Lucy Vickery presents the winners of Competition No. 2528
In Competition No. 2528 you were invited to submit an extract from an imaginary story in the Famous Five series written in the style of hard-boiled crime fiction. So it’s Blyton meets Hammett; the upper-middle-class crime-busting quintet, whose adventures are played out in a 1950s rural idyll punctuated by picnics and bicycle rides, filtered through the prism of gritty 1930s urban America, what Raymond Chandler calls ‘a world gone wrong’. Your entries bore many hard-boiled hallmarks: sharp repartee, staccato delivery, economy of expression, psychological drama, black humour and liberal use of simile; though there was a tendency to overdo it.
The winners, printed below, get £25 each. Adrian Fry pockets the extra fiver.
Julian was cool as iced beer in a heatwave, Anne blubbed like a bishop in a bordello, Dick’s wiseacre comments dried faster than a biro signature, and if dogs get goosebumps, Timmy could have proved it right there.
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