If Shakespeare was writing today, he'd be a crime writer

The bestselling author of the Roy Grace mysteries explains how, when he is planning a new villain, the Bard’s murderous, manipulative creations are his primary inspiration

William Shakespeare’s fascination with the dark side of human nature has always had a big influence on me, ever since my student years when I first began to get to know his works. He created some of the most enduring monsters in literature and today, whenever I am planning a villain for a new novel, I am invariably drawn – as I know are countless of my fellow crime writers – to his plays. His vast canon of vivid, rounded, intensely human personifications of evil are driven by greed, lust, prejudice, sometimes plain sadism. Just as villains are today.

King Lear provides us with the eye-gouging monster Cornwall, the opportunist Edmund, and the tragic king’s hard-arsed daughters, Goneril and Regan (and although we feel pity for Lear himself, he’s not exactly Mr Nice Guy, either). Nor is Richard II (murdering his uncle) or Richard III (committing infanticide on his nephews). Hamlet gave us Claudius, the stepfather from hell; while Othello’s Iago, with his ferocious intellect and charisma, is a kind of Elizabethan Hannibal Lecter. The name of the wickedly manipulative Lady Macbeth has become synonymous with female evil. Shakespeare’s bloodiest play of all, Titus Andronicus, has the Elizabethan Bonnie and Clydes, Tamora and Aron – only they’re somehow even nastier.

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