From where all the good thrillers come from?

William Shakespeare’s princely play has inspired the titles of more crime novels than perhaps any other, lending a name to works from Agatha Christie, Derek Raymond, Reginald Hill and many more.

[This article was first published at theguardinan.com by Moira Redmond]

There’s an old joke about Hamlet: it’s full of quotations. After seeing the new Benedict Cumberbatch performance at the Barbican, I’d offer something else: it’s full of book titles. Is it the most quoted work of literature? Perhaps the Bible might beat it in numbers, but in proportion of lines used, Hamlet must win – from David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest to Monica Dickens’ The Winds of Heaven to John Masefield’s Bird of Dawning.

But what really struck me was the number of crime writers who have taken their titles from the play: I came up with a dozen without even trying, and there are many more once you start reading more closely.

[There are hundreds of copy cats, sand only one original! Get Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark here.]

Perhaps Hamlet was the first murder mystery, and that is why it appeals so much to crime writers. It is certainly full of death and killing imagery.

Murder Most Foul (spoken by the ghost in Act 1) has been co-opted for any number of short-story collections, novels and true crime books. Intriguingly, Agatha Christie in a 1934 short story has a crime writer dissing his editor – “Ten to one he’ll alter the title and call it something rotten like Murder Most Foul” – little suspecting that one of the Margaret-Rutherford-as-Miss Marple films would be given the name 30 years later.

Hamlet’s first line in the play is “A little more than kin and less than kind”. Charlotte Armstrong elided that into A Little Less than Kind, her 1963 thriller, transposing the plot of the play to a family-run Californian company – Hamlet meets Mad Men. And Reginald Hill’s A Killing Kindness (one of his Dalziel and Pascoe mysteries) has a murderer who quotes Hamlet after each death. Michael Innes’s Hamlet, Revenge! is one of a number of books set round a performance of Hamlet (though the phrase Hamlet, Revenge! is not from Shakespeare’s version of the story). Jill McGown’s 1999 Plots and Errors, a routine police procedural that turns into something much more, takes its title from the closing lines of the play, and is threaded through with quotations from it. Put on By Cunning is from the same section, and gave Ruth Rendell a title.

Carolyn Weston’s Poor Poor Ophelia has a sad drowned girl in it, and has added an extra “poor” to Claudius’s and Laertes’s description of Ophelia. (The book appeared in 1972 and was, unlikely as it sounds, the basis of the TV police series The Streets of San Francisco.)

Georgette Heyer used No Wind of Blame (Claudius again, a man with guilt on his mind) for one of her detective stories – in which there is not a Regency buck or a muslin gown in sight, unlike her more famous historical romances. Poison in Jest (whose punning meaning – they do but jest, poison ingest – I have only just seen) is the name of one of John Dickson Carr’s atmospheric mysteries.

The play-within-a-play in Hamlet gave Agatha Christie her most famous title: The Mousetrap (although the original radio play was called called Three Blind Mice).

With a Bare Bodkin is a Cyril Hare murder mystery, and the title comes from the “To be, or not to be” speech:

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time … When he himself might his quietus make With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear …

Glimpses of the Moon gave both crime writer Edmund Crispin and novelist Edith Wharton book titles. Shortly after it is spoken in the play comes the well-known line “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark”, which provided cult crime writer Derek Raymond with a name for a weird dystopian thriller.

Ethel Lina White is most famous for writing the book on which Hitchcock

based The Lady Vanishes, but she also wrote Some Must Watch (“For some must watch, while some must sleep” – spoken by Hamlet just after The Mousetrap performance) which was turned into another memorable and influential film: The Spiral Staircase.

Laurie R King has To Play the Fool, and Margaret Millar wrote the terrifying How Like an Angel, taken from part of Hamlet’s descriptions of man.

There’s a splendidly melodramatic and noirish book called Leave Her to Heaven by Ben Amos Williams, which was made into an equally enthralling film, phrase being Hamlet’s verdict on his mother.

There are also books with Hamlet-derived titles by crime writers Patricia Wentworth, Rex Stout, Robert B Parker, Donna Leon, Delano Ames and Anne Morice.

So are there any lines of Hamlet that haven’t been assigned to books? As it happens, there are plenty still free: Toys of Desperation, anyone? And how about Unreclaimed Blood?

Am I right that there are more crime titles from Hamlet than from anywhere else (with Macbeth probably runner-up)? Let me know the ones I’ve missed, along with a choice Hamlet phrase you’d choose for that bestselling thriller …

[There are hundreds of copy cats, sand only one original! Get Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark here.]

[This article was first published at theguardinan.com by Moira Redmond]