Who Killed Cock Robin? (Christie Meets Cluedo in Norfolk)
Audio/ musical book versions here:
Video of "The Text" here: https://youtu.be/rntRJaONA3Q
First published by Dead Author as “Murder at Cock Hall”
Dead Author’s Posthumous Foreword
Squire Robin Peacock of Cock Hall, the 13th Duke of Little England in the Styx, was a One Nation cosmopolitan Briton. He was murdered three weeks after I, Dead Author (pen name Dr ‘Blake’ with a silent e, pronounced ‘Black’, spelled variously ‘Blak’ ‘Black’ or ‘Blake’) – author of “Cock of Cock Hall; A Modern Loxley”(the Duke’s Official Biography)- was myself beheaded in a unprovoked scythe attack at the annual Norfolk Noir Conference at Cock Hall and my headless corpse hidden on the cellar steps. My head remains lost, last seen in the clouds. Being dead and the victim of a previous crime was never going to stop a Black being accused of the Squire’s murder by white supremacist Cock Hall housekeeper Mrs ‘Self-Island’ White and jaundiced Trump Tan-Supremacist climate change-denying viral holiday homes capitalist Colonel Mustard.
Little England in the Styx is a ghost village populated by empty holiday cottages, empty second homes and vast empty third choice staycation mansions and peopled by archetypes from Cluedo, English folklore and Agatha Christie; policed by local land-marks DI Ken Hill; Chief Constable Melton; DS Len Wade and a Miss Marple “jumpy as a poulter in Geist”; Ghost-Officed by Postmodern Post-Man Pat; haunted by archaeology from Boudicca through Anne Boleyn to The Brown Lady and the ghost of a First World War aerodrome and Daily Mailed by Mrs “self-unconscious-authoritarian-past-tense-straight-linear-cause-effect-oxygen-supply-demand- semi-detached bourgeois-realist-plot-in-my-beginning- is-my-Middle-England-ever-after-revenge-narrative” White.
Channelling the deerstalker/violin/exotic moustache detective into postmodernity, DI Ken comes to work in a long Saxon cloak of Robin Hood Green and plays a bodhran in the woods as an aide meditation to the Critical Theory he learned as a fast-tracked police graduate at UEA in the 1970s, enduring the nick--name "Your UEA-ness" from slow-track old-school colleagues. His preference for Green over Planetary Extinction Farming gets him taken off the case by Super ‘Market’ Law of Bourgeois Realist Plod during the Super’s weekly round of golf with his Old School pal (and prime suspect) Colonel Mustard who sub-contracts the ‘Freud Squad’ (Poirot and Marple of AC/OCD) to pursue a Red Herring of Professor Plumski and Miss Scarlett until the a-fornication mentioned Freud Squad unbutton repressed clues in the unconscious cellar of Cock Hall whereupon they are themselves expensively replaced by CIA agents Frank and Mark Adams gone private (“Government contracted on a private number”) while on garden leave in England from the Cain case, the First - and still Unsolved - Murder, at one of Mustard’s Holiday Villas.
Dr William Black (aka Dead Author), Cellar Steps, Cock Hall, Christmas 2019.
Suicide Note by the Late Professor Plumski
Dead Author’s dazzling vision in The Text – we know who the double murderer is white from the start and also the rotten kernel forcing her murderous hand if we only look hard enough- is at first obscured by DI Ken’s Critical Theory, read against the grain of The Text, about it, the impasse allowing Colonel Mustard to counterplot a Trumped up Fake News against the Murder genre itself, replacing it with an advert for his business. When DI Ken’s critical vision clears, he is taken off the case.
After First World War veteran/amateur detective Captain Hastings is murdered during a public phone call in which he is about to name the murderer, his corpse is found in one of the LETSCOBBLE (The Little England in the Styx Clued Ouija Board Basement Level Excavation) archaeological trenches during a Christie-Cluedo Murder Mystery Weekend, with a Norman arrow through his Private Eye. When Benjamin the cynical seaside donkey from Animal Fram (sic) objects to this, he is show-denounced at the Burnham Horse Trials en route to Gammon White’s Knacker’s Yard.
When PC Plot is arrested by rather than arresting Mustard's privatised Eyes, DS Lynn makes the stock police drama speech, "This was PC Plot. One of our own. So let's crack this bastard case.” But DI Ken objects to the ritual emotionalism of One of Our Own on the basis that if a teacher only taught properly if the pupil was a teacher's child, or if bus drivers only drove other bus drivers, or postal workers only delivered each other's letters etc etc, where would we be? (Answer – Little England.)
Ken and his team now nevertheless pull out all the stops and other punctuation marks to reconstruct the case so that PC Plot is doing the arresting not being arrested. They, along with Poirot and Marple, work tirelessly through a recalcitrant list of suspects; a postmodern gossip of competing narratives and motives and several ‘Pandora’ family-sized tissue-boxes of lies and Public Eye-Dentify the Double Murderer as ….
M-.
The rest of this document has been redacted.
