Friday, August the 19th, 2005

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Murder in the Murk

When they exhumed all the books from the Buried Library under the Big Field of Cement, one of the volumes they found was a first edition of Murder In The Murk by Chlorine Winslow. You probably know Winslow as the author of Fangs in The Mist, her most famous work, the one that won prizes, the one that sold thousands of paperbacks, the one that was turned into an opera bouffe by Boof.

Boof himself is an intriguing character, but I don't want to get sidetracked. Perhaps I will write another time about him, about his many operas, opera bouffes and opera buffas, soap operas and light operas, about his pet curlew Desmondo, once savage but domesticated by Boof according to his own bird-taming plan based on Edward de Bono's revolutionary “six hats system”, about his love of both chocolate swiss roll and lemon meringue pie, about the Boofgate scandal, about the time Boof visited a gigantic dam in a distant land, a dam that didn't work, and how he never went back even though the dam managers implored him to, about Desmondo's birdseed preferences, about six hats of different colours, and about Boof's musical adaptation of Fangs In The Mist by Chlorine Winslow. All that can wait, because I want to tell you about Murder In The Murk.

Murder In The Murk is, as its title indicates, a murder mystery. It features Winslow's so called “invisible detective”, invariably known only as The Invisible Detective. Some critics have pooh-poohed Winslow's prose, particularly her dialogue, for passages such as this:

“There are things that creep upon the face of the earth, Dalewinton, that it is best you—gaaaar!”

“Heavens above, The Invisible Detective,” screamed Dalewinton, The Invisible Detective's ruddy, plump, ever-reliable assistant, “What is the m-m-matter?”

“Fear not, Dalewinton, I was merely saying ‘gaaaar’ to keep you on your toes,” said The Invisible Detective.

Dalewinton mopped his brow with a large red yellow green blue and black embroidered cotton neckerchief from Peru.

For all her leaden prose, however, Chlorine Winslow was a supreme deviser of plots. In Murder In The Murk, a clerk armed with a dirk, lurking in the murk, goes berserk, murdering many. Winslow gives each of the victims a quirk. For example, the first to be slain has a tattoo of several cormorants on his torso. The second is a smarmy, brilliantined git who bathes in asses' milk and toasts his crumpets over the fire using a replica of the magic five-pronged fork of Tantarabim, part of the cutlery treasures in the Museum at-or-near Ack. The third victim is a podgy cowpoke poultry man. As we follow in the invisible footsteps of The Invisible Detective and The Invisible Detective's Assistant Dalewinton, the twists and turns and thrills pile up, page after page, just like in a well-thumbed library book you may remember reading when you were young and feckless and callow. Alas, like Dobson's pamphlets, Murder In The Murk is out of print.