A Personal Word about "Cursed Spite"
My novel is about a guy named Harvey Wells, a 30-something ex-cop turned private eye. He gets kicked off a police force in a California town for drinking, then sobers up and comes to Oregon and gets a job as a private investigator with a company run by his lifelong friend, Dave McCreedy. When his partner comes up dead, an apparent suicide, Harvey doesn’t buy the local law’s verdict. He needs to find out who killed his pal. What starts out as a quest to nail a killer soon turns into a labyrinth that leads him to a small group of people with a device to travel back to set periods in the distant past. One of those periods happens to be the London of William Shakespeare. That’s where Harvey has to go to solve his friend’s death and find out the whereabouts of the famous film and stage director, Jack Benchley, his pal McCreedy was looking for.
Along the way some uncouth types abuse their authority on him, or threaten him with jail or mayhem, or make snotty remarks about his past job titles and the way he chews his fingernails and cleans his ears with a used Q-tip. Some people are so devoid of good manners they even try to kill our hero Harvey Wells, not just sap him over the head and into a year-long coma the way things used to be when people were generally nicer and dogs didn’t bark so much when you were trying to catch a nap on a Sunday afternoon.
Well, he is a private detective after all. You have to expect it, right?
"Cursed Spite" started out as a simple, if absurd, idea–what if you could bring William Shakespeare ahead in time to see the great impact his plays had on the world? Living in a town that is home to one of the major mostly-Shakespeare theatrical festivals in North America brought it to my mind. I’d seen some of the plays the company has put on over the years and I wondered what Mr. W.S. himself would think of his work in, say, a modern setting? Or how about the pseudo-scholarly cottage industry that has grown up for the last hundred years or so that tries to take credit away from "the Stratford man" and give it another, usually more eminent Elizabethan like the 15th Earl of Oxford or Francis Bacon?
Well, that was where I started. But really Cursed Spite is first and foremost a detective story and William Shakespeare is a minor but important character in the book. I decided when I started to write my story that it really shouldn’t be The Bard of Avon who makes the jump 400 years forward in time, but that I should have my main characters go back and visit his world–the bustling and dangerous London of treacherous nobles and their hirelings, struggling players of a emergent art form (the great dawn of English-speaking theater) displaced soldiers, grubby apprentices, tavern tapsters, pickpockets and con men (AKA "cony catchers") , and the general flow of people living unawares of what an amazing time they are caught up in.
That way my main characters, Harvey Wells and his romantic interest Bonnie Noel, could see this world from the perspective of visitors to a place and time that is truly extraordinary–and try and stop the William Randolph Hearst-like Sherwood Strunk and his ally, the rotund actor Trevor Wearbeck , from damming up and destroying the steady flow of time and, among other nasty ventures, tear down the true legacy left by the Bard of Stratford
A quick word about the centuries-old "authorship controversy": a lot of eminent people from Sigmund Freud to Mark Twain to moderns like Sir Derek Jacobi and dozens of amateur literary sleuths believe that there was some conspiracy to use Shakespeare as a front for a more educated man/men. Such unalloyed snobbery from those living and dead propelled me in part to write the novel in the first place. My main goal, however, is to entertain and keep you guessing how it will all turn out. I’m happy to report most literary scholars don’t bother with such conspiracy theories. Since my desire is to entertain and not get didactic, I recommend that those interested in finding out about how Shakespeare wrote and thought look up solid books of scholarship like Peter Greenblatt’s recent Will in the World or A.N. Wilson’s Shakespeare: the Evidence or anything the late, great A.L. Rowse wrote on the subject.
In a way it’s a compliment to William Shakespeare, the glover’s son from rural Warwickshire, that some people think he couldn’t have possibly write really write his plays and sonnets and epic poems, but, implausibly to me, that another more noble figure did (or as one recent author suggested, a veritable pack of Eminent Elizabethans working working together.) As a distinguished American literary critic, Professor Rufus Fears put it, "Shakespeare is the Dante, the Virgil, the Homer of the English language..." All in one package, folks. Perhaps the man himself sensed that when he wrote these lines from Sonnet 18 :
"So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and gives life to thee."
Time is the great fourth dimension--we cannot halt its forward flow. Albert Einstein himself postulated that the only way to slow down time was to get into a rocket ship and travel at the speed of light. And, as for traveling backwards in time, well just...fergettaboutit!
But fiction writing and the human imagination have no such barriers. Just about everybody I’ve ever talked to on the subject has a favorite time and place they would like to travel back to (assuming they could get back to their own time again). Admittedly, there are some folks for whom the thought of travel into the future sets their hearts going. What will the world be like 50 or 100 years from now. You know who you are. Excelsior!!! Yeah, let’s see what happens way down the road!
Nothing personal, but I am just not one of those people.
I figure the future can take care of itself. Maybe their will be a cure for cancer, have great new technologies so we can talk to people all the globe for practically nothing and our motor vehicles will run on canola oil. Who knows, maybe the San Francisco Giants might win a World Series!! Still, I’m not in any hurry to jump ahead in time. I bet the price of real estate will be murder, the ever-powerful consumer-oriented corporations will figure a way to put commercials in our dreams at night, and good luck finding a parking space even if you can drive your car on hydrogen or whatever.
Although admittedly not a great fan of the future oriented novels of Ray Bradbury or Robert Heinlein, or the anti-utopian futuristic allegories that are served up often on television shows that are mostly rehashes of the original "Star Trek" series, the idea of going BACKWARDS in time has intrigued me ever since I was a kid. Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court is an influence, but I’ve also read Jack Finney’s classic science-fiction novels Time and Again, The Woodrow Wilson Dime and About Time. I've also been drawn again and again to numerous films on the subject. (e.g., The Time Machine (1960), Somewhere in Time (1979), Star Trek IV: the Voyage Home (1986), Freguency (1999), et al.
In addition, like a lot of people, I’ve taken serious note of the American "hard-boiled" detective writers of the past (Raymond Chandler and Hammett are, of course, favorites) and fine artists like Sue Grafton and Stuart M. Kaminsky who have kept that blend of sardonic humor and core humanism alive and well. I hope a sliver of what they did has been constituted in my own way into the backbone of the story and its characters.
O.K., I admit Cursed Spite is rather an eclectic contraption. Go ahead and sue me for not sticking to one genre...but read the book first.
The time is out of joint. Oh, cursed spite,
that ever I was born to set it right.
Hamlet, Act 1, Scene V
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