Funny Ha, Ha
Page 16
‘A crowd of vulgar little boys,’ she was saying, ‘and horrible indecent placards all over the room.’
He carried her bag down to the cab.
‘And me in my state of health,’ she said as she followed him. From the cab she gave her parting shot.
‘And if this horrible thing hadn’t happened, I might have stayed with you all the winter and perhaps part of the spring.’
William’s father wiped his brow with his handkerchief as the cab drove off.
‘How dreadful!’ said his wife, but she avoided meeting his eye. ‘It’s – it’s disgraceful of William,’ she went on with sudden spirit. ‘You must speak to him.’
‘I will,’ said his father determinedly. ‘William!’ he shouted sternly from the hall.
William’s heart sank.
‘She’s told,’ he murmured, his last hope gone.
‘You’d better go and get it over,’ advised Henry.
‘William!’ repeated the voice still more fiercely.
Henry moved nearer the window, prepared for instant flight if the voice’s owner should follow it up the stairs.
‘Go on,’ he urged. ‘He’ll only come up for you.’
William slowly removed the barricade and descended the stairs. He had remembered to take off the crown and dressing gown, but his one-sided moustache still hung limply over his mouth.
His father was standing in the hall.
‘What’s that horrible thing on your face?’ he began.
‘Whiskers,’ answered William laconically.
His father accepted the explanation.
‘Is it true,’ he went on, ‘that you actually took your friends into your aunt’s room without permission and hung vulgar placards around it?’
William glanced up into his father’s face and suddenly took hope. Mr Brown was no actor.
‘Yes,’ he admitted.
‘It’s disgraceful,’ said Mr Brown, ‘disgraceful! That’s all.’
But it was not quite all. Something hard and round slipped into William’s hand. He ran lightly upstairs.
‘Hello!’ said Henry, surprised. ‘That’s not taken long. What—’
William opened his hand and showed something that shone upon his extended palm.
‘Look!’ he said. ‘Crumbs! Look!’ It was a bright half-crown.
THE LORD OF THE FLIES
Marco Denevi
Marco Denevi (1922–1998) was an Argentine author, lawyer and journalist. His work is characterized by its criticism of human incompetence. His first novel, Rosaura a las diez (Rosa at Ten O’Clock), was a bestseller and his short story, ‘Secret Ceremony’, was made into a film starring Elizabeth Taylor.
The flies imagined their god. It was also a fly. The lord of the flies was a fly, now green, now black and gold, now pink, now white, now purple, an inconceivable fly, a beautiful fly, a monstrous fly, a terrible fly, a benevolent fly, a vengeful fly, a just fly, a youthful fly, but always a fly. Some embellished his size so that he was compared to an ox, others imagined him to be so small that you couldn’t see him. In some religions, he was missing wings (“He flies,” they argued, “but he doesn’t need wings”), while in others he had infinite wings. Here it was said he had antennae like horns, and there that he had eyes that surrounded his entire head. For some he buzzed constantly, and for others he was mute, but he could communicate just the same. And for everyone, when flies died, he took them up to paradise. Paradise was a hunk of rotten meat, stinking and putrid, that souls of the dead flies could gnaw on for an eternity without devouring it; yes, this heavenly scrap of refuse would be constantly reborn and regenerated under the swarm of flies. For the good flies. Because there were also bad flies, and for them there was a hell. The hell for condemned flies was a place without excrement, without waste, trash, stink, without anything of anything; a place sparkling with cleanliness and illuminated by a bright white light; in other words, an ungodly place.
Translated by José Chaves
THE GIRL WHO FIXED THE UMLAUT
Nora Ephron
Nora Ephron (1941–2012) was an Academy Award-winning screenwriter and director and a New York Times-bestselling essayist, known for her biting wit and strong female characters. Starting out as a reporter for the New York Post, Ephron wrote humorous essays, which eventually led her to branch out into script writing. Her films, which include When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail, essays, and autobiographical novel Heartburn have often drawn comparisons to Dorothy Parker. Ephron herself said, ‘All I wanted in this world was to come to New York and be Dorothy Parker. The funny lady. The only lady at the table. The woman who made her living by her wit.’
