Abstract
This chapter discusses the cultural uses of Shakespeare and Austen in detective fiction, including stories in which Shakespeare and Austen themselves become detectives (Stephanie Barron’s Austen Mysteries), stories which purport to find a lost Shakespeare or Austen text (Edmund Crispin’s Love Lies Bleeding, A. J. Hartley’s What Time Devours) and stories which allude to or imitate an existing Shakespeare or Austen text (Reginald Hill’s Pictures of Perfection and A Cure for All Diseases, P. D. James’s Death Comes to Pemberley). There are similarities and differences between them: in Austen-themed stories, America represents freedom; in Shakespeare mysteries it is a threat. Austen is associated with love and Shakespeare is not, and Austen-based crime tends to be more easily assimilated into the category of what is now called ‘cosy crime’, whereas Shakespeare-based crime fiction may have some very dark purposes indeed. All these differences, this chapter concludes, suggest that Austen, more than Shakespeare, is nowadays often understood as a brand, while Shakespeare tends to be regarded as the author of individual, but different, works of genius spanning a variety of genres.
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Notes
- 1.
Lisa Hopkins, Shakespearean Allusion in Crime Fiction: DCI Shakespeare (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2016).
- 2.
Runa Fairleigh, An Old-Fashioned Mystery (Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys, 1983), 9.
- 3.
Ibid., 237.
- 4.
Ngaio Marsh, Death in a White Tie (London: Harper Collins, 1938 [2009]), 28.
- 5.
Stephanie Barron, ‘Suspicious Characters, Red Herrings, and Unreliable Detectives: Elements of Mystery in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey’, Persuasions 32 (2010): 60–7, at 60.
- 6.
Susannah Fullerton, Jane Austen and Crime (Paddington: The Jane Austen Society of Australia, 2004), vii.
- 7.
Ngaio Marsh, Death at the Dolphin ([1966]. London: Harper Collins, 2009), 617.
- 8.
Juliette Wells, Reading Austen in America (London: Bloomsbury, 2017).
- 9.
Stephanie Barron, Jane and the Man of the Cloth (London: Headline, 1997), 148.
- 10.
Stephanie Barron, Jane and the Twelve Days of Christmas (New York: Soho Press, 2014), 326.
- 11.
Fullerton, Jane Austen and Crime, 33. See also Jocelyn Margaret Harris, ‘Jane Austen and Celebrity Culture: Shakespeare, Dorothy Jordan and Elizabeth Bennet’, Shakespeare 6.4 (2010): 409–29; Linda Troost and Sayre Greenfield, ‘“Strange Mutations”: Shakespeare, Austen and cultural success’, Shakespeare 6.4 (2010): 430–44; and Penny Gay, ‘Women and Eloquence in Shakespeare and Austen’, Shakespeare 6.4 (2010): 462–76.
- 12.
Stephanie Barron, Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor (New York: Bantam, 1996), 199.
- 13.
Marina Cano, ‘In Flesh and Blood: Jane Austen as a Postmodern Fictional Character’, in Global Jane Austen: Pleasure, Passion, and Possessiveness in the Jane Austen Community, eds. Laurence Raw and Robert G. Dryden. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 143–64, at 146.
- 14.
Stephanie Barron, Jane and the Wandering Eye (New York: Bantam, 1998) 23, 8–9, 48.
- 15.
Ibid.,159.
- 16.
Carrie Bebris, Suspense and Sensibility (New York: Forge, 2005), 11.
- 17.
In James Thurber’s short story ‘The Macbeth Murder Mystery’, one of the characters announces that, because Macbeth ‘was on the counter with the other Penguin books’, she ‘supposed of course it was a detective story’ as ‘All the others were detective stories’ (46). She found nothing in the play to dissuade her from that belief.
- 18.
Bebris, Suspense and Sensibility, 153.
- 19.
Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (edited by John Wiltshire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1814); page numbers cited parenthetically in text.
- 20.
Carrie Bebris, The Matters at Mansfield (New York: Forge, 2008), 120.
