Module 9 – Something Rotten: A Horatio Wilkes Mystery

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Gratz, A. (2007). Something rotten: A Horatio Wilkes mystery. New York, NY: Speak.

Summary —

Something stinks in the town of Denmark, Tennessee, and it’s not just the local paper mill’s gag-inducing fumes.  Horatio Wilkes promises his friend Hamilton Prince to unearth the real story of how his father, Rex Prince, CEO of Elsinore Paper Plant, died. In this modern-day retelling of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, just about everyone in town is a murder suspect: Prince’s uncle/step-father Claude, his mother Trudy, ex-flame Olivia, his mother’s ex Ford N. Branff, and even the cowboy-outfit wearing help Candy. Each one of them may have motive and means, and Horatio is determined to help his friend figure out who poisoned his father.  Each character introduced is a modern-day equivalent of a character in the original play Hamlet, including the inept country-bumpkin duo of Gilbert and Roscoe (Guildenstern and Rosencrantz). In a knowing homage, Gratz’s version has the play in which we catch the conscience of the king be none other than the community theater’s production of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.  Hamilton accidentally shoots Olivia’s father, Paul Mendelsohn, mistaking him for his uncle, since he was wearing Claude’s hunter’s jacket.  Luckily it’s not fatal, but Paul ends up in the hospital with a shattered shoulder.  Not much later, Olivia ends up in the hospital, too, after she pulls off a media stunt where she drinks some of the water from the polluted Copenhagen River.  Gilbert and Roscoe attempt to take Hamilton out of town to a re-hab hospital, but Hamilton makes a few phone calls and discovers there’s no appointment for Hamilton at the re-hab center.  He manages to rescue Hamilton from Gilbert and Roscoe shortly before the duo’s car blows up, a result of Claude’s mechanic meddling. At last, Horatio is finally able to prove that Claude had been slipping dioxin in his brother’s liquor and slowly poisoning him. Unlike the source material, most of the characters live to see the end of the tale, and there is a happy finale as Hamilton and Olivia seem to reconcile.

Lucien’s thoughts —

I’m a sucker for a good Shakespeare-based story.  I loved Stoppard’s take on Hamlet and was poised to enjoy Grantz’s version.  I’m glad I was able to read it for this class, as it was a fun re-imagining of the Bard.  The ghost scene with Hamlet’s father is replaced with video tape of surveillance footage, and the final duel between Hamlet and Laertes is replaced with a press conference over the environmental impact of Elsinore Paper’s plant, where Hamilton and Larry spar with words instead of swords.  The idea of taking a well-known play and converting it into the literary trappings of a hard-boiled investigator’s tale works really well here.  Grantz follows the general plot outline of the original play, but is loose enough in his interpretation that the suspense of figuring out who did it works. I’ve already decided to add Something Wicked, the next novel in the Horatio Wilkes series based on Macbeth, on my reading list for when I am done with this class.

Librarian’s use —

I think that this book can easily be incorporated into a session on Shakespeare and adaptations of his various plays.  The librarian can introduce the original works for a high school audience, as well as introducing known derivative adaptations, like Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, the Horatio Wilkes’ series, and movie adaptations like Ten Things I Hate About You, Strange Brew, Romeo + Juliet, West Side Story, and Shakespeare In Love.  There are also several graphic novel adaptations of Shakespeare, including the Neil Gaiman’s adaptation of The Tempest, to be found in The Sandman, vol. 10: The Wake.

Other reviews —

Stephenson, D. (2007). Something rotten: A Horatio Wilkes mystery (review). Bulletin of the center for children’s books, 61 (3), 140.

As the title and subtitle hint, this mystery story is a revisioned Hamlet, here set in Denmark, Tennessee, the home of Horatio's boarding-school friend Hamilton Prince. The sudden death of Hamilton's father, owner of the lucrative Elsinore Paper Plant, and the swift remarriage of Hamilton's mother to her former brother-in-law has Hamilton suspicious; it doesn't help that he's still hung up on townie Olivia, who's the daughter of the Prince family lawyer and who's convinced that Elsinore has been covering up its dangerous and illegal pollution of the Copenhagen River. The overlay of Raymond Chandler onto the contemporary Shakespeare plot adds unnecessary gimmickry, but it does make Horatio's narration teen-appealingly snarky, and the rest of the story capably accentuates the elements likely to intrigue the YA audience: adult dishonesty, youthful disaffection, troubled romance. There's a hint of Chinatown as well as Chandler in the industrial pollution plot, but Gratz deftly uses that story to energize his updated Hamlet, and his alterations (Hamilton wavers between feigned and real alcoholism rather than madness, while the final face-off is a public hearing rather than a duel) are adroit and effective. The snappy patter and friendship-centered drama make this readable in its own right, and it would serve multiple curricular purposes by giving readers a chance to discuss the reasons behind the variants (Gratz kindly provides his main characters with a more hopeful ending than Shakespeare) and to gain additional understanding from viewing the plot at a different angle. Readers will find this enjoyable as a pleasure read and surprisingly painless as a curricular entry, and if the subtitle suggests sequels rather than "The rest is silence," can you really regret the continued crime-fighting adventures of Horatio and Hamlet?

Something rotten: A Horatio Wilkes mystery (review). (2007). Kirkus review, 75 (17),  929.

Gratz is cornering the niche market of novels containing dissimilar topics. Here he combines Hamlet and hardboiled detective pulp. During a vacation from their academy, Horatio Wilkes accompanies his buddy Hamilton Prince to Denmark, Tenn. Just two months after his father passed away under suspicious circumstances, Hamilton's Uncle Claude has married Hamilton's mother. Claude now controls the Elsinore Paper Plant, a multibillion dollar company blatantly polluting the Copenhagen River. Horatio, with a knack for investigating, is determined to expose Claude's corruption while Hamilton, dismayed by what he believes is his mother's betrayal, drowns himself in alcohol. Ultimately, Horatio relies on environmentalist protester Olivia to reveal secrets about Elsinore. The many parallels to Hamlet are interesting, but Gratz wisely avoids producing a carbon copy of the tragedy. Horatio admirably plays the loyal friend but has a cocky voice that is too self-assured and as a teen rings unauthentic. However, this well-crafted mystery has appeal for readers familiar with both Raymond Chandler's novels and Shakespeare's masterpiece.