Shakespeare References in Dead Crazy

Nancy Pickard’s mystery novel Dead Crazy contains a couple of Shakespeare references. This book is a volume in the author’s Jenny Cain Mystery series. From that same series came her Say No Murder, and interestingly the first reference in Dead Crazy is to the same line from The First Part Of King Henry The Fourth that Pickard referred to in that earlier novel. The line is Falstaff’s “The better part of valor is discretion, in the which better part I have saved my life.” In Dead Crazy, Pickard writes, “It finally fishtailed one too many times for my nerves, and – while staring at the bumper of the Chrysler with which I had nearly collided – I decided the better part of valor was to abandon my car” (p. 59). The second reference is to Hamlet. Pickard writes: “More to the point, it sounded plausible to Geof and to the other detectives. But proving it, aye, that was the rub” (p. 266). That, of course, is a reference to a line from Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy. “To sleep, perchance to dream — ay, there’s the rub,/For in that sleep of death what dreams may come/When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,/Must give us pause.”

Dead Crazy was published in 1988. The First Pocket Books Edition was published in 1989.