Let's get one thing perfectly clear at the outset. This is a "Da Vinci Code" clone. Live with it! It is better than Dan Brown's original--but, then, what isn't?
As has been noted elsewhere in these Amazon reviews, perhaps the most interesting portion of this book is to be found in the Author's Note at the back of the volume. In it, Dr. Carrell tells how she came upon Shakespeare's possible lost plays in E. K. Chambers' magisterial four-volume study, "The Elizabethan Stage."
"I began to wonder," she writes, "what would it be like to find one of these plays. Where might one unearth such a thing? What would the moment of discovery feel like? And what would the finding do to the shape of one's life--apart from the obvious bestowal of instant wealth and fame?" [Hardback edition, page 407]
"Interred with Their Bones" is Dr. Carrell's 405 page attempt to answer the questions generated by her reading of Chambers.
The format of the answering takes the form of an academic quest generously laced with copious amounts of homicide, general looniness and sight-seeing. The object of the quest, the McGuffin, is a manuscript of a play that was produced before the English royal court in 1613 under the name "Cardenno" or maybe "Cardenna" that may or may not have been the same as a play registered in 1653 (but never published) under the names of John Beaumont and William Shakespeare and called "Cardenio."
The course to be followed by the protagonists is the one set out in that universal guidebook for lunatic quests, "The Da Vinci Code." Faithful to its precepts, the questors will find themselves beset by people who drop mysterious clues because, for some unexplained reason, they refuse to express themselves in simple declarative sentences. There are enough deaths to make one think that at least one of the characters must be a second cousin to an unusually aggressive upas tree. Naturally, commonsense is in short supply or there wouldn't be a book at all. (After all, why should one waste breath talking to the cops merely because one's nearest and dearest friends are dropping like flies: there are files to be rifled and planes to catch!) And it need hardly be said that the whole is seasoned with regular lashings of surprises, hair-breadth escapes, betrayals, revisions and then re-revisions of relationships.
So far, so good. But what is a Brownian academic mystery without crackpot theories? This book abounds in them, hardly a surprise considering the history of Shakespearean scholarship. Included in the crackpot-iana, but by no means exhausting the list, are theories about the skullduggeries of Jacobean aristos, the origins of the play "Cardenno" or "Cardenna" or maybe "Cardenio," the identity of the author(s) of what we call Shakespeare's works, the validity of Shakespeare's sonnets as autobiographical material and the identities of the Dark Lady and the Fair-haired boy who shared the name "Will" with the poet. Ee-haw!
The presentation of the book is competent enough. Dr. Carrell's prose is professionally adequate, although memorable or witty passages--if any--are few and very far between. The crackpot theories are well and fairly presented, some at considerable length--but what's the value of a mad theory in an academic mystery that isn't long-winded, eh? The theories, themselves, are mostly old-hat to anyone who has ever dipped into the wilderness of mirrors that is the "Anti-Stratfordian" controversy.
Oddly, though, there are occasionally jarring little quirks of carelessness that seemed strange from a Ph.D. in literature with a bent for Shakespeare. For example, the phrase, "All that glitters is not gold" or variations on it, appears several times in the book. Not once does the supposed academic superstar heroine ever note that Shakespeare actually wrote "All that glisters is not gold." Even worse, is an old letter bearing the following dateline: "20 May 1881, The Savoy, London." I can't help but think that the heroine might have been disposed toward doubt about the contents of this missive had she realized that the Savoy Hotel in London opened its doors to the public for the first time on August 6, 1889.
Then there is a little motif that I suspect was originally intended to lead somewhere but simply peters out in the published version of the book: fires are started in two different cities, each of which covers the theft of a Shakespearean First Folio. Fair enough. But the folios are casually described at beautiful books. Anyone who has ever taken a good, close look at a Folio or even a facsimile of one will immediately realize that it is a perfectly dreadful-looking book, a distinctly inferior example of the printing art of the early 17th Century, as is amply demonstrated by the willingness of its owners to chuck it out when the much better looking Second Folio was published some years later. In one of those fires, it is clear that a Gutenberg Bible displayed beside the First Folio had been destroyed, a fact that elicits not the slightest hint of regret from anybody in the book. In fact, a First Folio is a mere collectible. Its true (as opposed to monetary) value resides solely in its text, something that has been relentlessly examined and reproduced for the better part of four centuries. If all the First Folios were to be burnt, the world would not be appreciably worse off. A Gutenberg Bible, on the other hand, was a magnificent work of art on the day it was first printed and remains so to this day. The loss of one out of the survivors of the original printing run of about two hundred would be an artistic catastrophe.
Finally, there is Dr. Carrell's peculiar omission of the fact that a claim was made in the late 20th Century that "Cardenio" had actually been found. It was identified as an old play that had never actually been lost, a piece traditionally attributed to Massinger under the title of "The Second Maiden's Tragedy." Admittedly, the claim has not exactly taken the academic community by storm. On the other hand, it hasn't generated a string of murders--yet.
This is a first novel about a lunatic academic quest. It is generally more intelligent and respectable than "The Da Vinci Code," rather less over-hyped and breathless, and just about as illogically plotted. For devotees of academic puzzlers, it's probably worth four stars, but for the general mystery reader, three will do.