There was a tap at the door at five in the morning. She woke up. Shit. Now what? She’d fallen asleep with her Palm Tungsten T3 in her hand. It would take only a moment to smash it against the wall and shove the battery up the nose of whoever was out there annoying her. She went to the door.
“I know you’re home,” he said.
Kalle fucking Blomkvist.
She tried to remember whether she was speaking to him or not. Probably not. She tried to remember why. No one knew why. It was undoubtedly because she’d been in a bad mood at some point. Lisbeth Salander was entitled to her bad moods on account of her miserable childhood and her tiny breasts, but it was starting to become confusing just how much irritability could be blamed on your slight figure and an abusive father you had once deliberately set on fire and then years later split open the head of with an axe.
Salander opened the door a crack and spent several paragraphs trying to decide whether to let Blomkvist in. Many italic thoughts flew through her mind. Go away. Perhaps. So what. Etc.
“Please,” he said. “I must see you. The umlaut on my computer isn’t working.”
He was cradling an iBook in his arms. She looked at him. He looked at her. She looked at him. He looked at her. And then she did what she usually did when she had run out of italic thoughts: she shook her head.
“I can’t really go on without an umlaut,” he said. “We’re in Sweden.”
But where in Sweden were they? There was no way to know, especially if you’d never been to Sweden. A few chapters ago, for example, an unscrupulous agent from Swedish Intelligence had tailed Blomkvist by taking Stora Essingen and Gröndal into Södermalm, and then driving down Hornsgatan and across Bellmansgatan via Brännkyrkagatan, with a final left onto Tavastgatan. Who cared, but there it was, in black-and-white, taking up space. And now Blomkvist was standing in her doorway. Someone might still be following him—but who? There was no real way to be sure even when you found out, because people’s names were so confusingly similar— Gullberg, Sandberg, and Holmberg; Nieminen and Niedermann; and, worst of all, Jonasson, Mårtensson, Torkelsson, Fredriksson, Svensson, Johansson, Svantesson, Fransson, and Paulsson.
“I need my umlaut,” Blomkvist said. “What if I want to go to Svavelsjö? Or Strängnäs? Or Södertälje? What if I want to write to Wadensjö? Or Ekström or Nyström?”
It was a compelling argument.
She opened the door.
He handed her the computer and went to make coffee on her Jura Impressa X7.
She tried to get the umlaut to work. No luck. She pinged Plague and explained the problem. Plague was fat, but he would know what to do, and he would tell her, in Courier typeface.
She went to the bathroom and got a Q-tip and gently cleaned the area around the Alt key. It popped into place. Then she pressed “U.” An umlaut danced before her eyes.
Finally, she spoke.
“It’s fixed,” she said.
“Thanks,” he said.
She thought about smiling, but she’d smiled three hundred pages earlier, and once was enough.
THE LOCKED ROOM MYSTERY MYSTERY
Jasper Fforde
“So who’s the victim?” asked Detective Inspector Jack Spratt, shaking his overcoat of the cold winter rain as he entered Usher Towers. “It’s Locked Room Mystery,” explained his amiable sidekick, Detective Sergeant Mary Mary. “He was found dead at 7.30pm. But get this: the library had been locked… from the inside.”
“Locked Room killed inside a locked room, eh?” murmured Spratt. “What was that tired old plot device doing out here anyway? I thought he was at the At the End of The Day retirement home for washed-up old cliches.”
“It was the Mystery Contrivances Club annual dinner,” explained Mary. “Locked Room was going to be given a long-service award – you know how they like to stick a gong on ideas before they die out completely. Last year it was the Identical Twins plot device.”
“I always hated that one,” said Jack.
