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Sub-titled 'Dostoevsky and the Gentleman Murderer Who Inspired a Masterpiece', Kevin Birmingham's impressive research is combined with his flair for characterising the teeming intellectual debates of the day and giving insight into one of the world's great novels. It is the immersive tale of how Fyodor Dostoevsky came to write Crime and Punishment and why it changed the world. As a young man, Dostoevsky was a celebrated writer, but his involvement with the radical politics of his day condemned him to a long Siberian exile. There he spent years studying the criminals who were his companions. Upon his return to St Petersburg in the 1860s, he fought his way through multiple hardships - gambling addiction, debilitating debt, epilepsy, the deaths of loved ones, and literary banishment - to craft an enduring classic. The germ of the novel came from the sensational story of Pierre-Francois Lacenaire, a notorious murderer who charmed and outraged Paris in the 1830s. Lacenaire was a glamorous egotist who embodied the instincts that lie beneath nihilism, a western-influenced philosophy inspiring a new generation of Russian revolutionaries. Lacenaire was a character who could demonstrate the errors of radical politics and ideas through the character of Raskolnikov. Raskolnikov began to merge with Dostoevsky. The novelist was determined to tell a murder story from the murderer's perspective, but his character couldn't be a monster because he wanted so desperately to be good. The writing consumed Dostoevsky. As his debts and the predatory terms of his contract caught up with him, he hired a stenographer so that he could dictate the final chapters in time. Anna Grigorievna Snitkina became Dostoevsky's first reader and chief critic, and she changed the way he wrote forever. By the time he finished his great novel, he had fallen in love. We are brought back into the fevered panic of Raskolnikov as he murders an old woman, and Birmingham braids a hat trick of three biographies - the life of the man who wrote the novel, the murderer who inspired the tale, and the evolution of the novel itself. A magnificent achievement, 416pp, photos. Remainder mark.