I have a great fondness for skilful parody, which is why I try to read it only when it’s done by other people – three talented fellows whose work springs to mind immediately are Jerome K Jerome, David Langford and John Sladek.
Sadly, I like to scribble mockeries myself, for relaxation, and take the pee out of things (we’re talking literature here, not lurchers, by the way – Django needs no help in that area) even without the talent. And we’re overstretched at the moment, so instead of doing a proper article on something, with grown-up notes, links and so on, today we offer some of greydog’s dreadful parodies to while away your time in custody.
(And if you choose to say “But look, what you write isn’t actually parody, it’s just cheap shots chucked together for ephemeral amusement!” then yes, you’re right. So?)
It helps, of course, if you mock things which people recognise. A cunningly wrought lampoon of Miss Hepzibah Tworle’s Nineteenth Century novel Kilner, on the sinfulness of bottled peaches, is likely to be passed over without great interest. Sherlock Holmes, on the other hand, is always fun:
THE ADVENTURE OF THE DEVIL’S BISHOP
“Great Scott!” I cried. “This isn’t Sir Reginald Musgrave at all, but seven otters in a morning suit. Damn it, Holmes, I’m a doctor, not a miracle-worker!”
Holmes shook his head. “As usual, my friend, you miss the most salient point. These are not the common otter, but Enhydra lutris, the Pacific sea otter. The entire plot almost succeeded because Sir Reginald was in fact AMPHIBIOUS!”
“Then Hurlstone Manor is…” Inspector Lestrade paused to take in the enormity of this revelation, “The only country house in Sussex involved in the illicit Chinese sea urchin trade, the very business which almost took down Gladstone and eight peers of the realm!”
“No, Lestrade.” Holmes strapped out his pipe on the inspector’s head. “That was in the last story. Do keep up, you utter womble.”
Thus it was that I, John Watson, left Sussex a wiser man, smelling of seaweed and five pounds lighter. The blacksmith took ship to South America; Lestrade toyed with entering a nunnery and Holmes himself remained triumphant. I would have written this case up for The Strand magazine, but I think, instead, that I shall make up some old bollocks about a dog covered in phosphorescent paint. That always goes down well.
Oh, and I never did find out what happened to the bishop…
I can’t say I’m a vampire fan, though it can occasionally be done well. It can also be done like Twilight, which entranced a generation of teenage girls and also screwed up their sense of self-worth:
THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF EDWARD
His dark, brooding face turned to hers in a look which spoke of centuries of tousled, slightly ill-defined passion, as if they had known each other since the beginning of time, or at least prior to the invention of portable toilets.
“I’m not a vampire,” he said moodily, brushing shimmering fragments of congealed light from his shoulders. She wondered if he knew there was a shampoo for that sort of thing?
“That’s nice.” She faced him warily, thinking suddenly and unnecessarily about her dead but beautiful mother, her loveable but alcoholic father, and the veiled warnings she had heard from her grandmother, before they discovered the old lady was overdosing on toilet cleanser and trying to date the washing machine as well.
He coughed. “But you might say that I’m also a rebel, a loner in this small, narrow-minded town with a generic name and an intolerant pastor who has his own secrets to hide.”
She smiled playfully, showing that most of her teeth were in the right place. No one had ever spoken to her like this before, except three other boys at school who had inexplicably self-ignited during football practice.
“What are you rebelling against?” she asked trepidatiously.
“Raccoons, mostly.”
Her destiny was sealed.
Or you can go with the gay version:
“I can make make you immortal,” said the man with the slicked-back, raven-black hair and eyes like pools of Dettol. Wrapped in a velvet cloak of darkness, he seemed to have swirled in with the evening breeze.
Gary looked up from his Budweiser. “You’re a photographer?”
“No,” said the stranger, his voice a sliver of ice across the bar, “A vampire!”
“Immortality, huh? You sculpt working men in surprising poses?”
“No, I said–”
“You can get my scripts read at the studios?”
The man hissed. “Look, I am a Prince of the Undead, right? Master of the Children of the Night, sire of a thousand depraved souls. And as it happens, mortal, I’m taken by your roguish good looks.”
Gary adjusted the collar of his check shirt, glancing in the mirror behind the bar. Instead of the stranger’s reflection, all he could see was some expensive dental work hovering in mid-air.
“I see. I am into guys, as you ask. Are you fond of colour co-ordinated design, extravagant musicals and soft furnishings?”
The vampire prince hesitated. “Uh, yes. Yes I am.”
“Pity. I dislike sexual identity stereotypes. I’m a dockyard welder with an interest in cheap hamburgers (no onions), and stapling parking citations onto old ladies’ hats to annoy them.”
“So…”
“Nope.”
The vampire sighed, and wrapped his fine velvet cloak more tightly around his lean frame, like a clothes-horse re-arranging itself. This was not to be his night for passionate embraces and a good siring, it seemed.
“You don’t know if anyone sparkly called Edward lives in the neighbourhood, do you?” He caught the look in Gary’s eye as he edged away. “Yeah, I know – but I’m getting desperate here…”
Easy targets, you say? Well, yes. I mean, I could write parodies of Nabokov or Gogol, sly and subtly crafted works which would get me the admiration of the literati, but what can you do with admiration? Bottle it, like those wicked peaches?
I have no shame in taking cheap shots – such as at the Weird Western, a sub-genre which is being explored by more and more writers:
A SLOW DAY FAIRLY NEAR HELL BUT NOT QUITE IN IT
The town of Aching Gulch had given in for the day. It settled low into the afternoon dust, hunkered down like an old cougar whose claws were too blunt to make fighting worth a spit. Far in the distance, the Jessop Boys removed the wheels off the stagecoach; the passengers they had intended to rob were carrying nothing but wooden nickels and jewellery made of paste. Wallpaper paste, at that.
