A chilling reflection: Nicholas Shakespeare’s new book hits hard in today’s political context

“Five years ago, I don’t think a book like this would have the reverberations that it does today,” says British author Nicholas Shakespeare.

Article content

Rain is pounding down. A furious wind tears at the pine trees. Feral dogs are on the prowl. We’re on the north shore of Lake Superior, the Terry Fox Memorial nearby. But it could be a landscape from hell, a place where frightening things can happen — which they do when the dogs forage through the undergrowth and expose the remains of a murdered man.

Article content

The crime is a political act, rooted in the subterranean depths of Washington, D.C., conspiracy, and in his new novel, Frame 37, award-winning British author Nicholas Shakespeare adds a further ironic twist to its horrors with a glimpse of a hired killer driving to safety along the Thunder Bay expressway, relaxing to the strains — would you believe? — of Neil Young’s Rocking In The Free World on his car radio.

Article content

Article content

Article content

Article content

Article content

Frame 37
Nicholas Shakespeare
Viking

Article content

Article content

Somewhat to Shakespeare’s astonishment, he finds he has written a story that could only be happening in the age of U.S. President Donald Trump. “I don’t usually write novels that are consciously trying to reflect the state of the world,” he confesses. “Yet I very much find that this novel is suddenly doing just that.”

Article content

This certainly wasn’t on his mind years ago when he and his Icelandic-Canadian wife were heading westward on the Trans-Canada Highway and discovered the Fox memorial along the way. He was struck by the fictional possibilities of such a striking setting. “It started a seed that would germinate when I started writing this novel,” he says.

Article content

TheTrans-Canada Highway would provide Frame 37 with some of its most frightening moments. A man dies there because he possesses knowledge that could destroy another man’s presidential ambitions. In explaining why, Shakespeare cuts a wide swath that moves backward and forward in time and also takes the reader to Tasmania, Argentina, the sinister backrooms of Washington politics and — crucially — Michigan, where memories of a vicious unpunished crime from 40 years before have risen from the ashes.

Article content

Article content

People are now dying because of it — because of what they witnessed in their youth.

Article content

People in high places misbehaving and sometimes getting away with it: it was a promising theme for a new novel — but then it went on Shakespeare’s back burner because of a commission to write a biography of 007 creator Ian Fleming. That book was published to rave reviews in 2026 and cleared the way for Shakespeare to return to the novel that would become Frame 37. However, much had been happening in the interim.

Article content

“What was amazing was to see my plot being mimicked by events in the real world.” Two examples: E. Jean Carroll’s successful courtroom victory against Trump for sexual assault, also the earlier charges levelled against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanagh during his confirmation hearings.

Article content

“I think the real world actually defies our understanding,” Shakespeare says. “As a novelist, you have to find ways of fashioning it into a more realistic narrative.”

Article content

The Wall Street Journal has hailed him as “one of the best English novelists of our time.” As for Shakespeare himself, he has a less lofty view of his endeavours. “I’ve always been interested in stories that can’t be told,” he says simply. On the phone from his home in England, he’s quick to remind you of his earlier career as a working journalist — and it’s with a reporter’s eye that he now takes stock of the book he has written.