Things aren’t going well for writer Col Newton. It’s ten years since he published his only novel, a critically acclaimed commercial flop. Then out of the blue, he hears from his old university friend, Chris Lazenby. There had always been rumours Lazenby was a spy. Turns out the rumours were true. Lazenby has a tempting […]
Alexander II: love and death in Imperial Russia
Paris, the City of Love, in the 1860s; Alexander II of Russia meeting a mysterious fortune-teller who predicts his death; an assassination attempt in the Imperial Palace. RN Morris tells this strange story and wonders: did the gypsy’s prophecy come true? Part one: love In May 1867, a World Fair was held in Paris. Tsar […]
Death Of A Princess by RN Morris
Summer 1880 in Lipetsk, a spa town in Russia. The elderly and cantankerous Princess Belskaya suffers a violent reaction while taking a mud bath at the famous Lipetsk Sanatorium. Soon after, she dies. Dr Roldugin, the medical director of the sanatorium, is at a loss to explain the sudden and shocking death. He points the […]
PT Barnum and the Circassian girl
It was a shock for RN Morris to discover that PT Barnum, the famous showman, was a people-trafficker. Yet the facts are well documented. For Historia Roger investigates Barnum’s attempt to buy a ‘beautiful Circassian girl’. One of the things I discovered while researching my novella, The Crimson Child, is that PT Barnum, the famous […]
Revisiting St Petersburg?
When RN Morris went to St Petersburg to research his second 19th-century crime novel it felt as if he was revisiting the city he’d imagined so vividly: so much that his guide, a native St Petersburger, said his book had an “authentic atmosphere”. One day – who knows when – he’d like to be able […]
The Crimson Child by RN Morris
Spring 1880 in St Petersburg. While on an outing with his family in a leafy park, a retired general encounters a mysterious child dressed in red. The child leads him to a secluded spot. And a violent death. The shocking crime, committed in broad daylight against a respected member of the establishment, strikes terror at […]
The Mannequin House by RN Morris
London, 1914. Called out to investigate the murder of an employee of the House of Brackley, an upmarket Kensington department store, Detective Inspector Silas Quinn finds himself investigating one of the most bizarre cases of his career. For the chief murder suspect is a monkey. One of the store’s fashion models has been found dead […]
Did radicals and reactionaries unite against Tsar Alexander II?
Did the radicals plotting to murder Alexander II and the reactionaries who thought his reforms went too far join forces to get rid of the Tsar? RN Morris explores an unlikely alliance that provides the political backdrop to his latest historical crime mystery, Law of Blood. In his excellent biography of Tsar Alexander II (1818-1881), […]