Clustr Maps
Take the Monster into your very home
The Gentle Ax
I recently finished the novel, The Gentle Ax, by R.N. Morris and can well recommend it. Generally speaking, I'm a bit of a sucker for these period mysteries, though this one is a bit unique, at least insofar as the setting is pre-Soviet Russia.
In conformance with a recent trend in such novels, Morris has chosen to follow a fictional case investigated by the fictional detective introduced in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, Porfiry Petrovich. You may recall Petrovich's manner from the Dostoevsky novel and how he gently hounded the poor student Raskolnikov into confessing his crimes.
This work, which takes place a few years after the events of the Dostoevsky novel and after a massive overhaul of the Russian system of justice, opens with a Babushka walking through a massive park in St. Petersburg in the middle of winter and happening upon the bodies of a large man, hanging from the limb of a tree with a bloody axe held in his belt and that of a dwarf, tucked into a suitcase. In the grim reality of the impoverished, this event is truly her lucky day, as she finds a fortune in cash on the body of the hanged man.
From this point forward, Petrovich battles both the criminals and their colleagues, as well as the petty bureaucrats of the new Russian justice system, and pulls together a number of seemingly unrelated persons and events to arrive at the solution to this and other mysteries. Along the way, he enounters another impoverished student, calculating madames, prostitutes, pornographers, the Russian Intelligentsia and nobility. Of course, all is not what it seems. While the final wrap up is a bit hurried, overall the book is a very entertaining read and brings with it a view of the world through the eyes of imperial Russia, before its descent into chaos and revolution.