Competition | 18 July 2009

In Competition No. 2604 you were invited to submit a passage from a novel that is the product of a collaboration between two unlikely bedfellows.

Hot on the heels of eminent literary partnerships past — Somerville and Ross, George and Weedon Grossmith — come such unlikely yet intriguing alliances as Eric Carle and Marcel Proust, Jean Rhys and Capt W.E. Johns, Ian Fleming and Wilkie Collins. P.G. Wodehouse found himself in bed with, among others, Iris Murdoch, Daphne du Maurier and St Mark, though you resisted the temptation to tuck him up with A.A. Milne, which might have produced some entertaining squabbling.

Some competitors melded the themes of one author with the style of another; others blended styles. All were on cracking form. Special mentions to Elizabeth Emerk’s Lewis Carroll/Dashiell Hammett hybrid — ‘Go fall off a wall, fat man!’ spat Spade. ‘And if your mimsy gunsel Tweedledum pulls a vorpal blade, I’ll spoil his nice new rattle’  — and to P.C.