If it's true, as some wags have it, that there are only five plots in literature (and life), surely Shakespeare told them all. In Much Ado About Murder Anne Perry has rounded up 17 variations on his themes, in short stories that range in time and place from Jacobean London to the royal court of France, and from Plantagenet England to the Rome of Coriolanus. The authors of these carefully observed tales have already proven their talents in a host of more contemporary thrillers, although Perry herself is best known for her Victorian mysteries featuring William Monk, and Sharan Newman, a medieval historian, is comfortably at home in 12th-century France and late-Roman Britain. Aficionados of the Bard of Avon will find much to enjoy in this spirited collection, and even those with only a smattering of Shakespearean knowledge will find the themes timeless enough to ignore the authors' occasional anachronisms. --Jane Adams
Much Ado About Murder FROM THE PUBLISHER
A stellar cast of today's finest mystery authors have come up with rapier-sharp mystery stories--inspired by Shakespeare's life, times, and works. Each story in this collection offers murderous intrigue worthy of the Bard himself, assuring us that Shakespeare lives on...and that the rest of us are quite mortal indeed.
Includes stories by:
Jeffery Deaver
Carole Nelson Douglas
Robert Barnard
Sharan Newman
Gillian Linscott
Lillian Stewart Carl
Marcia Talley
Edward Marston
Simon Brett
Brendan Dubois
Margaret Frazer
Edward D. Hoch
Kathy Lynn Emerson
P.C. Doherty
Peter Robinson
Peter Treymayne
Anne Perry
FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
Much Ado About Murder, an all-original Shakespeare-themed anthology edited by Anne Perry, gathers tales by 17 top mystery writers, most of them stars in the historical category, from both sides of the Atlantic. Contributors include Carole Nelson Douglas, Robert Barnard, Marcia Talley, Edward Marston, Margaret Frazer and Peter Robinson.
Kirkus Reviews
Perry (Death of a Stranger, p. 1180, etc.) and 16 accomplices take on the daunting job of rewriting Shakespeare. The high points include Carole Nelson Douglas's Mixmaster approach to The Merchant of Venice and The Tempest, in which Portia, having made her name in the ultimate courtroom drama, defends Caliban when he's accused of murdering Antonio; Marcia Talley's witches'-eye burlesque of Macbeth, in which the weird sisters' economic and domestic problems dwarf the tragedy of their Scottish clients; Robert Barnard's attempt to give voice to the Silent Irishman in Hamlet (addressed in the line "Now I might do it, Pat") in a farce that seriously undermines the melancholy Dane's status as proto-modernist hero; and more earnest considerations by Peter Robinson and Gillian Linscott of how characters Shakespeare represented as ideals of feminine docility might take bloody revenge on their oppressors, showing how a popular genre may take its revenge on the oppressive canons of high culture. Less radical (and less successful) revisions by Brendan DuBois, Peter Tremayne, Sharan Newman, P.C. Doherty, Lillian Stewart Carl, Simon Brett, Kathy Lynn Emerson, Edward Marston, Jeffery Deaver, and editor Perry consider Shakespearean characters offstage, in historical contexts, or onstage, as actors in performances of Shakespeare in various historical periods. Genuinely witty interpolations and extrapolations of the plays, in which Shakespeare and mystery both profit from the resulting cross-pollination, alternate with more pedestrian tales. The latter's disconcertingly Shakespearean cast may well make you miss iambic pentameter and blame the Bard for creating such conventional victims, villains, anddetectives.
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