Spectator Competition: Nursery crimes

Comp. 3347 invited you to write a hard-boiled nursery rhyme. This inevitably led many to think of Humpty Dumpty, hence his multiple appearances (the consensus is he didn’t fall, he was pushed). Philip Marlowe was smouldered at by various femmes fatales including Little Bo Peep and Miss Muffet. A special mention goes to David Silverman’s scandi-noir Måry Had a Little Lamb/Five Little Ducks: ‘D.I. Lund surveyed Nyhavn from the discomfort of an Ektorp chair. One candle lit the gloom, which was decidedly un-hyggelig.’

Some strayed from the brief enjoyably. The winners, printed below, get £25 each.

There was no ducking it: I had to go down to the woods today and boy, was I in for a big surprise. The rain was falling fast as a widow’s tears and twice as serious and I was dressed in tennis gear (I’d figured I’d better go in disguise). What I wouldn’t give for my gabardine mac. I found the crew quickly enough. They were all there: Pudsey One-Eye (he lost the other in a knife fight with Big Bird out of Chicago); Winnie, called ‘the Pooh’ because, well, you really don’t want to know; Big Paddy Paddington, representing the South American drug interest; Fozzie for the New York Italians; Crazy Rupert in his trademark golf pants; Shotgun Sooty with his hired muscle in tow, the Big Sweep. And I was just one guy with a tennis racket instead of a ’45. This was going to be no picnic.

Joseph Houlihan

As I drank, I reviewed what I knew of the vics:

We’d found their dark glasses, their tiny white sticks.

I knew they’d been running, blood splatter don’t lie,

But the question was where, and the question was why.

Were they chasing their killer, or running away?

Then forensics came back: it was mouse DNA.

I leant on the farmer, but all he would say

Was he didn’t see nothing, he was out making hay.