R.N. Morris's Blog
September 3, 2025
Pedro Pascal reading Crime and Punishment
Apparently, Crime and Punishment is Pedro Pascal’s favourite book. That seemed a good enough reason for me to make another animation…
June 25, 2025
I’m on a longlist!
I was thrilled to discover that Death of a Princess has made it onto the longlist for the inaugural SpyMasters Book Prize. As you can see from the list below, it’s in distinguished company. I don’t expect I’ll be on the shortlist when it’s announced in October, so I will make the most of it …
June 3, 2025
I just like moving things around
I’ve been taking a break from writing. To begin with, I decided to step back from my day job writing podcast scripts. The plan was, I would spend more time developing my own fiction projects. I mapped out five prospective ideas for new books, and with the help of my agent whittled it down to …
December 18, 2024
Writing historical fiction vs writing history podcasts
As well as writing historical novels such as Death of a Princess, I also work as a scriptwriter for a number of True Crime and History podcasts. The latest is A Curious History of your Home, which you can listen to on BBC Sounds. I explore the different requirements and challenges of the two types …
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November 30, 2024
Death of a Princess makes best books of 2024 round-up (twice!)
November/December is always a stressful time for any author who’s had a book come out in the preceding year. Everywhere you look, you see books of the year lists, in which your book inevitably doesn’t feature. So it was a truly unexpected surprise to discover that Death of a Princess has been picked by not …
Death of a Princess makes best books of 2024 round-up (twice!) Read More »
November 22, 2024
My trailer ritual
Whenever Beryl Bainbridge finished a novel, she would make a painting inspired by the book. It feels like it might have been a way of getting the novel fully out of her system, enabling her to move on to a new project. Although apparently, the real reason was that when she was writing she missed …
November 11, 2024
Hot off the (virtual) press
I’ve written a couple of articles about the background to my new book, Death of a Princess. The first begins: “In 1879 a group of eleven young people descended on the quiet Russian spa town of Lipetsk, over 700 miles south of St Petersburg. The ten men and one woman stood out from the geriatric …
November 7, 2024
Death of a Princess is out now!
My writing partner Moomin admiring the book we wrote together I’m delighted to announce that my new novel, Death of a Princess, is out now. The paperback will be published next week. It’s the final book in my Empire of Shadows series featuring the Russian investigating magistrate Pavel Pavlovich Virginsky. Like all my books, it’s …
October 16, 2024
Letting go
After four read-throughs and four rounds of self-edits, I have finally shared my latest book with my trusted beta-reader. So now begins the nail-biting period of waiting to hear what she thinks. It’s not made any easier by the fact that my trusted beta-reader likes to read in bed. Lying next to me. (Did I …
October 3, 2024
Let the edit begin
I’ve just begun my own edit of the third book in the Empire Of Shadows series. The read-through went well, but there were a couple of structural points that jumped out at me. I need one or two extra chapters, I think, just to open up the action a bit more in places. It feels …
