[Marion Shore]

No. 2591: Inconsequential
You are invited to submit an extract from either a gripping thriller or a bodice-ripping romance containing half a dozen pieces of inconsequential information (150 words maximum). Entries to ‘Competition 2591’ by 9 April or email lucy@spectator.co.uk.

I'm intrigued by this one-- but I don't quite get it. Are you supposed to write your own thriller or romance, or use an already published book? (Stephen King, Barbara Cartland, something of the sort?)

Any thoughts?

[John Whitworth]

No. I think you're supposed to make it up. She's getting at authors who but in nuggets of undigested info just to show that they KNOW, Fleming going on about wines, the divine Donna Leon putting in descriptions of Italian food that the Commissario (is that his rank?) is about to eat, is eating, has just eaten. Though I would argue that the stuff about food is in fact integral to her evoction of Venice. I also think it has to be in prose, since these books are rarely if ever written in verse. I'm going to keep my powder dry until they actually ASK for a verse. Incidentally, the guy who ALWAYS wins didn't win this week, which lmost makes up for the fact that noneof us won either. Personally I thought saucy was just plain filthy, though none the worse for that.

[Jim Hayes]

I'm thinking of sending this in;

Inconsequential.

Lucinda awoke. So did Tom and lot of other people who didn’t know her. At the station some trains were on time and a gap-toothed comb lay in the drain outside Mulligans. No one knows how it got there, or what colour it used to be. But Tom knew, and knew why Lucinda sometimes wore outrageous, ladies-day-at-Ascot hats a la Phillip Tracy, or sometimes wore a French beret with a wide circular crown with a band, in a variety of positions on the head and which some people prefer to wear slightly at an angle, although she wasn’t adverse to wearing a snug fitting cap with a full front “bill” which in a baseball cap is referred to as a “visor” and is designed to shade the eyes from the sun and comes in every imaginable material, shape and size of bill. Sometimes they have ear flaps and a wide range of designs from rounded to square.

[Roger Slater]

Amanda pulled a gun and pointed it at my head, which only that morning had been trimmed by Tommy, my barber for the past six years ever since Carlo moved back to Italy. Tommy did a pretty good job. He was a dollar cheaper than Carlo, and almost as skillful, but I missed Carlo's selection of pretty women cut from magazines and scotch-taped to the periphery of his mirror. Tommy had his own pictures, but he favored older models with red hair, while Carlo went for younger blondes. Amanda was wearing a green blouse with yellow buttons. It was Tuesday. The gun clicked as Amanda squeezed the trigger. I could still taste the poppy bagel I had eaten for breakfast one hour earlier, but only because the deli had run out of sesame bagels. The new clerk was apologetic and offered me a free coffee, which I declined because I do not like coffee. But now there was no time to think about such things. A fly crawled along the window sill. Amanda was musing out loud about the possibility of sending a bullet through my head. George Bush was president. It was sixty three degrees outside.

[Marion Shore]

Sighing, I entered the visiting room of the Baltimore Correction Center, a modern facility on Green Mountain Avenue, opened in 1984. They brought the kid out -- clean-cut, wholesome, even in his unattractive orange jumpsuit, labeled number 85324. Fair hair, freckles, the type of pigmentation that cries out for sunblock SPF 45, especially in the brutal summer months, where temperatures are known to reach 99.3 in the shade. Typical college student, majoring in civic engineering, minoring in Romance languages, you know the type. The whole city thought he was guilty of murdering his girlfriend. Hell, despite his right to a presumption of innocence, a concept derived from the Latin legal principle that ei incumbit probatio qui dicit, non qui negat (the burden of proof rests on who asserts, not on who denies), I wasn't sure I believed him, and I was his goddamn lawyer. . .

[Jim Hayes]

Marion, I love this, all of it and indeed your ending, being his lawer, which is very funny, but, the ending IS consequential, adding a major dimension to your story, if you put in some other trite element, or even adding some trite comment after the lawyer bit, if you want to keep that, I think it would be inconsequential enough to win.

I think.

Anyway, best of luck.

Jim

[Marion Shore]

Jim,
Yeah, the ending, especially after the presumption of innocence bit, was way too consequential. Any ideas?
Marion

[Jim Hayes]

Marion, you could add some immaterial biographical details- about your own graduation or some such, but better, I imagine, to expand boringly, vacuously on the youth.

[Roger Slater]

It was a Tuesday when Christopher Columbus first spotted the New World over the bow of the Santa Maria. It was a Tuesday when Dr. Michael Debakey transplanted the first human heart and watched in awe as it started beating, and a Tuesday when his patient died as his own antibodies attacked the foreign organ. It was a Tuesday, as well, when Ronald Reagan, former screen actor and Governor of California, was first elected president of the United States, and yet another Tuesday when he was re-elected four years later, changing the face of American politics for decades to come. But I don't know what day of the week it was when I first began to suspect that my wife was trying to murder me. I believe it was a Monday, since two empty garbage cans were in front of the house and garbage is collected on Mondays and Thursdays. Perhaps it was a Thursday.

[Marion Shore]

How's this?

Presumed Innocent Until Proven Guilty by a Jury of Ones Peers

by Josh Harming, being an anagram of the author's name since he wouldn't want anyone to associate it with this piece of crap he wrote while sitting on his newly-installed Serif® toilet with the Ingenium flushing system, reading the Speccie, which he always left there in case of difficult bowel movements, which were occurring more and more frequently along with the onset of middle age...


Sighing, I entered the visiting room of the Baltimore Correction Center, a modern facility on Green Mountain Avenue, founded 1984. They brought the kid out -- clean-cut, wholesome, even in his unattractive orange jumpsuit, labeled number 85324. Fair hair, freckles, the type of pigmentation that cries out for sunblock SPF 45, especially in the brutal summer months, where temperatures can reach 99.3 in the shade. Typical college student, majoring in civil engineering, minoring in Romance languages, you know the type. The whole city thought he was guilty of murdering his girlfriend. Hell, despite his right to a presumption of innocence, a concept derived from the Latin legal principle that ei incumbit probatio qui dicit, non qui negat (the burden of proof rests on who asserts, not on who denies), I wasn't sure I believed him, and I was his goddamn lawyer, fifth in my class at Harvard Law School, 1982...