List of Suspects compiled by DI Ken Hill (reprinted by kind subscription of the Norfolk Noir CCTV series Ken’s Critical Theory)
Eve Lady Peacock, wife of the Squire, racy light novelist and Coquette of Cock Hall. A High Tory Royalist of expensive and indulgent appetites and a Clytaemnestra without the mitigating mother-love of her daughter (her daughter being Miss Scarlet). Her definition of Marriage as “a public stage for private parts” was removed from The Text by a threat of legal action but remains in a grumbling appendix hidden among Author’s spiral notepads on his desk in his cottage-shrine ‘Jerusalem.’ Her name connects her to Juno and Argus, whose all-over fly Eye (“I saw him die”) was banished for voyeurism into the tail of the peacock. Opposes the Squire’s vision for Cock Hall; his patronising of dreamers; and his plan to marry their daughter to a Green but, as the Text suggests, the Coquette of Cock Hall ‘wears the jodhpurs’ in their marriage’ so may not have needed to kill the Capon to get her way. The Text leaves several clue-prints in the ‘Snow’ that lead to Mrs White.
Colonel Norman D (Lightful D Leerious D) Mustard a Trumpian entrepreneur; the Huntin’ Shootin’ Hangin’ n Brexitin’ millionaire chairman of Mustard’s Holiday Hearths who has privatised Bombadil Common, set the planet alight with his forest-scorching ‘Donald’ burger and has aggressive designs on the Cock Hall Estate including (the Squire believes) on Lady Peacock. Blond-Haystacked, Bluster-Brained, Breck’s-Idling Blue-Eyed Boy of The Black Shuck Hellhound of the Baskerville Telegraph and The Self-Unconscious-Authoritarian-Past-Tense-Straight-Linear-Cause-Effect-Oxygen-Supply-Demand- Semi-Detached Bourgeois-Realist-Plot-In-My-Beginning-Is-My-Middle-England-Ever-After -Revenge-Narrative , Mustard represents Little England’s Tourist as opposed to Farming interest. Provides Holiday Homes, Holiday Hunts and ‘Hysterical Torcs’ (sic. a spelling mistake for ‘Historical Talks?’) along the ‘Boudicca Trail’. Cokeservative to Robin Peacock’s ‘Champagne Socialist’ and founder Fuhrer of the Heritage Inheritance Traditionalists’ League of English Resistance (HITLER) – now LEIP/ BYO (Little England Isolation Party/ Bring Your Own) - recently winning its first council seat in Washport Fen with its policy of closing children’s centres to build more museums. Born the year Eden surrendered Suez and sworn to its recovery along with Hong Kong, Aden, Jamaica, Jerusalem, Acre, Anjou and Normandy, he lost his left eye in the Japanese attack on Poole Harbour December 8 1982.
Mrs Self-Island Wight, Housekeeper of Cock Hall, a traditional fish n chip-on-the-shouldered refugee from a London suburb she left because it was (in her words) ‘invaded by refugees’; in hopeless love with Colonel Mustard and murderously hostile to the Squire’s growing Old-Liberalism. A Huntin’, Shootin,’ Hangin’ n Brexitin’ Cokeservative without the private fortune to finance any of these. Believes There is No Society Except Private Life and no business except her nose up everyone else’s. Flies a Union flag whenever Her Majesty is in residence at nearby Sandringham and a Swastika whenever she isn’t. Self -appointed representative of the village’s “semi-detached bourgeois realist plot in-my-beginning is-my-Middle-England-ever-after revenge narrative planetary-extinction-with-farm-views cul de sac.” Identifies with – and (her doctor notes) increasingly AS Lady Peacock. (My ‘Snow Queen”).
The Freud Squad’s theory that Lady Peacock actually IS Mrs White in Her Lady’s feathers, Mrs White having reportedly murdered her ‘Snow Queen’ and taken her place in the way Diana was inhabited by her butler (and many Royalists effectively live as fantasy royals.) accelerated out of control after one of Lady Peacock’s exquisite ‘Desdemona’ label hankies turned up under a ton of voluminous white underpants in Mrs White’s secret fan drawer during the search for the murder hanky (see the Lady’s own Mills and Floss velvet-tipped bodice-rippers Lady Cock-Tail’s Lover, Lady Cock-Tail’s Fan and the most infamously explicit Lady Cock-Tail's Cock with its immortal power-line “Well darling we all know who wears the lady-pants in that relationship!*) and has gained further credence since Mrs White’s official abolition:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3674462/Cluedo-kills-Mrs-White-Board-game-s-makers-replace-character-deciding-mansion-s-housekeeper-dated.html
DS Lynn’s streetwise synthesis of these dialectically opposite theories, achieved without any Critical Theory whatsoever, is that Mrs White is Lady P’s coke dealer, disguised as a family retainer. (Or – more frighteningly still - vice versa.)
