Book Titles from your own Poems!
 

There's a long tradition of titling books with phrases from poetry. In a narcississtic mood, I decided to imagine some book titles from my own recent work, along with their genre. It was fun; join in?
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This Sodden Arondissement (noir)
The Sanctum That You Promised Me (Harlequin romance)
Within Me Within You (marriage guidebook)
Scene of the Ax (mystery)
It Could Only Have Been Eartha (Earth Kitt bio)
Destination: Nusquam (sci fi)
They Wear A Single Face (horror)
No Waiting, No Escrow (make it rich in real estate)

Kate, I've got a couple of those real estate manuals, too ("Showings" and "Old World Charm").

"Dissonance": A treatise on the physics of sound.
"Fist": A history of bare-knuckle boxing in the nineteenth century.

Or am I missing something and making it too easy?

Slightly off-topic, but perhaps not really. Detective stories are often titles from well-known tags of poetry.

Some Buried Caesar (Rex Stout)
The Moving Toyshop (Edmund Crispin)
Hamlet, Revenge (Michael Innes) Well, not so well-known but what would you expect with Michael Innes?
The Lady in the Lake (Raymond Chandler) A deliberate misquotation of course
There Came Both Mist and Snow (Can't remember but Spherians surely will)
Gaudy Night (Dorothy L. Sayers)
Ten Little...whoops! (Agatha Christie)

I once wrote a detective story myself (unpublished and, I think, just as well) and called it Dishonoured Shroud. When I did so it occured to me thast that quatrain of Eliot would give us an almost endless stream of tiitles.

Someone Indistinct
At the Door Apart
The Nightingales are Singing
The Convent of the Sacred Heart
The Bloody Wood
When Agamemnon Cried Aloud
Liquid Siftings
Stain the Stiff

Well, perhaps that last one is a cheat but you see what I mean. Does that Tell us something about the Eliot method? I think it may. And I suspect Auden would yield similar results.

My favourite quotation title is not a detective story at all. Her Privates We is an autobiography of the author's time in the British Army. And the best quotation for a POEM title must be Sam Gwynn's Train For Ill.

Another Michael Innes, would you believe? Haven't read it, but thanks for reminding me of Edmund Crispin. Haven't thought of him in a squirrel's age. I think his Frequent Hearses fits the bill as well...

Thanks,

Bill

Ah, don't forget Murder Most Foul.

Has there ever been a book titled Bacchus and His Pards? If not, there should be.

Just saw Blithe Spirit on Broadway, by the way, and am now reading Some Tame Gazelle.

This reminds me of a favourite game. It's sometimes called "Deflation"--take the title of a famous book or movie or whatever, and bring it down a notch:

Collect Call of the Wild
Mansfield Park'n'fly
Rhinestone as Big as the Ritz

etc.

You get extra points if you can fuse two titles in one. Mix'n'Mashup.

Gone with the Wind in the Willows
Fathers and Sons and Lovers

and a personal favourite . . .

Memoirs of Hadrian Mole

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Hamlet the Dame
Hadrian the Seventh Seal (sequel to Tarka the Otter)

never mind

- Allen

Ross MacDonald took the title for one of his last mysteries, The Blue Hammer, from a poem by his friend, Henri Coulette.

Seven Brides for Seven Samurai has always been a favorite of mine.