Comp. 3347 invited you to write a hard-boiled nursery rhyme. This inevitably led many to think of Humpty Dumpty, hence his multiple appearances (the consensus is he didn’t fall, he was pushed). Philip Marlowe was smouldered at by various femmes fatales including Little Bo Peep and Miss Muffet. A special mention goes to David Silverman’s scandi-noir Måry Had a Little Lamb/Five Little Ducks: ‘D.I. Lund surveyed Nyhavn from the discomfort of an Ektorp chair. One candle lit the gloom, which was decidedly un-hyggelig.’
Some strayed from the brief enjoyably. The winners, printed below, get £25 each.
There was no ducking it: I had to go down to the woods today and boy, was I in for a big surprise. The rain was falling fast as a widow’s tears and twice as serious and I was dressed in tennis gear (I’d figured I’d better go in disguise). What I wouldn’t give for my gabardine mac. I found the crew quickly enough. They were all there: Pudsey One-Eye (he lost the other in a knife fight with Big Bird out of Chicago); Winnie, called ‘the Pooh’ because, well, you really don’t want to know; Big Paddy Paddington, representing the South American drug interest; Fozzie for the New York Italians; Crazy Rupert in his trademark golf pants; Shotgun Sooty with his hired muscle in tow, the Big Sweep. And I was just one guy with a tennis racket instead of a ’45. This was going to be no picnic.
Joseph Houlihan
As I drank, I reviewed what I knew of the vics:
We’d found their dark glasses, their tiny white sticks.
I knew they’d been running, blood splatter don’t lie,
But the question was where, and the question was why.
Were they chasing their killer, or running away?
Then forensics came back: it was mouse DNA.
I leant on the farmer, but all he would say
Was he didn’t see nothing, he was out making hay.
A search of the kitchen turned up a sharp knife,
And the fingerprints on it belonged to his wife,
Who swore blind she’d just used it for carving up beef,
That she loved little critters, wouldn’t give them
no grief.
Then she told me she thought it was Fat Bob, the cat.
Sure, something was off here, sure I smelled a rat,
But she pressed up against me, her hand on my thigh.
Now Fat Bob’s in handcuffs. That cat’s gonna fry.
Matt Quinn
A good egg who got himself scrambled; that was the story they were telling about Dumpty. When I got to the scene, I found more horses than seemed helpful – none whatsoever would have been the optimal number, I figured. Together with a whole bunch of braying guys with a monarchy fetish, they were busy turning a hopeless rescue into a badly botched postmortem. Questioning these guys, I heard the same story so often it might as well have been on a phonograph. Dumpty, they said, had fallen from a wall. It was something they were certain of, something they’d no more seen that I’d had sight of a paycheque lately. I wasn’t going to buy that any more than the wall, itself a pretty low affair, was going to provide a witness statement to the NYPD. No, this was a hit and I knew the King ordered it.
Russell Chamberlain
Guys and dolls get out of bed,
The moon is up, come, blow your bread!
Skip your fodder and skip your kip,
Rattle the rubbernecks, give ’em lip.
Tread the ladder rungs, scale the wall,
Let’s go on a bender and have a ball,
Come with your irons and come with your blades,
Hide your faces behind your shades.
Sidestep the flat feet and dodge the dumb dicks,
Trash the seats in the flea-pit flicks.
Light up your gaspers and flimflam the mugs,
Slug the trouble boys, boozehounds and thugs.
Swell the kitty; we’re none of us skint,
A nicker apiece and we’ll rake in a mint.
You bake the wacky cake, I’ll brew the Joe
And we’ll all bite an egg in a hour or so.
Alan Millard
The blonde wore a pink gingham dress that missed her knees by a mile and a straw bonnet with pink streamers. That’ll get stares even in L.A., where the freakish is the average. The killer touch was the shepherd’s crook. I wondered what games they were playing in the local bordellos.
She gave me the eyes and I waited for her to speak. I was in no hurry. She looked fine silent.
After a daydream or three I told her, ‘Surprise me.’
‘Why, Mr M – Marlowe, I hardly know where to begin…’ She had the ingénue’s hesitation waltz off to perfection. This called for a drink. I poured one.
‘Mr Marlowe, I’m old enough to drink.’ She was still giving me the eyes, so we toasted crime then got down to business. Guess what, she wanted me to recover her sheep. Easiest 25 bucks I ever made.
Basil Ransome-Davies
Peter Piper, mobster sniper,
had a wife who was a griper;
popping her would be a doddle,
then he’d get a newer model.
‘Sweet Cheeks’ as he used to call her,
even though her name was Paula
found out what she had in store,
felt she too must break the law.
Daniel Diller, hired killer,
hid behind a front porch pillar,
bludgeoned Peter, crushed his head,
spilled his brains and left him dead.
Peter Piper’s mobster boss
looked into his hitman’s loss,
soon discovered Paula’s ruse
and gifted her with concrete shoes.
Paul A. Freeman
In a New York summer, hot enough to boil your brains, this high-class dame was baking jam tarts for her man. Crazy. I guess she loved him. He was respected in the neighbourhood, perhaps feared. Nobody messed with him. It was pretty damn tough for him to discover his no-good son had made off with the tarts. The big man went after him. He felt ready to kill. Mad as a skunk, he beat the hell out of the kid who promised never to steal again and so lived to tell the tale.
Dorothy Pope
No. 3350: Beg to differ
You’re invited to write a refutation of any famous line from literature, e.g. ‘The past is a foreign country [etc]’; ‘To be, or not to be, that is the question’ (150 words/16 lines max). Lucy Vickery is away for a short time so please email entries to competition@spectator.co.uk by midday on 15 May.
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