James DeVita, one of the region's finest Shakespearean actors, has written a murder mystery featuring a Bard-obsessed detective.
I’ve been trying to recall the last time I saw James DeVita kill someone — as he played a Shakespearean character, of course. I’ll certainly never forget him as the treacherous murderer Iago in American Players Theatre’s fine 2004 staging of Othello. I enjoyed watching that production as the corpses piled up, in the Shakespearean way.
I thought of DeVita’s experiences with stage bloodletting as I read his enjoyable mystery thriller A Winsome Murder, in which the corpses likewise pile up. Can you guess how one of the region’s most prominent Shakespearean actors writes a crime novel? I’ll tell you: He throws in tons of Shakespeare.
Terrace Books
The book’s hero, Chicago police detective James Mangan, is obsessed with Shakespeare. I love this. I love that this everyday guy reads Titus Andronicus. It’s a populist vision of what enjoying great literature means, and it’s fitting for DeVita: In addition to numerous stage works, he has written two novels for younger readers.
The detective investigates a series of grisly murders. All the victims are women. The first is troubled Deborah Ellison, from the fictional town of Winsome, Wis. Then a magazine editor is killed, and then a journalist who’s writing about Deborah’s case. Mutilated body parts show up here and there, and a series of ominous messages appears, written in all caps. As everyone who’s ever used the Internet knows, all caps means THE WRITER IS ANGRY.
Mangan doesn’t just read Shakespeare. A defining conceit of A Winsome Murder is that lines from the Bard’s plays bubble up into the detective’s consciousness incessantly. Sometimes the quotations reflect the twists and turns of his investigation. Sometimes they provide him with insight. “Mangan,” DeVita writes, “found Shakespeare’s plays a great way to study the psychology of evil: power, jealousy, insanity, revenge, the motives of thwarted ambition and sexual jealousy.”
In end notes, DeVita meticulously documents the Shakespeare references, a device I find distracting. Still, I do not doubt that people who immerse themselves in Shakespeare see the playwright’s world all around them.
DeVita is good at evoking a sense of place — in Chicago and, especially, in small Wisconsin towns. The titular burg, for example, boasts three churches and four bars. People who live in the Badger State have at least driven through a place just like that.