- 21.
Ibid., 245.
- 22.
Edmund Crispin, Love Lies Bleeding (London: Vintage, [1948] 2007), 268.
- 23.
Ibid., 179.
- 24.
Ibid., 13.
- 25.
Hopkins, Shakespearean Allusion in Crime Fiction.
- 26.
Barron , Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor, 8.
- 27.
Michael Gilbert, ‘Weekend at Wapentake’ (1955). In Murder at the Manor: Country House Mysteries (ed. Martin Edwards. London: Poisoned Pen Press, 2016), 374.
- 28.
Gilbert, ‘Weekend at Wapentake’, 376.
- 29.
Barron , Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor, viii.
- 30.
Ibid., 1.
- 31.
Ibid., 3.
- 32.
Barron , ‘Suspicious Characters, Red Herrings, and Unreliable Detectives’, 52.
- 33.
Stephanie Barron, Jane and the Genius of the Place (New York: Bantam Books, 1999), 56.
- 34.
Stephanie Barron, Jane and the Prisoner of Wool House (New York: Bantam Books, 2001), 37.
- 35.
Ibid., 319–20.
- 36.
Deirdre Le Faye, Jane Austen’s Letters (4th edn). (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 287.
- 37.
James does attempt to account for this by having Elizabeth muse that ‘It still surprised her that between Darcy’s first insulting proposal and his second successful and penitent request for her love, they had only been together in private for less than half an hour … If this were fiction, could even the most brilliant novelist contrive to make credible so short a period in which pride had been subdued and prejudice overcome?’ (54).
- 38.
P. D. James, Death Comes to Pemberley (London: Faber and Faber, 2011), 99.
- 39.
Stephanie Barron, Jane and the Stillroom Maid (New York: Bantam Books, 2000), 35, 109.
- 40.
Barron, The Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor, 28–9.
- 41.
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (edited by Tony Tanner. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1813); page references cited parenthetically in text.
- 42.
Ibid., 122.
- 43.
Ibid., 96, 71, 141.
- 44.
James, Death Comes to Pemberley, 196, 310.
- 45.
Reginald Hill, Pictures of Perfection (London: Harper Collins, 2000), 3, 4.
- 46.
Carrie Bebris, Pride and Prescience (New York: Forge, 2004), 87, 130, 128, 152, 225.
- 47.
Ibid., 161.
- 48.
Carrie Bebris, The Suspicion at Sanditon (New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 2015), 269.
- 49.
Bebris , Suspense and Sensibility, 245.
- 50.
Carrie Bebris, The Deception at Lyme (New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 2011), 128, 194.
- 51.
Barron , Jane and the Stillroom Maid, 111.
- 52.
Hopkins, Shakespearean Allusion in Crime Fiction.
- 53.
Simon Hawke, The Merchant of Vengeance (New York: Forge, 2003), 9, 114, 73.
- 54.
Ibid., 152, 186, 171.
- 55.
Barron , Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor, ix, 48, 231.
- 56.
Barron , Jane and the Wandering Eye, 112, 292, 310.
- 57.
Barron , Jane and the Genius of the Place, 354.
- 58.
Stephanie Barron, Jane and the Ghosts of Netley (New York: Bantam Books, 2003), 92–5, 316.
- 59.
Barron , Jane and the Stillroom Maid, 240.
- 60.
Ibid., 278–9.
- 61.
Hill, Pictures of Perfection, 305.
- 62.
Ibid., 42.
- 63.
Ibid., 51.
- 64.
Reginald Hill, A Cure for All Diseases (London: Harper Collins, 2009), 132.
- 65.
Ibid., 169, 362.
- 66.
Val McDermid, NorthangerAbbey (London: Harper Collins, 2014), 343.
- 67.
Ibid., 11.
- 68.
Hill, Pictures of Perfection, 73, 382.
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Hopkins, L. (2019). Austen and Shakespeare, Detectives. In: Cano, M., García-Periago, R. (eds) Jane Austen and William Shakespeare. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25689-0_14
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