As forensic science has come to dominate the real world of murder investigation, crime writers are increasingly turning to moments in history when detectives had to do without fingerprints and DNA. CJ Sansom’s Tudor mysteries and Boris Akunin’s diplomatic detective Erast Fandorin are leaders in the field, and novelists are becoming ever more inventive in their choice of settings. One of the most vivid is St Petersburg in the 1860s, a city teeming with brothels, slum tenements and the unavoidable consequences of poor sanitation.

In the middle of a sweltering summer, his office filled with the stench from a nearby canal, a detective with a familiar name is in a bad mood. Porfiry Petrovich first appeared in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, but he’s been given a new lease of life in a striking series of novels by RN Morris. A Vengeful Longing is the second, and the novel teems with tsarist spies, would-be revolutionaries and a stifling bureaucracy that frustrates ordinary Russians at every turn.

Porfiry is an extreme example of a decent man in a society close to collapse. The crimes he is called on to investigate are baroque, involving characters who might easily turn up in a circus or a stage melodrama: dwarves, axe murderers, lunatics. In Crime and Punishment, Porfiry showed himself to be a master of criminal psychology, able to detect the workings of a single mind in a mass of extraneous detail. He brings a similar perspicacity to bear on the murders in A Vengeful Longing, quickly realising that the chief suspect in a double killing (a doctor accused of poisoning his wife and their disabled son) has been framed.

There is no obvious link with either of the subsequent victims, a colonel who has been shot with his own pistol and a penniless tailor, but Porfiry brushes aside the obvious clues and begins to see a pattern in the murders. Morris’s descriptions of the horrors of insanitary slum dwellings in St Petersburg are extraordinarily vivid, but the most striking feature of the novel is the way in which Porfiry’s sophisticated understanding of human nature compensates for the limited investigatory tools at his disposal.

A VENGEFUL LONGING by RN Morris
Faber £12.99 pp317

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