Further Foolishness. Стивен Ликок
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Название: Further Foolishness
Автор: Стивен Ликок
Издательство: Bookwire
Жанр: Языкознание
isbn: 4057664616647
isbn:
McGILL UNIVERSITY MONTREAL
November 1, 1916
Follies in Fiction
I. Stories Shorter Still
Among the latest follies in fiction is the perpetual demand for stories shorter and shorter still. The only thing to do is to meet this demand at the source and check it. Any of the stories below, if left to soak overnight in a barrel of rainwater, will swell to the dimensions of a dollar-fifty novel.
(I) AN IRREDUCIBLE DETECTIVE STORY
HANGED BY A HAIR OR A MURDER MYSTERY MINIMISED
The mystery had now reached its climax. First, the man had been undoubtedly murdered. Secondly, it was absolutely certain that no conceivable person had done it.
It was therefore time to call in the great detective.
He gave one searching glance at the corpse. In a moment he whipped out a microscope.
"Ha! ha!" he said, as he picked a hair off the lapel of the dead man's coat. "The mystery is now solved."
He held up the hair.
"Listen," he said, "we have only to find the man who lost this hair and the criminal is in our hands."
The inexorable chain of logic was complete.
The detective set himself to the search.
For four days and nights he moved, unobserved, through the streets of New York scanning closely every face he passed, looking for a man who had lost a hair.
On the fifth day he discovered a man, disguised as a tourist, his head enveloped in a steamer cap that reached below his ears. The man was about to go on board the Gloritania.
The detective followed him on board.
"Arrest him!" he said, and then drawing himself to his full height, he brandished aloft the hair.
"This is his," said the great detective. "It proves his guilt."
"Remove his hat," said the ship's captain sternly.
They did so.
The man was entirely bald.
"Ha!" said the great detective without a moment of hesitation. "He has committed not one murder but about a million."
(II) A COMPRESSED OLD ENGLISH NOVEL
SWEARWORD THE UNPRONOUNCEABLE
CHAPTER ONE AND ONLY
"Ods bodikins!" exclaimed Swearword the Saxon, wiping his mailed brow with his iron hand, "a fair morn withal! Methinks twert lithlier to rest me in yon glade than to foray me forth in yon fray! Twert it not?"
But there happened to be a real Anglo-Saxon standing by.
"Where in heaven's name," he said in sudden passion, "did you get that line of English?"
"Churl!" said Swearword, "it is Anglo-Saxon."
"You're a liar!" shouted the Saxon, "it is not. It is Harvard College, Sophomore Year, Option No. 6."
Swearword, now in like fury, threw aside his hauberk, his baldrick, and his needlework on the grass.
"Lay on!" said Swearword.
"Have at you!" cried the Saxon.
They laid on and had at one another.
Swearword was killed.
Thus luckily the whole story was cut off on the first page and ended.
(III) A CONDENSED INTERMINABLE NOVEL
FROM THE CRADLE TO THE GRAVE OR A THOUSAND PAGES FOR A DOLLAR
NOTE.-This story originally contained two hundred and fifty thousand words. But by a marvellous feat of condensation it is reduced, without the slightest loss, to a hundred and six words.
(I)
Edward Endless lived during his youth
in Maine,
in New Hampshire,
in Vermont,
in Massachusetts,
in Rhode Island,
in Connecticut.
(II)
Then the lure of the city lured him. His fate took him to
New York, to Chicago, and to Philadelphia.
In Chicago he lived,
in a boarding-house on Lasalle Avenue,
then he boarded—
in a living-house on Michigan Avenue.
In New York he
had a room in an eating-house on Forty-first Street,
and then—
ate in a rooming-house on Forty-second Street.
In Philadelphia he
used to sleep on Chestnut СКАЧАТЬ