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From inspiration to The Dead Hamlets
I had a wonderful time talking to Ruff Radio about my book The Dead Hamlets and all things theatre — Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, performance vs. text, representation, the creative process, Ur-Hamlets and more. I actually worked in theatre a little in the past, and The Dead Hamlets is very much a love letter to those days. Many thanks to Christine Horne of Shakespeare in the Ruff for her thoughtful questions and theatre insights! I’d appreciate it if you give the interview a listen.
Here’s a bit of background to The Dead Hamlets if you’re not familiar with the book:
Something is rotten in the court of the faerie queen. A deadly spirit is killing off the faerie, and it has mysterious ties to Shakespeare’s play, “Hamlet.” The only one who can stop it is the immortal Cross, a charming rogue who also happens to be a drunk, a thief, and an angel killer. He is no friend of the faerie since they stole his daughter and made her one of their own. When it appears she may be the next victim of the haunting, though, he must race against time to save her. He encounters an eccentric and deadly cast of characters along the way: the real Witches of Macbeth, the undead playwright/demon hunter Christopher Marlowe, an eerie Alice from the Alice in Wonderland books, a deranged and magical scholar – and a very supernatural William Shakespeare. When Cross discovers a startling secret about the origins of “Hamlet” itself, he finds himself trapped in a ghost story even he may not be able to escape alive!
No ghost in the machine?
I recently checked to see if any of my books were included in the books data set used to train AI systems and found The Mona Lisa Sacrifice and The Apocalypse Ark — Books 1 and 3 of my Cross series of supernatural thrillers. Book 2, The Dead Hamlets, was not included. I don’t quite know how I’m supposed to feel about that. Pleased? Irritated? The tale of Cross battling an order of renegade angels to free the gorgon Mona Lisa from their imprisonment is good enough? As is the tale of Cross desperately trying to stop the mad creature Noah from ending the world with his eerie ark at the Sunken City? But the tale of Cross becoming trapped in a ghost story featuring the original Hamlet ghost isn’t good enough for an AI?
I know I should probably have an opinion on whether or not books should be used in this manner, and I do: authors should be consulted on how their works are adapted or used and compensated appropriately. Without those basic rights, it’s a lot harder for authors to be able to keep creating the works we do. But I’m also too exhausted to say much else about it because, well, 2023.
And if the AIs run amok and try to end the world I’m really sorry about that….
The good news is that if the world doesn’t end the Cross books will be republished in 2024 with Wolsak and Wynn! Hopefully they’ll find some new human readers.
(Thanks to George Murray for the reminder about the data set. He has some thoughts about the whole issue in a recent Walrus article that is worth checking out.)
peter darbyshire 