[Jim Hayes]

My objective was simple, to include as many titles as possible and make some sort of sense. OK it's not a great poem but that's not why it isn't a 'fit'
It's just too unwieldy on the page, the best I can hope for is a HM which would be real good going having seen the efforts here from you guys.

[John Whitworth]

I can't believe that even the Big Friendly Greenwell has got more than FORTY titles in, Jim.

[Marion Shore]

Greenwell probably used the bare minimum of six to create a masterpiece. No cheap pyrotechnics for him. Wait and see.

[Roger Slater]

21 again, but perhaps a bit more sense.


MAGUFFIN

We each play many roles in life,
from sabateur to farmer's wife.
The lodger plays the Jamaica Inn game,
Rebecca plays the notorious skin game.

Young and innocent, rich and strange,
from murder to easy virtue, we change.
Each role is a lifeboat. We do what we can.
Even those born on the Isle of Man

can leave if they want to and not be a Manxman
(just sever the rope and declare, "Me? No thanks, man!")
Like strangers on a train, we're spellbound,
hardly aware that our carriage is hellbound

since by the rear window we're lounging, unknowing
it's north by northwest that we're actually going.
Time is a secret agent that banishes
the person we once were. The lady vanishes.
 

[Jim Hayes]

Actually JW, I got 45 titles. Hey, I think that last of yours gets the big ceegar Bob.
Well, maybe John's acrostic too, and Marion's as well and Sam was the one showed us how, geesis, they're all good.

[Janet Kenny]

I don't know how you lot find the time for all of this but here's a weak one with only 17 titles. If I find the time I'll try again.

Stage fright, no shadow of a doubt,
explained the rope that took him out.
Notorious Rebecca did confess,
but failed to give the right address.
I found him at Number 17,
Jamaica Inn. He could be seen
through the rear window torn curtain.
A psycho, that at least is certain.
The trouble with Harry? The wrong man
to film on a mountain in Japan.
His vertigo was for the birds.
I heard him sabotage his words.
Suspicion arose when he screamed, spellbound,
“I’m damned if I’ll leave this solid ground.
A foreign correspondent up Fujiyama
can be filmed on a set in Alabama.”

[FOsen]

The shadow of a doubt grows from suspicion,
Through all the thirty-nine steps in between,
To frenzy, murder, and then intermission—
Most often, though, the wrong man’s on the screen.

The nimble master-mind who drew us here,
Who’d visit terrors on us in the dark,
Stage fright and then direct our rising fear,
Was only in one crowd scene in the park.

Though plots get stale, his cameos seem ageless.
We laugh to see him: passerby-in-chief,
Who, there amid his intrigues, acts quite blameless.
We laugh, like thieves he’s set to catch a thief.

Frank