In The Gentle Axe, R.N. Morris has picked up police magistrate Porfiry Petrovich’s career where Dostoevsky left off.
Two dead bodies in St. Petersburg’s Petrovsky Park. A big, burly man hanging from a tree with a bloodied axe tucked into his belt and a dwarf packed inside of a suitcase with a deep axe wound in his head.
Petrovich soon has reason to reject the obvious explanation that one man killed the other and then hanged himself.
The Publishers Weekly review implies that Petrovich was the inspiration for TV’s Columbo. I never heard that before, and somehow it got by me in the 600 plus pages of Crime and Punishment.
I did some armchair traveling to Russia not too long ago while reading Boris Akunin’s Sister Pelagia and the White Bull Dog, which has a vague air of Chekhov about it. Perhaps it is time for a return visit.