They stepped into the spacious marble-lined entrance vestibule and a worried-looking individual ran up to them, wringing his hands in a desperate manner.
“Inspector Spratt!” he wailed. “This is a terrible business. You must help!”
“Jack,” said Mary, “meet Red Herring, president of the club and owner of Usher Towers.”
“Perhaps you’d better show me the body,” said Jack quietly, “and tell me what happened.”
“Of course, of course,” replied Red Herring, leading them across the vestibule to a large oak-panelled door. “We were about to present Locked Room with his award but he’d gone missing. We eventually found his body in the library. I swear, the room was locked, the windows barred, and there is no other entrance.”
“Hmm,” replied Spratt thoughtfully. “You knew him well?”
“Locked Room and I have been friends for a long time,” replied Red Herring, “despite the fact that he had an affair with my wife, fleeced me on a property deal in the 60s and has been secretly blackmailing me over my indiscretion with a Brazilian call girl named Conchita.”
“Conchita, eh?”
“Damn,” said Herring. “You know about her?”
“It’s my business to know things,” replied Spratt coolly. “I also know, for instance, that this mystery conforms to the Knox Convention.”
“You mean—?”
“Right,” said Jack. “There’s no chance of someone we’ve not mentioned turning out to have done it.”
“That also rules us out as the detectives,” added Mary, “and there must be clues.”
“And in a story this short,” continued Jack, “some of them might be in italics – so keep a sharp eye out.”
Jack turned back to Red Herring. “Who else was in the house at the time?”
Herring thought for a moment and counted the guests off on his fingers: “There was myself, Unshakeable Alibi, Cryptic Final Message, Least Likely Suspect, Overlooked Clue, and the butler, Flashback.”
Spratt thought for a moment. “Tell everyone to wait in the drawing room and we’ll speak to them one by one without a lawyer present and in clear contravention of any accepted police procedures.”
Red Herring departed, and Jack and Mary ducked under the “Police line – do not cross” tape into the library. They cautiously approached the desk where lay the corpse of the old lady, with her throat so entirely cut that, upon an attempt to raise her, the head fell off.
“This MO seems somehow familiar,” mused Spratt, looking around for a sharp object and finding nothing.
“Definitely locked from the inside,” added Mary, having made an impossibly rapid examination of the room. Luckily for them both, the dark-humoured pathologist stereotype was the guest of honour at the Mystery Contrivances Club dinner, and was able to give an improbably precise time of death.
“About 7.02, give or take nine seconds,” he said, munching on a sandwich.
The first suspect they spoke to was Unshakeable Alibi, who presented them with a photograph of herself taken earlier that evening – with a clock prominent in the background that read precisely 7.02.
“You knew Locked Room well?” asked Spratt.
“We were both there right at the beginning with Poe’s Dupin mysteries,” she mused. “Strange as it may seem now, Inspector, Locked Room was once the brightest star of the genre. He said he was going to make a comeback, but it never happened – it was all a bit sad, to be honest.”
“And you are?” asked Jack as the next suspect walked in.
“Cryptic Final Message,” replied the man, raising his hat. “Locked Room scribbled this note earlier today – I found it in the waste-paper basket.”
Jack took the message and handed it to Mary.
“Okay, intimate nectar,” she read. “Could be an anagram.”
“Impossible,” replied Spratt. “The Guild of Detectives have banned all anagram-related clues since 1998 – the same time we finally got rid of the ludicrous notion that albinos must always be homicidal lunatics.”
“Well,” purred Overlooked Clue, as she entered the room in a silk kimono. “Inspector Spratt – dahling – we meet again.”
“Indeed,” replied Jack. “You knew Locked Room?”
“Of course,” she replied, draping herself with a fashionably decadent air upon the chaise longue. “We were close, but not intimate. He taught me all I know about misdirection. I always keep his first story close to my heart. Dearly missed, Inspector, dearly missed.”
She sobbed and clasped a small volume of Poe short stories to her breast.
