Introduction

Abstract

In Ngaio Marsh’s Death in a White Tie, Marsh’s hero Alleyn tells his friend Lord Robert Gospel to observe a suspect ‘with the very comment of your soul—’ and Lord Robert interrupts with ‘Yes, yes, yes. Don’t quote now, Roderick, or somebody may think you’re a detective’ (28). In a much later Alleyn novel, Tied up in Tinsel, Alleyn responds to his wife’s attempt to tell him something with, ‘Speak, I am bound to hear’, and she says, ‘Rory! Don’t be a detective’ (514). Both quotations are of course from Hamlet, and Shakespeare is a pervasive presence in detective fiction. Sometimes he is merely touched on, or suggested by a detail; in John Bingham’s My Name is Michael Sibley, for instance, the narrator notes that ‘when evening came I wandered across to the Falstaff and had a couple of large whiskies’ (222). Sometimes Shakespeare is called in evidence as a guide to human nature, as in John Bude’s The Sussex Downs Murder where the detective, trying to decide on the degree of Janet Rother’s guilt, thinks, ‘Now what the devil was that bit from Shakespeare? About the apple. Ah—“a goodly apple rotten at the core”. Well, Janet Rother might quite easily be rotten at the core’ (155). The importance of Shakespearean allusion as a background element is neatly illustrated by Runa Fairleigh’s highly self-conscious An Old-Fashioned Mystery, which itself purports to be based on a manuscript of mysterious provenance and features just about every possible cliché of the genre, including a character whose main contribution to conversations is ‘I say!’, a girl who doesn’t know whether she has committed crimes or not, purloined letters, a locked room mystery and a whole host of secret passages, and ten people on an island who are killed one by one with no obvious perpetrator. Since no one has succeeded in solving the numerous murders, An Old-Fashioned Mystery concludes in an afterlife into which the characters are issued by Ronald Knox, a writer who famously deplored supernatural elements in crime fiction; a list of his ‘Ten Commandments of Detection’ given in a footnote (217) makes clear that every possible one of them has been broken. Officially the text makes no acknowledgement of Shakespeare beyond the bare fact of containing twins named Sebastian and Violet, but its opening epigraph is from King Lear (9), and at the end of the book the narrator pityingly tells the characters that this in itself really should have been enough to alert them to the fact that they were inhabiting a crime narrative (237).