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Hello and welcome to the Spectators Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor

of The Spectator, and this week my guest is the writer Kevin Birmingham, whose new book,

The Sinner and the Saint, is subtitled Dostoevsky,

A Crime and Its Punishment.

Kevin, welcome.

Now, Dostoevsky has been much written about over the years.

What was it that made you think there's something new to say and what we're setting out to do with this book?

The idea for the book came from

a single paragraph in Joseph Frank's magisterial biography. It's a five-volume biography. It's about

2,500 pages. And yet, even in a biography, as long as that, there is almost always a lot of material that's left

undiscussed or under-examined.

And in that one paragraph, Joseph Frank mentions that one of the inspirations for crime

and punishment is the case of a French murderer named Pierre Francois Lausanneux that

Dostoevsky came across in 1861 when he

was looking for material for a magazine that he was starting with his brother. Now, I've filed this

away. I didn't think too much about it after reading it. Dostoevsky was someone that I wanted to

write about for a long time. He has a fascinating life, which I'm sure we'll discuss as we go on, but I couldn't

think of a new angle for talking about it. And one of the things I wanted to do was to talk about

crime and punishment in particular and the creation of that masterpiece. And when I went back

to Lassenere, I did a little bit of digging and very quickly realized that he wrote his own memoirs in between the time that he was convicted and guillotined.

And when I looked into the memoirs, that's when the idea struck me that this could be a two-part story, a story that goes back and forth between Lassener's life

...