The next interviewee was Least Likely Suspect, a sweet old lady with white hair and clear blue eyes who spent her time gossiping and handing round photographs of her grandchildren. She asked Jack to hold a skein of wool so that she could wind some into a ball.
“I’m so sorry about Locked Room,” she said sadly. “The finish of the Golden Age hit him badly. He always claimed he would make a dramatic comeback in the Christmas supplement of a leading daily newspaper, but I suppose it’s too late for that now.”
“Perhaps not,” murmured Jack, leaning gently against the fourth wall. “I take it that you are still gainfully employed in the mystery thriller industry?”
“Me?” giggled the old lady. “What possible harm could a little old—”
She had stopped talking because a pearl-handled revolver had slipped from her purse and fallen to the floor with a clatter.
“I have a licence for that,” she said quickly.
The next to be interviewed was Flashback the butler, who after taking them on an interesting but irrelevant excursion around a trivial incident in his childhood, gave no new information – except to say that Locked Room entered the library alone, and he heard the key being turned behind him.
“Tell me,” said Jack slowly. “Was he carrying a small volume of short stories with him?”
“Why yes!” replied Flashback, “it’s… it’s all coming back to me now.”
“I was initially baffled by the lack of a murder weapon within the locked room,” intoned Spratt when all the suspects were conveniently arranged in the drawing room a few minutes later, “but after due consideration, it makes sense. All of you had reason to kill him. Red Herring was blackmailing him, Unshakeable Alibi was nervous that she might be eclipsed by his planned comeback, Overlooked Clue was still in love with him and Least Likely Suspect wanted to stay employed for ever.”
They all looked nervously at one another as a log settled in the grate and sent a shower of sparks up the chimney.
“That’s right,” said Jack, “the killer was…”
Answer: It had to be a suicide. Locked Room, unable to come to terms with the loss of his literary stardom, wanted to re-establish the tired contrivance to full prominence in a final, totally unsolvable locked room m
ystery that would be discussed on a million bulletin boards for all eternity. Sadly, unable to come up with a decent description of his own mutilated body, he borrowed it word for word from Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”, his first and keynote appearance.
Keen-eyed as usual, Jack noticed that in his haste, Locked Room had forgotten to change genders on the description and had inadvertently left the quote italicised. It was the book that Flashback saw him with, and also the same one later retrieved by Overlooked Clue as a keepsake. The anagram on the suicide note handed to Last Cryptic Message read: “I can’t take it any more.” Red Herring was indeed a red herring, and Flashback’s attendance was entirely irrelevant – I just liked the joke.
FROM HANCOCK IN THE POLICE
Ray Galton and Alan Simpson
Ray Galton (1930–2018) and Alan Simpson (1929–2017) were an English comedy script-writing partnership. They met in 1948 whilst recuperating from tuberculosis at a sanatorium in Surrey. They are best known for their work with comedian Tony Hancock on radio and television, and for their long-running sitcom Steptoe and Son. The piece below is an extract from an episode of Hancock’s Half Hour in which Hancock (played by Tony Hancock) and Bill (played by Bill Kerr) decide to become policemen. Their Bond Street beat is plagued by a thief, and so Superintendent Farmsworth (played by Kenneth Williams) hatches a plan to catch the devil red-handed.
SUPERINTENDENT FARMSWORTH. … Now, every Friday a young lady cashier leaves this shop with the week’s takings and goes to the bank. My plan is this: we will employ a decoy. Another young lady will leave the shop at the correct time with an empty bag. We’ll be lying in wait, and when the thieves strike, we will jump out and overpower them!
HANCOCK. Hooray!!
SUPERINTENDENT FARMSWORTH. The question is, who shall we use as a decoy?
HANCOCK. I know the very woman, my secretary. Just the girl. It’d take a gang of ten to knock her down.
[Music]
GRISELDA. No. I’m not risking my life to get you out of trouble.