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