Much ado about murder Book

It may well be that Much Ado About Murder has a stronger historical foundation than its two predecessors in the Shakespeare and Smythe mysteries, but it isn't as interesting as a mystery. Part of this may be the fact that the murder doesn't occur until well over halfway through the novel and part of this may be that author Simon Hawke drew from extremely depressing realities from the Elizabethan Era: the plague season when the playhouses were closed for public safety and the apprentice riots where said workers ran like street gangs and created periodic waves of violence and destruction. Another factor may have been the fact that the incidents in this book deal with the unraveling of The Queen's Men and, even though it ends with a glimmer of hope (that, of course, we know because we know the actual history), means that reading these pages offers a bit of a "downer."

In spite of the overall depressing nature of the novel, I enjoyed the fascinating trap placed to bring the main problem to a conclusion and Hawke's continuing creativity in placing literary references within the text. Normally, the latter amount to plays on Shakespearean quotations, but this time there is a play based off Geoffrey Chaucer's "The Miller's Tale." Smythe is told that he would have slept through the flood (p. 141). The primary reference is to the flood recorded in Genesis, but the idea of sleeping through the flood sounds like the tale where a lustful cleric decides that he can have his way with a man's wife if he can convince the husband that he needs to ensconce himself in a large barrel because a flood of Noahic proportions is coming. The husband falls asleep in the barrel, waiting for a flood that is never destined to come and, when things go awry and the noisy disaster awakens him, he shouts, "Noah's Flood!" (Well, Chaucer had something like "Noel's Fludde!" but you get the idea!)

Mere pages later, we see a double example of twisting the bard's own phrases "against" him. On page 143, we hear a cry of "My kingdom for a sword" (instead of Richard III's "horse") and an invocation of "Friends! Colleagues! Countrymen!" (instead of Marc Anthony's funeral oration). Add to that an earlier reference to Julius Caesar where "'Ton Tuck hath a lean and hungry look" (with Tuck ironically taking the place of Cassius, somewhere near page 17). But, alas, the humor present in the first two volumes of the series seemed rather restricted in this volume. I plan to keep reading, but this one suffers in comparison to the first two.