Jeb Whittles, the town podiatrist, leaned back on the saloon porch. He lit a match on his daughter’s stubble, and drew in a lungful of smoke from what the folk of Aching Gulch liked to call cigars.
“Sure is weird round here, Annie-Beth.”
Annie-Beth snickered, and knocked over a bucket with one mucus-laden tendril. The clatter of the tin bucket down the steps was as hollow as Abe Murphy’s testicles.
“Yep,” she said.
Annie-Beth had to admit that the town had seen its fair share of trouble since the cattle barons clashed with the sheep earls, and the goat lords gave up on the whole idea of hanging around in such a violent area. Times were hard.
Lured by talk of a plot of land for only $1, most of the homesteads were filled with embittered court stenographers from New York, and there were now more cuticle salons in Aching Gulch than in the whole of Texas. A man could easy lose his life walking down the main street, prey to a stray fingernail clipping coming out of one of the shop windows.
“Heared there’s vampires in town,” said Old Jed, spitting at the saloon dog. The dog growled, and urinated on Jed’s six-shooter to make a point.
“Yup, they dun been sayin’ that,” agreed the tall, scarred man with the sheriff’s star on his vest, and the Winchester ‘73 crooked in his arm. Even half-blind old Jed could see the ripple of muscle under the grimy, torn shirt the man wore. “Pity I’m a florist.”
“Sure is.” Old Jed sighed. It looked like Aching Gulch was pretty much doomed again.
On the other hand, parody in the style of dear M R James is a gentle pleasure:
A CURIOUS INCIDENT IN PICKERING
Mr Bettleworth did not consider himself to be a scholar. He had achieved some minor success, it is true, with his monograph on the lost hill-people of King’s Lynn, and his acclaimed series of presentations to the Royal Society detailing the men’s toilet facilities at Beverley Minster. At this advanced age, however, he felt that the days of bicycle, brass-rubbing kit and a pack full of hard-boiled eggs were behind him. Especially the latter, since the incident with the rubber tube and olive oil at King’s College.
And so it had been a pleasant prospect to take an extended walking holiday through the less corrugated parts of the Yorkshire Wolds, encumbered only by his umbrella, the Seal of Solomon, the drowned coronet of the last King of Cumbria, a dog whistle and a series of curiously animated fitted sheets.
In these perambulations, he was often accompanied by his nephew Reginald, a keen photographer who seemed to fall into a state of gibbering terror every time he was instructed to develop negatives which included Mr Bettleworth himself.
In mitigation of such circumstances, the genial uncle always had a kind word for young Reginald. “Nil desperandum, parva lamia”, he was fond of quoting when his nephew was especially distressed. Which is to say, in loose translation from Ovid’s original text, “Don’t worry about treading on the smaller owls.”
Mr Bettleworth, it must be admitted, understood little Latin.
And occasionally I like to hit multiple genres at the same time:
THE DA VINCI CUBE NEXUS MYSTERY
The nurse mopped the doctor’s brow with surprising urgency. If only I could love him, she thought, but I swore to my undead mother that I would become a Lesbian for Jesus. Besides, I have yet to solve the jade-encrusted riddle of the Unremitting Garden, where the blind beg hoarsely for throats with which to scream.
Doctor Aalfinus smiled, knowing her thoughts only too well. His own mother, the Autarch of N’Eph’Eir, had asked for a similar pledge when the diesel-powered cowboys of the Santeria Lord has breached their plane of existence and slaughtered the Dawn Legion. He turned back to the patient, sliding his hands into the purulent, protoplasmic ooze of the last shoggoth, just as Brett, the anaesthetist, pulled off his shirt and displayed his glistening torso.
“Damn you, Brett, not now!” snapped Aalfinus. “Negacorps Inc insists that we complete the operation – this shoggoth is our only hope of understanding how two people adrift in time, and continents apart, can still have a love affair that their families have forbidden. Don’t you care about them, or our troops fighting the Industrial Complex Wars?”
Disappointed, Brett put his shirt back on, dreaming of the time when there had only been the open plains and his faithful possum hound. It had been so simple back then, when finding D’Arne’s lost notes on the Da Vinci Cube was all that mattered. He glanced at the nurse, who tossed back her long, lustrous copper hair to reveal a long, lustrous copper skull.
“We are the Void,” she said. “Bereft of that coruscating luminosity which shelters all from unreason and the night-cries of the Ur-Mind. We are Yesterday, splintered into a Tomorrow which will flense sorrow from the City of Cities…”
“I think I’m in the wrong story,” said Flaxman Low, noted psychic investigator.
And speaking of investigators, having started our parody adventure with Holmes, why not fail to finish satisfactorily with an eerie tale of Carnacki the Ghost Finder:
THE CASE OF THE MAN WITH NO ENDING
Carnacki settled back into his armchair and lit his pipe, affecting such a Holmesian pose that we looked to the study door to see if Mrs Hudson was on her way in.
“Did I ever tell you fellows…” he began.
After we had recovered Taylor from behind the curtains, and stopped Arkright from feigning an epileptic fit, the Ghost Finder nodded and continued.
“…about a dashed sticky situation I encountered in Nottingham, a case which almost cost me more than my life, threatened the sanity of many a resident of that fair city, and brought me to the attention of some of the highest authorities in the land”
We admitted that he had not.
“Good,” said Carnacki. “Out you go, then, you ungrateful bastards.”