Words, words, words: Nine years of blog posts on Shakespeare as a crime writer

Photo by Peter Rozovsky

The 400th anniversary this week of William Shakespeare's death has crime readers and writers remarking on similarities between Shakespeare's work and crime fiction. Here are links to some posts I've made on that subject over the years.

Some of the posts sound the standard Shakespeare-crime themes, mainly that lots of people die by foul means in the plays. Another explores Shakespeare's use of repetition to build tension in Hamlet. One post I especially like discusses a 17th-century criticism of Shakespeare that sounds like a 20th-century criticism of Mickey Spillane or a 21st-century knock on noir.

Sarah Bernhardt
as Hamlet

1. "Hamlet, our crime fiction contemporary"
2. "Words, words, words"
3. "Jeopardy! catches up to Detectives Beyond Borders, then gets one of its own questions wrong"
4. "A bit more from a great seventeenth-century crime writer"
5. "Bill Shakespeare, sleuth / A question for readers"
6. "Critic blasts crime fiction for lacking ontological scrutiny"
7. "An English writer's Scottish crime story," and my favorite of the bunch, a post in which
8. I catch Samuel Johnson out for an erroneous Shakespeare attribution in his Dictionary of the English Language.

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

Dr. Johnson was a great lexicographer, but he could have used a copy editor

April 15 marks the 259th anniversary of the publication of Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language:

"I have, notwithstanding this discouragement, attempted a dictionary of the English language, which, while it was employed in the cultivation of every species of literature, has itself been hitherto neglected, suffered to spread, under the direction of chance, into wild exuberance, resigned to the tyranny of time and fashion, and exposed to the corruptions of ignorance, and caprices of innovation."

— Samuel Johnson, from the preface to A Dictionary of the English Language

Awfully prescriptive, isn't it, not the sort of thing one would would see today.

I bought an abridged edition of the great book a few months ago. In honor of the book's birthday, here is a surprise I found within:

"asshead n.s. [from ass and head] One slow of apprehension; a blockhead.

"Will you help an asshead, and a coxcomb, an a knave, a thin-faced knave, a gull."

Shakesp. Hamlet.

The remarkable thing, other than the word's beguiling punch, is that the line is not, in fact, from Hamlet, but rather from Twelfth Night, Act V, Scene i

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

I have seen television's future ...

... and it isn't fucking Leave It To Beaver, now is it? Lots of viewers have apparently told BBC America just that, so it will be interesting to see if the cable channel continues its policy of bleeping out swear words from its broadcasts of The Thick of It.

I never watched this British political comedy/drama until Adrian McKinty's blog post yesterday about the bleeping; I've now watched all of Series 1 and a good chunk of Series 3 (in their uncensored versions). McKinty calls the show's invective "some of the best and most creative swearing that we've seen in the English language since Chaucer" and, while he unaccountably omits to mention Shakespeare, his head is in the right place.

The show, a purported look at the inner workings of the British government, is a symphony of swearing, with strings of ingeniously baroque invective from Malcolm Tucker, the brilliant and much-feared government communications director, punctuated by four-letter grace notes from him and the rest of the cast. The swearing is just part of the reason I'm more impressed by The Thick of It than by anything I've seen from Seinfeld, The Wire, The Sopranos or Curb Your Enthusiasm.

But I'm really here to ask for your favorite examples of published or broadcast fictional insult and invective. They need not involve sexual or bodily functions or even dirty words of any kind; one of my favorite invective set pieces in crime fiction is Salvo Montalbano's habit of cursing the saints at moments of tension in Andrea Camilleri's novels. That's up there with Thersites, the "deformed and scurrilous Greek" in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, whose lines include:

"I would thou didst itch from head to foot and I had the scratching of thee; I would make thee the loathsomest scab in Greece."

Those are my favorite examples; what are yours? And what distinguishes good swearing from tedious, offensive swearing in books, movies, and plays and on television?

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Hamlet, our crime-fiction contemporary

I've written more than once about Hamlet as a crime story, about its noirish patterns of guilt and doom, and about its hero as both killer and sleuth.

