No 3616 Set by Ms de Meaner
Ken Livingstone said: "I've met serial killers and professional assassins and nobody scared me as much as Mrs Thatcher." We asked for a rewrite of a famous thriller in which this frightening figure made an appearance.
Report by Ms de Meaner
Now hands up, class. Who has Jane Eyre down as a thriller? Yes, Nick Syrett, I can see that the first Mrs Rochester looked a good part, with the husband below with gin bottle in hand. But not quite obeying the rules, I feel.
This comp was quite hard to judge, as so many sent in Raymond Chandler, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle or Ian Fleming, and I didn't want to pick the same author twice (or even thrice). Accordingly, I looked hard at Adrian Fry's The Silence of the Lambs, with Dr Thatcher managing to spook the spooky Lecter, an amusing conceit. But while Dr Thatcher spoke in character, Hannibal Lecter just wasn't quite right - so, sadly, I had to reject it. £20 to W J Webster, plus the champagne (I loved this entry); the others can make do with a measly £15.
PS: a comper has written to say he didn't understand "When the mat's away, the mouse has problems" in the modern proverbs comp. Does this, he asks, refer to . . . computers? Yes, sir, it does.
"The Long Goodbye" by Raymond Chandler
There is no sign on my door saying "Knock before entering", but most people do. She didn't.
"Mr Marlowe." She made it sound like an indictment. I swung my feet off the desk and pleaded the fifth. "You are a detective?"
"We mostly get called private eyes."
"Private eyes. I like the sound of that." Her voice was low and husky. The kind of husky that gets to the end of the trail, then eats the rest of the pack.
Her face slit into a smile which stopped at her teeth. "I think we can do business, Mr Marlowe."
She was wearing a long blue jacket, a blue pleated skirt and a blue hat. It was the blue of the sparks from an electric chair. It matched her eyes. She came at my desk like a blue wave, flicking open her purse.
Instinctively, I reached for the draw with the loaded Luger. But all she took out was a faded photograph. She slapped it on to my desk and said: "There's a certain party I need to settle some accounts with. Will you help me, Mr Marlowe?"
Such a sweet old lady. How could I say no?
W J Webster
"The Hound of the Baskervilles" by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
A long, low moan, indescribably sad, swept over the moor. I thought it was a hound howling, till I deciphered the words, "Enemy within, enemy within".
Looking back towards Grimpen Mire, we saw her. Never in the delirious dream of a disordered brain could anything more savage, more appalling, more hellish be conceived than that dark form and savage face which broke upon us out of the wall of fog.
The howl became a vicious bark. "Argy! Argy!" With staring eyes and flailing fingernails she bounded towards us; I could smell the gin on her breath, when Holmes drew his revolver and emptied five barrels into her flank.
She lay there, gaunt, savage, large as a lioness. Even in the stillness of death her cruel eyes were ringed with fire. Holmes touched her face and his own fingers gleamed. "Phosphorus," he said. "No wonder the ignorant folk of the countryside were taken in."
That evening Holmes was in a sombre mood. "The monster is gone, Watson," he said. "But she whelped before she died. The son is a very different creature - he looks more like a young deer than a dog. But the same murder's in the blood. There's more devilry to come."
Ian Birchall
"Dr No" by Ian Fleming
It was uncanny: two hundred identical Lady Thatchers, from the sculpted coiffure to the urgent forward lean, from the crazed eyes to the indispensable handbag.
"Welcome to the Thatcher Foundation, Mr Bond." That voice, grating as ever. He turned reluctantly to face her. "You are admiring my research colleagues, I see. All exact replicas. A radical way of ensuring that we all think alike. There are many more, of course, currently giving speeches around the world, exciting admiration for my stamina and my apparent ability to be in several places at the same time."
Bond pointed to the white-gowned figures in the laboratory. "What now?"
"The secret of eternal life. We are about to become immortal."
"To what end?!"
"Power, Mr Bond. Power and money. What else is there?"
"Society?"
Lady Thatcher frowned. "Please do not disappoint me with signs of weakness. Even now I could find a use for a good man."
"Like Dr No?"
"Dr No was not one of us. We disposed of him."
"You zapped him with your handbag?"
The frown was now a basilisk stare of laser-like intensity. "I should warn you, Mr Bond. My researchers attempted a sense of humour implant, but it did not take."
Watson Weeks
No 3619 Set by John Crick
Jonathan Bate in the New York Times described Titus Andronicus as "a slasher movie . . . bloody revenge, dismemberment, miscegenation, rape and cannibalism". Write a blurb for a well-known literary classic which presents it in such a way as to appeal to modern movie-going tastes. Max 200 words and in by 9 March.
E-mail: comp@newstatesman.co.uk
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