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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Hamlet
Shakespeare

Fred Vargas is positively medieval

I knew Vargas was a medieval historian and archaeologist. More recently I read that she had done research on the epidemiology of the Black Death. The latter certainly figures prominently in Have Mercy on Us All. In Wash This Blood Clean From My Hand, protagonist Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg's recurring fantasy of stuffing Strasbourg Cathedral, one of the great medieval buildings, full of noxious beasts is redolent of plague imagery from medieval art.

In Have Mercy ... , a town crier and an impoverished keeper of a boardinghouse team up in the opening chapters to investigate puzzling messages that keep turning up in the letterbox where the crier gathers his news. The two have a testy relationship and, in their contrasting turns of mind and their squabbling, are a kind of humorous echo of the intuitive Adamsberg and his erudite, analytical lieutenant, Danglard.

It's tempting to think that Vargas took that echo-in-miniature idea from the Middle Ages. Medieval painters, sculptors, manuscript illuminators and embroiderers loved to populate their work with marginal figures that fill space, provide decoration, or, as in this example from the Bayeux Tapestry, echo, supplement, or comment on the main action.

None of this is necessary to enjoy Vargas' writing, but it's fun to think about and just might give some insight into her technique.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Fred Vargas
French crime fiction

More "Wash This Blood ... "

I'm still reading Fred Vargas' Dagger-winning Wash This Blood Clean From My Hand, and I'm not at all embarrassed or disappointed to be reading a bit more slowly than usual. This is a book to be savored. Among the pleasures of its first 222 pages:

1) Vargas works her protagonist, Commissaire Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg, into a predicament similar to those of a string of men later jailed for murder — wrongly jailed, Adamsberg believes. The similarities are so obvious that even I realized it, yet Adamsberg does not, at least not right away.

Weak plotting on Vargas' part? I thought so for about a tenth of a second. Then I realized that this is Vargas' small, subtle way of making a point that other writers would hit the reader over the head with: Her protagonist is not perfect. He has blind spots, weaknesses and vulnerabilities.

2) She puts a forthright, touching declaration of self-knowledge into the mouth of an Adamsberg colleague, then turns it into a declaration of strength:

"You didn't seem to be taking any notice, just sitting in a corner, looking bored."

"That was an act," said Retancourt, pouring out two more cups of coffee. "Men pay no attention to a fat, plain woman."

"That's not at all what I meant, lieutenant."

"But it's exactly what I meant, sir," she said, waving away the objection. "They don't bother looking at her, she's just part of the furniture, and they actually forget she's there. I depend on that. Add a bored expression and hunched shoulders, and you're sure to be able to see everything without being seen. Not everyone can get away with it, and it's served me well in the past."

3) Vargas gets the distance between Montreal and Hull, Quebec right.

More later.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Fred Vargas
French crime fiction

Fred Vargas

Up until very recently, I'd never read a single chapter by this double Dagger winner. Now, I have read a single chapter, the first of Wash This Blood Clean From My Hand, the novel for which Vargas and translator Siân Reynolds recently received their second succesive Duncan Lawrie International Dagger. This attention-grabbing opening begins with Commissaire Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg contemplating a broken central-heating system. He hopes to have it repaired, of course, but mostly he thinks about himself, the heater, and the place they share in the universe.

Adamsberg shivers with his second-in-command, Capitaine Danglard, a precise, knowledgeable officer, perhaps too precise and knowledgeable for the apparently intuitive Adamsberg. The two share personal secrets, and they have opposing approaches to an upcoming police seminar in Quebec. And that, for all practical purposes, is the chapter. There is barely a hint, if any at all, of the cases that will constitute the novel. The chapter reads more like the opening scene of a two-man show, all the emphasis on contrasts between the two characters. I have never read an opening chapter like this before in a crime novel.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Fred Vargas
French crime fiction

Peter Temple wins the world's biggest crime-fiction prize

This just in: Peter Temple's The Broken Shore has won a highly deserved CWA Duncan Lawrie Dagger, formerly known as the CWA Gold Dagger for Fiction, for best crime novel of the year. I've raved about The Broken Shore and Temple here. Other winners of awards from Britain's Crime Writers' Association include:

— Author Fred Vargas and translator Sian Reynolds, Duncan Lawrie International Dagger for Wash this Blood Clean from My Hand. This marks a repeat for the pair, who won last year for The Three Evangelists.

— Gillian Flynn and her novel Sharp Objects, winner of the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger and the CWA New Blood Dagger.

Find a complete list CWA winners here.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Crime fiction in translation