An essay from 1951 helps explain why Hamlet comes across like a crime-fiction protagonist. It's called "The Imagery of Hamlet," and its author, W.H. Clemen, tried to debunk the popular conception of Hamet as an irresolute waffler:

"Hamlet does not translate the general thought into an image paraphrasing it; on the contrary, he uses the opposite method: he refers the generalizations to the events and objects of the reality underlying the thought. ... In contrast to Othello and Lear, for example, who awaken heaven and the elements in their imagery and who lend expression to their might passions in images of soaring magnificence, Hamlet prefers to keep his language within the scope of reality, indeed, within the everyday world."

Clemen cites a string of the harsh insults by which Hamlet lays bare to his mother Claudius' true nature ("A cutpurse of the empire and the rule ... a king of shreds and patches"). "Hamlet sees through men and things," Clemen writes. "He perceives what is false, visualizing his recognition through imagery"

Hamlet shuns elevated speech; he's earthy, and he speaks the truth, harshly when necessary. Sounds a bit like Sam Spade. Or Jack Taylor. Or Mike Hammer. Or— Who in crime fiction does Clemen's assessment of Hamlet remind you of?

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Words, words, words

(Eugène Delacroix, "Hamlet sees the ghost of his father")

I'm rereading a crime story I've written about before, notably about its probing of killers' psyches. This time I'll highlight a device by which the author heightens tension:

And now, Laertes, what's the news with you?
You told us of some suit; what is't, Laertes?
You cannot speak of reason to the Dane,
And loose your voice: what wouldst thou beg, Laertes,
That shall not be my offer, not thy asking?
The head is not more native to the heart,
The hand more instrumental to the mouth,
Than is the throne of Denmark to thy father.
What wouldst thou have, Laertes?

Doesn't the repetition tell you that the speaker is nervous? Another character, too, likely has something on his mind:

Hamlet: Sir, my good friend; I'll change that name with you:
And what make you from Wittenberg, Horatio? Marcellus?

Marcellus: My good lord!

Hamlet: I am very glad to see you. Good even, sir.
But what, in faith, make you from Wittenberg?

Both selections are from Hamlet, Act I, scene ii. I suggest again that crime fiction might usefully be invoked in discussions of Shakespeare and Shakespeare in discussions of crime fiction.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Books received and a question for readers

Among the books to cross my desk recently at Detectives Beyond Borders are A Carrion Death by Michael Stanley and a new edition of Derek Raymond's How the Dead Live.

The former is of interest here for at least two reasons: its setting (Botswana) and its title, which comes from The Merchant of Venice. This adds Stanley, who are really the team of Michael Sears and Stanley Trollip, to that roster of crime writers who take titles or other cues from Shakespeare, a subject of occasional interest in this space.

How the Dead Live is part of a recent noirish turn to my crime-fiction experience. First came the delightful whirl of NoirCon 2008, and then came this new edition of Raymond's book, courtesy of Serpent's Tail. Raymond is revered as among the darkest of dark British crime writers, and the novel's opening plays nicely into a subject about which I've been thinking recently: humor in noir. Here's that opening:

"`The most extraordinary feature that psychopaths present,' the Home Office lecturer was saying, `is the painstaking effort they make to copy normal people.' He looked happily at us. `They make a close study of us — you realize that.'"

I suspect more than one reader will smile at that "He looked happily at us."

How about you, readers? Tell me about some of the grimmer or at least more unexpected places where you've found humor in your crime reading.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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The crime side of "serious" fiction

A pair of professors from Amherst College are the latest to notice that "serious" fiction has a crime side. Or did they notice that crime fiction has a serious side? You can decide when you read their article in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

The piece is a series of one-paragraph mock newspaper articles in the style of a roundup of crime news. I got a special kick out of the following, for reasons that will be obvious to readers who remember this, this and this from Detectives Beyond Borders:

Prince Runs Amok; Many Feared Dead

(Elsinore, Denmark) – The heir to the Danish throne went on a rampage yesterday, killing, it is feared, most of the members of the royal family. Details remain sketchy, but persons close to the scene report that the Danish prince killed his stepfather, the king; one of the king's leading ministers; and the minister's son. The prince's mother also is said to have died in the rampage; the assailant himself was killed in an all-out assault by authorities. The prince, believed to be in his mid-20s, had recently been placed under suicide watch after the death by drowning of his fiancée. A college acquaintance confirmed that the killer had been haunted by visions and nightmares since the death of his father some years ago: "He liked to talk about death and killing and stuff, but no one really took him seriously. He'd been saying the same thing for years." Said another unnamed source, "Everyone knew he was a little off, but he seemed pretty harmless. I guess we were wrong."

