The Demons (aka The Devils, or The Possessed):


"She invited literary people, and they were immediately brought to her in great numbers. Then they began to come on their own, without invitations: one would bring another. Never before had she seen men of letters like these. They were impossibly vain, but very openly so, as though that was their duty. Some (though by no means all) would even turn up drunk, but they seemed to see this as evidence of some beautiful, special truth that had been discovered only the day before. All of them were strangely proud of something. On all of their faces it was written that they had just discovered some extremely important secret. They would abuse each other, and reckon it their honour. It was rather difficult to determine just what they had written; but critics, novelists, playwrights, satirists and specialists in exposes were in attendance."

(I don't know how to do an acute accent on the second e in "exposays"..)

Last Words compiled by Claire Cameron

Toronto-based writer Claire Cameron, author of The Line Painter, compiled a collection of last words uttered by executed prisoners in Texas. Her piece ran in the New York Times here. I thought it was incredibly affecting and weirdly poetic.

A Razor Wrapped in Silk cover

Keanu Reeves’ pint pot

I was meeting a friend for a drink in the Compton Arms in Islington last week. As I was waiting for him to turn up I overheard a conversation between the barmaid and a punter.

“That’s Keanu Reeves’ pint pot,” said the barmaid, nodding towards something wrapped in a plastic carrier bag.

“Who?”

“Keanu Reeves. He was in here the other night. Must have been filming nearby and he came in for a pint of Guinness. They like to try things, don’t they?”

“Who do?”

“Celebrities.”

“Is he a celebrity then? I’ve never heard of him. What’s he called?”

“Keanu Reeves. He was in The Matrix.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s a film. Well, there are three of them. Matrix One. Matrix Two. Matrix Three. He was in them all.”

“Any good?”

“Yeah. Well, it depends if you like that sort of thing.”

“I don’t know. Never seen them.”

“He’s been in other things.”

The punter absorbed this news in silence.

“Well, anyhow, he was in here the other night. Had a pint of Guinness. He left a bit in the bottom and Alan said ‘Do you dare me to drink that?’ So Jack said he’d put three quid in the charity box if he drank it. So he did. Then Tom said we should auction it off, for charity. Keanu Reeves’ pint pot. We got ten pounds thirty for it. So thanks to Keanu Reeves, we raised thirteen pounds thirty for charity. Mike bought it, but he forgot it, so it’s waiting for him, the next time he comes in. So there it is, Keanu Reeves’ pint pot.”

The punter gazed inscrutably up at the pint pot wrapped in a plastic bag. “Thirteen pounds thirty?” He shook his head incredulously, as if for him this was the most amazing part of the whole affair.

My kids mocked my website

I made the mistake of clicking on my website in front of my son (aged 9). He howled with derision and called his sister (11) over.

"No, Dad, no! Colour clash! It's so amateurish! You should have got us to do it! That's terrible!" All this was accompanied by much laughter, and the occasional patronising "Aww" at a particularly inept bit of design on my part. It comes to something when you're patronised by your own kids.

It was quite hurtful. I mean, aren't our kids supposed to look up to us at that age? Isn't it only when they're teenagers, and work out they can beat us in a physical fight, that they're supposed to start treating us with the contempt we deserve? I was hoping I had a few more years of uncritical admiration to go yet.

At least my wife was on my side. She had to be, as she had approved my original design. Though now I am beginning to wonder whether her "Yes, dear, very nice" at the time was quite the ringing endorsement I was looking for.

Anyhow, their main problem with it seemed to be the colours of the typeface. I had bright red and bright blue contrasting vibrantly. A bold statement, I thought. They claimed it hurt their eyes. So I toned down the colours.

This is the revised version. I haven't shown it to my kids yet. I don't think I can stand the humiliation.

Humble apologies to any commenters

Oh God, I feel awful about this. I just discovered that I had 22 hidden comments waiting for me to moderate. I had been wondering why I hadn't been getting any comments recently. The truth was I had, but I just didn't know they were there.

I must have switched over to moderating my comments and then immediately forgotten that I'd done so.

God. I'm so crap. And sorry. Sorry sorry sorry.

I promise that I will keep an eye open for comments from now on.

Rapping with the rap sheet

Michael Jacob, who with his wife Daniela de Gregorio is one half of the crimewriter Michael Gregorio, has written up the recent event I did in Perugia for the Rap Sheet.

I finished reading Mike and Daniela's latest, A Visible Darkness, at the weekend.



It's an intensely dark and gripping tale, grotesque, atmospheric, full of candlelit twists and the fetid stench of the past - a bit like picking your way through an old, labarynthine castle. The Prussian amber industry on the Baltic coast, taken over by Napoleon's occupying forces, provides the setting, and as always Mike and Daniela's grasp of the historical situation - and their ability to bring it vividly to life, to imagine it from the inside - is extrememly impressive. This is what it must have been like, you can't help thinking. And a grim and grinding time it was, though beautifully evoked by Mike and Daniela. It's the third in their series featuring the Prussian magistrate, Hanno Stiffeniis. If you haven't discovered the series already, a treat is in store for you. Buy it here or here. Or you can start with the first in the series, Critique of Criminal Reason.

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!