Petersburg (1982) recreates 1914 Saint Petersburg and the machinations around Russia’s entry into the First World War as the end of the Russian royal family comes closer and Bolshevism takes centre stage.
Some more recently written Saint Petersburg-set crime novels: It’s also true that, like Razumov, Conrad’s father was imprisoned by the Tsarist Russians and then forced into exile. Academics see the book as Conrad’s response to Dostoevsky, a writer he supposedly detested. The story then shifts between Russia and Switzerland where Razumov goes into exile. Caught up in murder, revolution and politics Razumov suffers a deep identity crisis. Half a century after Dostoevsky, Joseph Conrad wrote Under Western Eyes (1911), in which a Saint Petersburg University student, Razumov, believes his fellow student, a radical revolutionary, has assassinated a senior Tsarist government official. Finally, The Cleansing Flames (2011) sees terrorist outrages across the city and a murder in intellectual circles for Porfiry Petrovich to sort out. A Razor Wrapped in Silk (2010) moves to 1870 with Petrovich linking the seemingly random murders of a child factory worker and a society beauty. A Vengeful Longing(2009) is, by contrast, set in the humid Saint Petersburg summer of 1868 with the murder of a doctor and his family as Petrovich encounters budding revolutionaries and Tsarist spies. Porfiry Petrovich begins his investigation in the city’s squalid brothels and drinking dens but is soon led into an altogether more genteel stratum of Saint Petersburg society. In A Gentle Axe (2007) it is the freezing winter of 1866 and two frozen bodies have been found in Petrovsky Park – a dwarf neatly packed in a suitcase, and a burly peasant hanging from a tree. Morris has “borrowed” magistrate Porfiry Petrovich from Crime and Punishment for his series of Saint Petersburg-set mysteries. Jennifer Wilson, a scholar of Russian literature, wrote recently in the New York Times that today’s true crime resurgence has an antecedent in the works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Cain, Jim Thompson, Patricia Highsmith, A Yi…and many others. In Crime and Punishment Dostoevsky created the first psychological crime novel and so influenced a multitude of later crime writers around the world-James M. Instead he finds himself mired in confusion, paranoia, and self-loathing confronting the real-world moral consequences of his deed.
He believes the funds from the murder will allow him to restart his life. Rodion Raskolnikov, down-and-out in Saint Petersburg, formulates a plan to kill an unscrupulous pawnbroker for her money. Well, we can’t not begin with Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866).
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