You might also like the item about – But why should I ruin the fun? Click on the article, and see which literary classics you recognize from their criminous descriptions. (As a newspaperman, I compliment the professors on their good eye for headlinese, that sometimes weirdly compacted turn of phrase seen only in newspaper headlines.)

(image from http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/frailtyofhamlet/gallery/shakepictures/)

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

(Non)crime classics

Back in September, I posted some comments about elements of Hamlet and Macbeth that would be right at home in crime fiction. And why not? Revenge, guilt, violence, murder. It amazes me that no one in Kansas or Pennsylvania has agitated to get moral degeneracy like that out of our good American schools.

But the parallels with classic literature don’t stop there. Goneril and Regan flatter their father in order to gain his inheritance in King Lear, then plot to get the old man out of the way, just as any number of ambitions gangsters have made their way to the top. And, just so you don’t think Shakespeare is the only crime writer out there, try the Icelandic sagas, unparalleled for matter-of-fact violence, legal maneuvering, and deadpan gems like this, from Njal’s Saga:

Hallgerd was outside. "There is blood on your axe," she said. "What have you done?"

“I have now arranged that you can be married a second time," replied Thjostolf.

And now, readers, let's hear from you. What classics of world literature belong on a crime lover’s bookshelf?

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Jeopardy! catches up to Detectives Beyond Borders, then gets one of its own questions wrong

Loyal readers will know I've posted several Shakespeare comments recently, noting instances in which the Bard drew from the same wellspring that inspires current crime writers.

Someone in TV land must have read those posts, because tonight's Jeopardy! including the cleverly titled category "C.S.I.: Shakespeare." Once they'd run through categories of '70s hits and words with the letter z, the contestants correctly answered, in ascending order of monetary value, questions that amounted to the following: Who kills the king who married his (the killer's) mother? Who stabs a king? What play has two dead lovers in it? and Which king who suffers heavy losses had three daughters?

Only the fifth question posed any kind of a test, asking, in effect, who drowned the Duke of Clarence in a cask of wine. None of the cautious contestants took a stab at that one (the answer was Richard III).

I expect a note of gratitude and a hefty royalty check from the Jeopardy! folks any day now.
===================================

If money and thanks fail to arrive, I'll console myself with the rare pleasure of having seen the show's question writers and host Alex Trebek make a mistake. A category called "The Star-Spangled Banner" asked: "Which two (sic) times of day" are mentioned in the U.S. national anthem? One contestant answered: "Dawn and night," which was closer to correct than Trebek got it. No, Trebek said, the answer is dawn ("by the dawn's early light") and twilight ("at the twilight's last gleaming").

Question for Alex Trebek: "This word completes the following line from `The Star Spangled Banner': `Gave proof through the ________ that our flag was still there.'"

(On second thought, I hope the question did not refer to the first verse of the anthem, in which case Jeopardy! would be right. Yikes!)

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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A bit more from a great seventeenth-century crime writer.

I don't want to carry this Shakespeare thing too far, but Act III, Scene iii of Hamlet is like a noir novel with the characters viewed inside out, or maybe through a fluoroscope. They think out loud classic noir patterns of guilt and doom.

Here's Claudius:

"O, my offence is rank, it smells to heaven"

And, even better:

"'Forgive me my foul murder'?
That cannot be; since I am still possess'd
Of those effects for which I did the murder,
My crown, mine own ambition and my queen.
May one be pardon'd and retain the offence?
In the corrupted currents of this world
Offence's gilded hand may shove by justice,
And oft 'tis seen the wicked prize itself
Buys out the law: but 'tis not so above"

Modernize the language a bit, and you could slip that seamlessly into a 1950s pulp novel called The Haunted Killer.

And how about this, from Hamlet himself, plotting not just to kill, but to kill when the killing will have the greatest impact:

"Now might I do it pat, now he is praying;
And now I'll do't. ...
... am I then revenged,
To take him in the purging of his soul,
When he is fit and season'd for his passage?
No!
Up, sword; and know thou a more horrid hent:
When he is drunk asleep, or in his rage,
Or in the incestuous pleasure of his bed;
At gaming, swearing, or about some act
That has no relish of salvation in't;"

Hamlet thinks at the same time like a contemporary crime-fiction psycho who plots a killing so it will have the greatest symbolic meaning, and a cool, professional killer, who plans the hit for when the target is most vulnerable, that is, not praying.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007



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Bill Shakespeare, sleuth / A question for readers

Like crime stories beyond number, Hamlet begins at night. Like fictional sleuths beyond counting, its protagonist sets a trap to snare a murderer ("The play's the thing / Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king.")

