Inconsequential

In Competition No. 2844 you were invited to provide an extract from either a gripping thriller or a bodice-ripping romance containing half a dozen pieces of inconsequential information. I can now add the fact that Zanzibar is the world’s largest clove producer, and that 99 per cent of Estonians have blue eyes, to my cache of conversational titbits. Thanks, for those morsels of trivia, to J. Seery and Nicholas Hodgson. Basil Ransome-Davies takes £30; the rest nab £25.

I was wearing out shoe-leather tracking Torpedo McCann across the city, learning why most American males prefer rubber soles. LA had expanded since it was bought by the US from Mexico in 1848 and I was building a thirst myself when he entered a saloon next to a tattoo parlour. Good Polynesian word, ‘tattoo’, but there wasn’t time to think about that.

It wasn’t the Ritz. Two hundred pounds of insanitary flab in the kind of mesh undershirt the British call a string vest stood behind the bar smoking a stogie. It stank like the privy of Hell. No wonder Vice-President Marshall said ‘what this country needs is a good five-cent cigar’. The clientele were pretty much the living dead.

I ran through into a cluttered yard, remembering that a yard is just over nine-tenths of a meter, and there he was. Armed and dangerous.
Basil Ransome-Davies
 
Sederman slowly drew on his Javanese second-growth cotton gloves. He loved the routine — it was almost a ritual — of preparing for a take-out job. The gloved hands he slid into loose calfskin gauntlets. It brought back his wicket-keeping days. He smiled at the thought of his 74 n.o. imperishably in Wisden. Good times. He folded back the figured Aubusson, sprung the floorboard and retrieved his snub-nosed Walther 290, said to have been modelled on Mussolini’s snout in profile.