Tuesday, June 25, 2019

Give Me The Daggers Foreword

My latest historical mystery/detective book has just been released. Here is the foreword to Give Me the Daggers.

   My love affair with Shakespeare began late in life. As a struggling writer I wanted to know why he was considered the greatest writer of the English language, and so I began my study. Soon I found myself gobbling up his plays like Falstaff feasting on capons and sack. I suppose I wanted to make up for all those years that I could have been reading Shakespeare, so casting off my misspent youth like young Prince Hal I delved seriously into the Bard of Avon. I quickly realized that all the praise and accolades laid at Bard’s door were well-earned. Since then I now have several of Shakespeare’s collected works as well as individual plays filling my bookshelves. My wife Susan and I drive up to Stratford, Ontario every summer to visit family and take in a couple of productions at the Shakespeare Festival.
  After reading Macbeth (three or four times) I came to realize, as did many others, that the play has the making of a murder mystery. In Shakespeare’s play we know the killers, but no one acts as a detective to investigate the killings. So I set out to write Give Me the Daggers as a Macbeth murder mystery. I chose the Thane of Lennox as the detective who seeks to learn the truth. All the familiar characters are there as well; Macbeth, Macduff, Banquo, Ross, and Lady Macbeth, along with some new characters. Fans of Macbeth will undoubtedly recognize many of the original lines that made the play so popular over the centuries, though sometimes the lines are out of order and some lines are spoken by other characters. Not all the famous lines and soliloquies are here, though. Due to the nature of the traditional detective fiction style, where the protagonist, Lennox, is in every scene, not every line in the play was used.
    William Shakespeare was commonly known to play fast and loose with history and he never let the truth get in the way of a good story (see my Afterward). He may also have had access to inaccurate history sources, for it is known that certain details in Macbeth are erroneous. Though I have used Shakespeare’s play as my source, I have also endeavoured to inject some true history in the story.
    The reader will, I trust, view Give Me the Daggers as more than a simple retelling of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, but as a detective story. I hope this will satisfy both Macbeth fans and those who have never read or seen the play (I am sure there are some out there). Perhaps this story will introduce some to Shakespeare, but let the reader beware; once you delve into the Bard, there is no turning back.

For God’s sake let us sit upon the ground
and tell sad stories of the death of kings;
How some have been deposed; some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghost they have deposed;
Some poison’d by their wives: some sleeping kill’d;
All murder’d ...
                                    Richard II, Act III, Scene II 




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