Hamlet, like Philip Marlowe, is prone to bitter jokes, and, like Lovejoy, Keller, Quiller and Parker, he has just one name. He goes undercover, in a sense, to impersonate a madman. And you can keep all your self-doubting Kurt Wallanders, Harry Holes or John Rebuses; Hamlet was there first.

Shakespeare has long inspired crime writers. Murder Most Foul is a line from Hamlet (Act I, Scene v, Line 27). And does the title of Fred Vargas' Wash This Blood Clean From My Hand seem familiar? Macbeth says those words after slaying Duncan.

And now, dear readers, what have I missed? What other crime writers have taken titles and other cues from Shakespeare? I'll start you off: Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon paraphrases Prospero in The Tempest when he calls the black bird "the stuff that dreams are made of." Now, help me build this list.

(image from http://www.leoyan.com/global-language.com/ENFOLDED/YOUNG/index.html)



© Peter Rozovsky 2007



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Critic blasts crime fiction for lacking ontological scrutiny

An article in the Independent under the wince-inducing headline "Murder most horrid" let us know earlier this summer that crime fiction had turned decadent and, I might as well say it, yucky.

The shame of one author's otherwise praiseworthy patterns of good, evil, damnation, redemption and salvation, the article tells us, "is that he makes those patterns in blood and gore. ... There are almost as many deaths as in Hamlet but without any of the accompanying ontological scrutiny."

It seems to me that all that evil, damnation, redemption and salvation would provide just the ontologogical kick that crime-fiction readers crave, but the article's author, Paul Vallely, has read the novel in question, Allan Guthrie's Two-Way Split; I have not. At least Vallely finished that book. He tells us with fastidious relish that he was simply unable to get far into two others that he tried: "Enough. I turned from the prologue to the first chapter. It began: `It was pissing down outside ...' Enough indeed."

Though Vallely's style is more precious than most ("As an ingénue in the world of crime writing I had expected something else ... "), his complaints are, of course, old and familiar. I thought of them earlier today as I flipped through the introduction to a book containing a story I wrote about here recently. That introduction quoted an earlier objection to the sorts of stories the book contains. The are filled with, to select just a few from a catalogue of sins, "injury, anger, wrath, hatred ... murder, cruelty ... incest ... killing, stabbing ... "

The complaint's author was John Greene, its date was 1615, and its target was stage tragedies, quite possibly including those by the guy who wrote Hamlet. In the spirit of investigation, then, I'm rereading Hamlet, even though it includes desecration of corpses and murder by poison poured into the victim's ear.

(image from http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/frailtyofhamlet/gallery/shakepictures/)

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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An English writer's Scottish crime story

With Macbeth, the story of a man sent spiraling into murder and despair by his own weakness and the prodding of a femme fatale, the versatile English genre writer William Shakespeare proves he is as at home in crime drama as he is in romance and historical stories.

Macbeth, a thane or "capo" in medieval Scotland, plots a route to power like Rico "Little Caesar" Bandello's, only more ruthless and more direct. Rather than eliminating rivals one by one, he goes right for the top, killing the king and planting forensic evidence on his guards, whom Lady Macbeth has got drunk in the meantime. The next day, feigning grief and anger at the murder, Macbeth kills the guards, neatly eliminating two possible witnesses.

Like Little Caesar, Shakespeare's story turns "away from the ... focus on detectives and victims of crime, and onto the life and development of the gangster himself." That focus takes a noirish turn almost from the start. Though noble and highly placed, Macbeth is a weak man and thus a cousin to the losers of classic roman and film noir. Plagued by visions and hallucinations, swinging wildly between depression and desperate optimism, Macbeth begins killing off possible threats to his new crown.

When Lady Macbeth, whose plot for Macbeth to take over the throne found fertile soil in her husband's susceptible mind, commits suicide, Macbeth is plunged into a hopelessness as affecting as any in Jim Thompson or David Goodis, the famous "tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow" speech. Many of the key scenes take place at night, thus lending the story a noirish feel to match its tragic protagonists' descent into hopelessness and death.

With its Scottish setting, Macbeth is sure to please fans of Ian Rankin.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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