Ali Karim was a Board Member of Bouchercon [The World Crime & Mystery Convention] and co-chaired programming for Bouchercon Raleigh, North Carolina in 2015. He is Assistant Editor of Shots eZine, British correspondent for The Rap Sheet and writes and reviews for many US magazines & Ezines.
Book reviewers of crime and thriller fiction can be often overheard using the term ‘same old, same old’ in describing books that passed their table. This phrase is not apt in referring to this intriguing book, though non-fiction, it reads like a thriller, a well detailed investigation into the dark heart of the bard’s work. Its release in March made me smile, recalling a warning to the complacent folk of Italy.
British publisher Bloomsbury are behind this book by a chemist, one who shares her vocation with a love of the literary. Though a Chemist myself with a matching interest in the literary; I have to say that this is not an academic volume as it is readily accessible to the non-scientist. Harkup’s previous work A IS FOR ARSENIC delved into the poisons that peppered the work of Dame Agatha Christie.
In this dark book, we are not restricted to poisons as a killing method, for the Bard’s work featured many diverse methods of inflicting death; seventy-four by Harkup’s reckoning. Remember the Bard lived in a dangerous time, so this book helps look back to that savage era, four hundred years in the past.
Though a morbid topic, it made me laugh many times for Harkup deploys irony, pathos and wit in her examination of the methods that Shakespeare’s protagonists kicked their proverbial buckets. It seems the Bard was up-to-date in his medical knowledge as he was in chronicling the dark heart of human nature – and as in Harkup’s book, ‘therein lies the rub’, for in carnage lies our interest and our entertainment.
This is an essential book, as the soothsayer warned in Julius Caesar, ‘beware the Ides of March’.
