This is illuminating well-planned and suggestive work not only for those readers who have little acquaintance with the subject

This is illuminating, well-planned and suggestive work, not only for those readers who have little acquaintance with the subject, but also for those already familiar with it. Explaining the theoretical implications of Ben Jonson’s preamble to Every Man Out of His Humour, he can’t resist suggesting that latecomers might nevetheless “be relieved if they had known what they had missed”.
To insist on Shakespeare as one among others is neither novel, nor even very exciting; after all, many undergraduate courses on Elizabethan and Jacobean drama are designed to do just this. Here he turns his attention to “and Co”, and “attempts to place Shakespeare in relation to the actors and other writers, mainly playwrights, of his time in an accessible and where possible entertaining manner”. The “where possible” is rather charming, and indicates correctly that there is something of a holiday mood about all this.

While responsibility to his subject never wavers, he allows himself licence, quoting from the (monstrously unjust) portrayal of the boy Webster torturing mice in Shakespeare in Love, and exhibiting some relishable dry wit. Though these remarkable documents are reproduced at the close of Stanley Wells’s book, they offer a good starting-place for appreciating the sheer, outrageous, world-consuming zest of the theatre in Shakespeare’s day Limits were few. The poet, as Sir Philip Sidney said “goeth hand in hand with nature, not enclosed within the narrow warrant of her gifts, but freely ranging only within the zodiac of his own wit”; he delivers a “golden” world. Hamlet’s economic gesture towards his own “distract’d globe” encompassed head, theatre, world and all. Let us for all love remember, though, as 21st century shelves fill with yet more books detailing Shakespeare the man, his genius, and his “lost years”, that in his time his head was not the only one busy transforming worlds. Stanley Wells is a highly significant figure in the contemporary understanding of Shakespeare and his works, but his years of invaluable scholarship, his editing of Shakespeare’s plays, his collaborative anthologies and numerous works of synthesis and explanation of the man and his legacy have not led to tunnel vision.

Fresh from The Wire, which is the best TV cop show on either side of the Atlantic, his new novel takes off from the word go, as a serial killer from the 1980s appears to return to the 21st century. Cops, former cops and disgraced cops criss-cross Washington DC from strip joints to sugar shacks to trick pads in the hunt for the Palindrome Murderer, whose victims’ Christian names are spelled the same back to front, but to no avail, as everything is far from what it seems. Things are never quiet in Pelecanos land and we should be grateful Police procedural at its very best.. ‘Two white shepherd’s coats, and 2 Danes’ suits, and 1 pair of Dane’s hose / 1 lion skin, 2 moss banks, and one snake / Eve’s bodice, 1 hat for Robin Hood / 1 great horse with his legs / 1 rock, 1 cage, 1 tomb, 1 hell mouth / 2 marchpanes, and the City of Rome.” It sounds like a kind of mad poetry, but this is a list: the Lord Admiral’s Men in 1598, in their home at the Rose Theatre, made full inventories of their properties and costumes. Never Fear is as tough a crime novel as I’ve read, with a plot that twists and turns like a snake on crack, as fire rages across LA and Alex is pursued by demons from the past and present. Frost, whose credits include scripts for Twin Peaks and The X-Files, has written a classic crime novel.The Night Gardener by George Oekecabsi (Orion £12.99)Pelecanos rocks! There are no two ways about it. As hardboiled as the contents of an egg salad sandwich.
Never Fear by Scott Frost (Headline £19.99)One night, Pasadena detective Lieutenant Alex Delillo discovers that she has a half-brother she didn’t know existed, and that he is dead, a suspected suicide.

But why did he try to send her a fax just before he died, and how did he know about her? The LAPD cop in charge of the case is hostile towards her interfering in what seems to be a simple investigation, then he’s killed and Alex’s popularity with the department nosedives – it was she that found his body. It just makes for a boss crime novel with an ending so strange as to be almost supernatural. “One would,” he says disconsolately, “have thought such suffering beyond the design of men.”. Damnation Street by Andrew Klavan (Quercus £12.99)

Scott Weiss and Jim Bishop are private eyes in San Francisco Weiss is an ex-cop and smart Bishop is akiller, but stupid. Andrew Klavan worked for them as a young man and tells the story, a “fictionalised memoir” Fact or fiction? I don’t know and it doesn’t matter All three are involved one way or another with women Searching for them, protecting them, yearning for them. After ploughing through 600 pages of this stuff one actually finds oneself identifying with Tannhauser, who, sloping back from the fray, sums up book and battle both.

“This was what it was to be a man,” intones Willocks, “this, and not some thing other than this.” No epic, of course, would be complete without a nod to the Iliad, but the reference to “the wine-blue sea” rather messes the nest for that particular parallel.The Religion is almost certain to be filmed, and barring a screenwriting miracle the best thing to be said for it will be that it’s quicker than reading the book. The narrative voice in The Religion is prevailingly that of the pulp historical romance – babes are “given suck”, people wave “damask blades”, women “sashay”, men “swive” – but it can occasionally rise to the kind of Basic English that Kingsley Amis used to write as a joke, especially when speaking of the great imponderables of manhood and existence. At such points Willocks seems torn between the mathematical pleasure of explaining exactly who’s doing what to whom and the sheer hell-yeah that the whole thing engenders in him, so you end up with such sentences as “he vomited a torrent of gall and phlegm in the dying man’s screaming face”, at which even a seasoned practitioner like Bret Easton Ellis might turn up his immaculately exfoliated nose.When not slaking his lusts, Willocks contents himself with mounting an assault on the English language that puts the Ottoman hordes to shame. Here, Tannhauser “guides the tip of his organ between the folds of her matrix”, a process referred to passim by Willocks as “slaking one’s lust”.That’s the Bad Sex Award in the bag. Unfortunately, The Religion waltzes off with the Bad Violence Award as well. Barely a chapter goes by without someone “loudly befouling themselves” before having their face cleaved in two, their arms lopped off, their tongue cut out, being disembowelled, vomiting, pleading, weeping, pissing or some novel combination of two or more.