A Wednesday game. Name book titles that are drawn from earlier works of literature or song. I’ll start:
- The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner: from Macbeth
- Fatal Vision, Joe McGinniss: Macbeth
- In the Beauty of the Lilies, John Updike: “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”.
Your turn.
lying for a living 
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Something Wicked This Way Comes, Ray Bradbury: from Macbeth
Not sure if this counts, Helter Skelter by Vincent Bugliosi – from the Beatles song.
Sticking with crime/thrillers and household names…
Agatha Christie plundered a range of sources for her titles: Shakespeare (By the Pricking of My Thumbs; Taken At The Flood; Sad Cypress); the Bible (The Pale Horse); the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (The Moving Finger); the poets Tennyson (The Mirror Crack’d From Side to Side) and Blake (Endless Night); and more than a few nursery rhymes (Ten Little Niggers; Hickory Dickory Dock; A Pocket Full of Rye; And Then There Were None; Three Blind Mice; One, Two, Buckle My Shoe).
Ruth Rendell’s Put On By Cunning and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest are both phrases from Hamlet. Dorothy L Sayers’ Gaudy Night is`from Antony and Cleopatra, while Clouds of Witness is a line from Epistle to the Hebrews 12:1 and Have His Carcase is from Homer’s Iliad. Ken Follett’s World Without End is a fragment from Ephesians 3:21 (Bible). Val McDermid’s Beneath The Bleeding and The Last Temptation came from TS Eliot poems. PD James’s Cover Her Face is from The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster.
James Patterson is big on this: When the Wind Blows, Step on a Crack, Jack & Jill, the Big Bad Wolf, Pop goes the Weasel, 4th of July (as in Born on, Yankee doodle dandy), Mary Mary, School’s out…Forever, etc. Also John Saul: also When the Wind Blows, Suffer the Children, An Eye for an Eye. Also, apparently When the Bough Breaks has been used by about a gazillion authors, as has “In the Still of the Night” (everyone sing: shoodoe, shooby-do).
And why WOULDN’T yours qualify, Husband?
I was about to wax lyrical about one of the all-time great and underestimated authors – Agatha Christie – but flipsockgrrl said it all so well.
But I have been heavily influenced by the topic and spent spare moments murmuring, “Some are born to sweet delight, Some are born to endless night….”
The title of John Connolly’s debut novel, “Every Dead Thing”, is a phrase from John Donne’s poem “A Nocturnal Upon St. Lucy’s Day”.
“Study me then, you who shall lovers be
At the next world, that is, at the next spring ;
For I am every dead thing,
In whom Love wrought new alchemy.”
The play “Death and the Maiden” by Ariel Dorfman.
Hi there,
How about “Piece of My Heart” by Peter Robinson which is taken from the Janis Joplin song from the 60’s?
~todd
Here’s one that I just discovered.PAY NO ATTENTION TO THAT MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN by Patrick Griffin. It’s about technology.
All over the road and in no particular order (except in which they popped into my head):
Vita Sackville-West “All Passion Spent” (Milton “Samson Agonistes”)
Hugh Maclennan “The Watch that Ends the Night” (Isaac Watts’ hymn “O God our help in ages past”)
Madeleine L’Engle did this a lot: “A Ring of Endless Light” (Henry Vaughan “The World”), “The Moon By Night” (Psalm 21), “Many Waters” (“Song of Solomon”), “Troubling a Star” (Francis Thomson “The Mistress of Vision”)–probably others, but these are the ones I know
E. M. Forster “Where Angels Fear to Tread” (Pope “Essay on Man”)
Peter Robinson is another biggie: “Caedmon’s Song” (Old English “Caedmon’s Hymn”), “A Necessary End” (Shakers “Julius Caesar”), “Wednesday’s Child” (nursery rhyme)
Chinua Achebe “Things Fall Apart” (Yeats “The Second Coming”)
Robert B. Parker gave Agatha Christie a run for her money: “God Save the Child” (Billie Holiday song), “Mortal Stakes” (Frost “Two Tramps in Mud Time”), “The Widening Gyre” (another from Yeats “The Second Coming”), “Pale Kings and Princes” (Keats “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”), “Taming a Sea Horse” (Browning “My Last Duchess”)–there are probably more, but that’s all I can remember
Josephine Tey “The Daughter of Time” (Berthold Brecht “Life of Galileo”)
P. D. James “Devices and Desires” (Book of Common Prayer general confession “we have followed too much the devices and desire of our own hearts…”), “The Black Tower” (Yeats “The Black Tower”), “The Skull Beneath the Skin” (T. S. Eliot “Whispers of Immortality”)
Dana Jean, your favourite–Steinbeck “The Grapes of Wrath” (“Battle Hymn of the Republic”)
“For Whom the Bell Tolls” by Hemingway (from poem by John Donne). “A Time to Kill” by Grisham (from Proverbs).
Excellent, excellent. Thanks for all the contributions.