Today (I’m writing this post on April 23), the world celebrates the birthday of William Shakespeare—the “Stratford man,” born in 1554, who ostensibly wrote the 38 plays, 154 sonnets, and assorted other works in verse that make up the most lauded body of literature by a single hand in all of history.
Shakespeare also died on this day, in 1616.
Death figured prominently in the Bard’s writing—as a haunting off-stage presence in his love poetry, as an unavoidable plot device in his work for the stage. So it’s not surprising that those who write murder stories have frequently borrowed language from Shakespeare to create titles for their own work. Barbara Paul, herself a crime novelist, features on her Web site a compendium of book titles that later and lesser writers have extracted from the Shakespearean corpus. As the sample list below demonstrates, most of Shakespeare’s plays have provided inspiration for at least one mystery title, with Hamlet and Macbeth serving as especially rich sources. One book even garnered two titles from the same passage of Bardic verse:
There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
The original British edition of Christie’s There Is a Tide bore the title Taken at the Flood, but her American publisher—as it did often, and often inexplicably—thought it knew better which cover line would grab the attention of U.S. readers. To me, it’s a genuine mystery why anyone would consider one bit of phrasing to be more apt, or more marketable, than the other.
The vogue among mystery writers for Shakespeare-spawned titles seemed to crest in the 1940s, when the genre attained a certain cultural maturity (or, arguably, a certain level of literary pretension). Over the past couple of decades, though, another trend in titling has emerged that signals a regression in sensibility. A Feta Worse Than Death, Sew Deadly, You May Now Kill the Bride—the cutesy pun has overtaken an expanding swathe of the mystery publishing field. The plague mainly afflicts books in the domestically inclined “cozy” subgenre, for perhaps obvious reasons. (Here’s a list of some other titles in this vein.)
Now, I happen to be a great enthusiast of puns; I look askance of those who look askance of them. But they have no place on the cover of a novel that presumes to derive entertainment from death. They give the game away. Titles drawn from Shakespeare’s work strike just the right note, finding balance—on the edge of a bare bodkin, one might say—between the thematic seriousness and the contrived theatricality that together give detective fiction its core identity.
- Gaudy Night, by Dorothy Sayers (Antony and Cleopatra)
- Under the Canopy, Barbara Paul (Cariolanus)
- Hamlet, Revenge!, by Michael Innes (Hamlet)
- Glimpses of the Moon, by Edmund Crispin (Hamlet)
- Leave Her to Heaven, by Ben Ames Williams (Hamlet)
- And Be a Villain, by Rex Stout (Hamlet)
- How Like an Angel, by Margaret Millar (Hamlet)
- Poison in Jest, by John Dickson Carr (Hamlet)
- The Mouse Trap, by Agatha Christie (Hamlet)
- Dead for a Ducat, by Helen Reilly (Hamlet)
- No Wind of Blame, by Georgette Heyer (Hamlet)
- Alarum and Excursion, by Virginia Perdue (Henry VI, Part 1)
- Exuent Murderers, by Anthony Boucher (Henry VI, Part 2)
- Such Men Are Dangeous, Lawrence Block (Julius Caesar)
- There Is a Tide, by Agatha Christie (Julius Caesar)
- Sad Cypress, by Agatha Christie (Twelfth Night)
- No Friendly Drop, by Henry Wade (Romeo and Juliet)
- Behold, Here’s Poison, by Georgette Heyer (Pericles)
- Murder Out of Tune, by Frances Lockridge (Othello)
- Put Out the Light, by Ethel Lina White (Othello)
- Kill Claudio, by P.M. Hubbard (Much Ado About Nothing)
- Ill Met by Moonlight, by Leslie Ford (A Midsummer Night’s Dream)
- The Quality of Mercy, by Faye Kellerman (The Merchant of Venice)
- Most Grievous Murder, by Sara Woods (Richard III)
- Enter Three Witches, by Paul McGuire (Macbeth)
- Dagger of the Mind, by Kenneth Fearing (Macbeth)
- To Fear a Painted Devil, by Ruth Rendell (Macbeth)
- Look to a Lady, by Margery Allingham (Macbeth)
- By the Pricking of My Thumbs, by Agatha Christie (Macbeth)
- Enter a Murderer, by Ngaio March (Macbeth)
- So Much Blood, by Simon Brett (Macbeth)
