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Unread 07-04-2009, 10:08 PM
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John Whitworth John Whitworth is offline
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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I once wrote a detective story myself (unpublished and, I think, just as well) and called it Dishonoured Shroud.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.
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