Crime and Punishment

"I think it was because it is probably one of the first books I read that you could call a crime book. It is not a crime book in the way that we understand crime fiction today. Instead it is like an existential psychological thriller . You watch the protagonist slowly unravel. He’s a student called Raskolnikov who kills his old landlady and covers it up, and it seems like the perfect crime. But what he doesn’t realise is that there is no such thing as a perfect crime because the individual has to deal with it and bear the consequences. One of the things I really like about it is that no matter how bad the characters are, you always see why they are behaving in that way and the consequences for them and the people around them. That is the power of Dostoevsky’s novels. Well, if you pick up any modern mass-market book, basically the villains are just cardboard cutouts that have to be locked up or arrested or shot by the good guys. Modern crime is an entertainment genre. It is about resolution, which you don’t get in real life. Although I have a bit of a reaction to this, it can be very good entertainment if it is done properly."

"It’s definitely worth it. It’s hard to choose only five books. The temptation is just to put down Dostoevsky’s five long novels and say, look, here’s your reading list, off you go. Some people will be upset that I haven’t included The Brothers Karamazov , which in some ways is the culmination of his work. I think Crime and Punishment is probably his most conventional novel. It’s effectively a sort of literary crime novel, and is in some ways quite typical of its time. It’s got a fascinating structure, where a full 80% of the novel comes after he’s committed the crime but before he reaches the punishment. So for the majority of the novel, you are in suspense and, despite the title, a part of you genuinely believes he might get away with it. It’s a real literary feat, I think, to bring you onside with a guy whose avowed mission is to kill an old woman with an axe. If you think about what his contemporaries were doing, I think it’s an incredible novel – in terms of the precedents that are set and the boundaries of what the novel can be and how risky it can be. It also explores a lot of the themes that preoccupy him in a really fine resolution. One thing I wanted to mention: I recommend this specific translation by Oliver Ready, because his new translation gives us the clearest possible sense of how vivid the language can be. There has been a whole, long, troubled translation history of Dostoevsky, and huge arguments over whether you should be literal or true to the spirit. I think if you haven’t picked up a Dostoevsky book and enjoyed it, Oliver Ready’s translation is where you should go to get a sense of what he can do as a writer. Ready’s equal to the task of translating Dostoevsky. It’s an incredible edition. This is just my personal taste, but I really like Constance Garnett’s . She’s quite true to Dostoevsky’s Victorian style. She’s not perfect, though. The other major translation was by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky . Debate rages over which of these is better. In general terms, I’d say Garnett is a bit more graceful at the expense of sometimes smoothing over rough patches, and the Pevear-Volokhonsky is maybe truer to the original. But some people find that literal-ness to get in the way of the reading experience. I personally prefer Garnett. What’s been fascinating about immersing myself in his writing for the last few years has been watching someone tackle some of the biggest questions we face as a species. You know: what it means to be good, the existence of God, how to create a functioning society. And a number of questions we still wrestle with, like free speech . Watching him get closer and closer to his perfect argument, or his best articulation and never quite feeling that he’s reached it. But there’s this incredibly satisfying feeling of him spiralling around the truth, getting ever closer. I don’t think it’s possible to pinpoint the one perfect sentence that will solve everything. But I do think that endeavour is worthwhile, and something we could all aspire towards."

"There was a real murder in Moscow in 1865, two elderly women killed by axe. Dostoyevsky was deeply moved by this crime. When a writer is deeply moved, he writes a novel. When it is a great writer, the story turns out to be a great novel. Crime and Punishment is on my list because I wrote my own version of the events. In a novel called F.M. (Dostoyevsky’s initials, Fyodor Mikhailovich) I introduce a newly discovered manuscript by Dostoevsky, a first version of Crime and Punishmen t, and it is a 100% mystery about a serial killer. The novel F.M. is a double mystery. On level 1, in modernity, it describes a chase for a newly discovered version of Crime and Punishmen t, a manuscript written by the great writer himself. It would cost many millions if sold at an auction. We can read the manuscript chapter by chapter as they are found one after another, and this is Level 2, where the events of the classical novel take an unexpected turn. Raskolnikov is a suspect there, but the story is much more complicated."

"Of course, I’ve read this at least three times and I’ve spoken about it at two New England colleges. I read it the first time in college and was fascinated by the man versus superman aspect to it, that there are superhuman people like Napoleon, like Hitler, who think they are better than everybody else and feel they can do whatever they like. Then there are the rest of us. The second time I read it was at a monthly police officers’ reading club where we’d get together and discuss a book over beer and pizza, and that time it struck me as funny and somewhat naive that a cold-blooded killer’s pangs of conscience lead him to confess. No! Of course, that’s nonsense in real life. I was speaking at Amherst, a fine liberal arts college in New England, and there was a Q and A and a young student raised her hand. We were talking about the murders in New York City. She says: ‘How many murderers turn themselves in because of pangs of conscience?’ I had dealt with hundreds of murderers and as far as I can remember the answer is: None. But I didn’t want to disappoint her so I made something up and said ‘Five per cent’ or something, and then she says: ‘And how many do you have to beat a confession out of?’ I said: ‘None. What would make you think we beat confessions out of people?’ She said: ‘I watch NYPD Blue .’ I told her if I was her father I’d ask for the tuition money back. Well, you use your creative genius. By tricking them. By lying to them. By doing good cop, bad cop. So, you say: ‘Oh, you know that person you thought you killed? They’re alive and that’s good for you because it’s important that you didn’t kill them.’ It depends on the ability of the investigator, but pretty soon you’ll usually get a confession. Once I was debriefing prisoners on a narcotics case, we were trying to get to Mr Big, and we had to flip this guy we brought in to work for us as an informant. I had a partner, he looked like Jesus Christ, and when he’d finished debriefing someone, not only had they flipped but they were so distraught we’d have to put them on suicide watch. Well. It takes a lot of digging to get to. Sometimes, we are reduced to using crass stuff, you know, like: ‘Oh, see your girlfriend out there, she’s pretty gorgeous and once you’re inside she’s going to go with all your friends…’ What’s incredible about Crime and Punishment is that you move away from the murders and then there’s Sofia, the prostitute, and the idea of possible redemption for the murderer. From a cop’s perspective, there’s nothing redeeming about a character like Raskolnikov. But it’s amazing how Dostoevsky gets you to feel sympathy for him. The killing of the two women is completely forgotten. This often happens in life – in police life in particular, that the real victims are forgotten. Yes! He’s the basis of Colombo and of Poirot. The idea that you can achieve just as good, if not better, results working with your head, the cerebral detective, if you will. Not the NYPD Blue smack ’em around and rough ’em up. You never see Colombo pull a gun. It’s all brains, no brawn."

"Oh, this is the antidote to ways of looking at history that insist only on external and objective workings of political and economic and social circumstances. “I think Dostoevsky understood psychological and social contradictions in life to a peak of intensity later writers have seldom been able to match.” A long time before Freud, Dostoevsky was at work explaining the contradictory, clashing tendencies of the human spirit through his anti-hero, the murderer Raskolnikov. I read this in my second year at college when I was still doing Russian literature and my very enlightened tutor said that I could just stop doing the rest of the 19th-century curriculum and concentrate on Dostoevsky for a year. I have never regretted it. I think Dostoevsky understood psychological and social contradictions in life to a peak of intensity later writers have seldom been able to match."