Crime & Punishment

Dostoevsky's  Crime and Punishment is probably the most original murder mystery ever written. It is also one of the first. Set in the oppressive summer of a St Petersburg heatwave, this is the story of Raskolnikov, an impoverished student who brutally murders a miserly old pawnbroker simply because he can. And so we enter the delirious mind and world of a killer – an intellectual misfit, alienated from his family and friends, cut off from a corrupt society "as if with scissors", and tormented by a "Great Idea" that turns into a cat-and-mouse nightmare with the police.   Boldly and vividly updated by adaptor David Zane Mairowitz and artist Alain Korkos to a modern St Petersburg peopled by the grotesques of the 'Gas-Putin' generation, this upside-down whodunit traces the path of a man above suspicion who ends up informing on himself. But can he find redemption?   When Robert Louis Stevenson finished reading  Crime and Punishment, he said the experience was "like having an illness"; then he started writing a new story about a Scottish doctor called Jekyll…