‘William stared down at his vague bellybutton which had shrunk to the size of a match head. For the past six months, in fact, ever since he blew the whistle on the use of tarot packs in diagnostics, magic spells in the theatre and numerology on waiting lists, his bellybutton had begun to shrink. He’d kept it open with an earlobe plug.’
As an opening statement in this review, I believe it’s fair to say that if you are a reader who enjoys mundane characters, following well-worn, linear plot lines and all-too familiar settings, this book is probably not for you. However, if you like your literature to open up the imaginative mind and massage it for hours with surreal explosions of unusualities, then F. J. McQueen’s 2016 novel, Out Damned Spot – William Shakespeare Crime Scene Cleaner, could very easily be right up your creative alley.
Let’s start with the story-line. When the novel begins, William Shakespeare, a married parent with an addiction to jazz and Parma Violets from Balham, London, is a junior doctor working for Largesse Cottage Hospital in Hampstead. However, William’s tenure as a doctor is about to come to an abrupt end, and he faces his last ever shift. The reason? It turns out that William is outraged at secretive, superstitious practices within the staff of the NHS, such as witchcraft and sorcery, in order to fight disease and illness, such as placing Ouija boards on the stomachs of patients in order to form a diagnosis.
Naturally, after becoming a ‘whistle-blower’, William’s social and career status reaches all-time lows, accompanied by intimidating, bullying tactics from his fellow workers, such as placing unpleasant items in his locker, surrounding his car in salt and replacing the windscreen wipers with salted rough, twigs. As his medical career is now redundant, William makes a bold decision: he will use his medical knowledge to become a crime scene cleaner – a decision largely based upon William hearing the cackling prophesies of three ‘witches’ within a locker in the cellar at Largesse Hospital. After hiring two odd assistants to aid his new business (who know less than William about crime cleaning, which totals precisely zero), William Shakespeare is ready to tackle the world of criminal activity. Well, at least once he and his clueless assistants have mastered the day course: ‘101 in Violence-Induced Debris and Staining’.
‘I’ll begin,’ she said, and the chatter subsided.
Murder leaves thirteen types of blot, requiring five methods of deletion. Violence creates two types of ghost, the murder snappy, the murder durational, the murder accurate, the murder incommensurate, the murder solitary, the murder communal and complicit, the murder scheduled, the murder ad hoc, the murder elementary, the murder urban, the murder irresolute, the murder intended, the murder for murder’s sake, the murder revengeful…the murder hierarchical, the murder canonical, the murder of equals, the murder of disadvantage, the murder devotional, the murder pathetical, the murder commodious, the murder involuntary, the murder scatalogical…’
As suspected from the name of the protagonist, F. J. McQueen’s novel pulls heavily on strings associated with THE William Shakespeare – the genius fellow who wrote all those plays in the 16th and 17th centuries. This association comes in multiple forms. Firstly, the names of the characters in this book tend to have a Shakespearean link. For example, Pilot Inspector Benedicke Othello and his wife, Desdemona, Co-pilot Sergeant Iago McDuff and Portia Avalon. William’s wife is naturally named Anne (after Anne Hathaway), although their twin daughters Odile and Odette are named after the black and white swans in Tchaikovsky’s ‘Swan Lake’. Furthermore, the plot of this book follows Shakespearean themes and characters. The writing style is quirky and follows its own path with ferocious tenacity.
As stated in the opening paragraph, this is not a place for boring, grey, predictive characters. The pace of the writing moves quickly, covering some unusual ground, but ultimately the journey is worth it, as the reader’s imagination is constantly fed and watered throughout the pages.
Something very different and enjoyable.