Competition: Reunion blues

Spectator literary competition No. 2837 

This week let’s have a poem about the horrors of a reunion dinner. Please email entries of up to 16 lines to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 26 February.

The recent invitation to give a classic of children’s literature the hard-boiled treatment produced a flood of entries that were a joy to judge. Much-loved children’s classics, filtered through the prism of gritty 1930s urban America (what Raymond Chandler called ‘a world gone wrong’), were given a bracing new lease of life. All the hallmarks of the genre were there: sharp repartee, staccato delivery, economy of expression, psychological drama, black humour and the liberal use of simile.

Honourable mentions go to Barbara Lightfoot, Mike Morrison and Poppy McLean, but you were all good. The winners earn £25 each, except Adrian Fry who gets £30.

Adrian Fry

I’m looking for this broad named Alice. An innocent abroad? I’ll say; she’s the type downs a bottle of hooch because it says so, the sort goes down holes looking for answers where wise guys know there’s only questions.