Jack Green, an ethical farmer and Radical, who ‘would kill to Green the Cock Hall Estate’; fiancé (lately estranged) of Miss Scarlet. A child of nature and very much in tune with the woods, seasons and the albums Jethro Tull was making in the late 70s. His and Miss Scarlet’s radical English folk duo The Peacock’s Fan was infamously banned for life from the Little England In The Styx Folk and Unionist Club (LETSFUC) ostensibly for 1. ‘cultural appropriation’ of non-English folk styles (ie not being skinheads) and 2. not singing and holding the prescribed agricultural folk instruments in the prescribed Child Ballad folk manner (one finger in the ear; one up the arse and biting everyone else’s fingers off with the strain of remembering the Entire Folk Tradition by rote) but actually because they led catchy singalongs by heart about the British Empire’s economic, social and cultural inappropriation of other continents and against the mastery of Pure White Folk at the LETSFUC.
Miss Scarlet daughter of the Squire and Lady Peacock and heir to the Cock Hall Estate. Shares Jack Green’s Radical passions though recently seduced by Plumski’s more violent revolutions. Runs a ‘Radical’ Bistro in Burnham Up Market. A spirited petitioner, lobbyist, activist, agit-propper, street theatre comedy situationist, GM crop-burner and street fighter. Took part in my first reconstruction of the crime in which she unconsciously deconstructed her fraught and conflicted love for her father at which damascene moment, she explains, she identified the murderer (her lifelong scourge Mrs White) of both her father and Dr Black but also by some unexpected grace felt able to forgive the murderess, comprehending that “the black hole at the heart of Mrs White’s brittle ego-shell” (as she put it) came not just from her radicalisation by The Self-Unconscious Authoritarian Past Tense Straight Linear Cause-Effect Oxygen-Supply-Demand Semi-Detached Bourgeois Realist Plot In-My-Beginning Is-My-Middle-England-Ever-After Revenge Narrative Planetary-Extinction-With-Farm-Views Cul De Sac but also from her existential terror at being cancelled and replaced by Dr Orchid, Dr Black’s secret daughter (see The Wife’s Story). This astonishingly unfashionable empathy with another human being (unheard of in the ruthless self-islanding imperialisms of Little England since the 1970s) precipitates not just Scarlet’s retreat from her role as Prof Plumski’s Fall Guy – his inside Lady comrade at Cock Hall, albeit helped by Aunt Jane’s pleas and the Prof’s own life-ending change of head - but to a complete reorientation of herself in regard to her childhood sweetheart Jack Green. Explained when interrogated by my Critical Theory that the real antidote to the phallogocentrism (and its recent virulent variants of Neo-narcissism and Trump’s Disease) is, always was, and always will be ….True Love-
…..-
NB. -The rest of Miss Scarlet’s profile has been redacted by Sue Grey pending a Met Police enquiry. The redacted material includes revenge porn of Miss Scarlet taken at crime scenes by officers now serving life sentences (with lots of subordinate clauses) for serial Rape, Torture and Murder.
Professor Plumski, an Old Stalinist, running armed underground campaigns from the Gun Room of Cock Hall under the Squire’s ‘eccentric’ patronage but hurt by the Squire’s recent preference for the utopian ‘New Jerusalem’ of Dr Blake. Revised his memorandum “Covid’s Metamorphoses” a good deal in response to this shift of preference, now emphasising his former talisman Cock Robin’s social and economic class as a landowner and capitalist rather more than he had originally advocated his progressive ‘Robin Hood’ ideology. “Squire Robin Peacock is a Robin Hood on the progressive side of history. The original twelfth and thirteenth century Robin Hood of Loxley Hall, like Engels, may have belonged to the property owning class but his ideology ranged him against this class consciousness, and on the right side of history, however much his class interest suffered by that” in the original document became “We should not forget that despite his ‘Robin Hoodisms’ the ‘white palace’ of Cock Hall is Capital owned and its profits enjoyed by Squire Peacock and that, for all her false consciousness and the opprobrium Dr Black heaps upon her, Mrs White is only one of his workers therein and ultimately much less culpable than he.” (See ‘Covid’s Metamorphoses’) Plumski’s and Scarlet’s heroic agent-provocative leaflet-bombing of Little England at the height of the pandemic calling for private parks to be made public property (especially those wooded green and pleasant Alfred Lawn Tennyson Englands around Cock Hall and Mustard’s recently privatised Bombadil and Little Eden Commons) caused much less reaction than the Old Stalinist hoped. It merely earned him a spread in the Black Shuck Hell News Hounds of the Baskerville Telegraph as a loveable adoptive English eccentric/ fourth generation Czarist emigre and approving puffs in the Daily Nail and Daily Brexit. It was only when he checked the original leafle ( printed by the hamster-wheeler-dealing financially squeezed, de-unionised proofreader-sacked one wage-slaved Cyclops Press, already signature-famous for its Washport 2016 European City of Culture ‘Norfuck Boudicca’s Cunty’ bid busness crads) that Comrade Professor P noticed the ‘t’ substituted for the ‘k’ in ‘parks’.
The rest of this profile has been redacted by Cressida Pink pending an enquiry into the Sue Grey enquiry. The redacted material includes revenge porn of Sue Grey taken by Dick Sparrow.Dick Sparrow, a retired Superhead, now retraining the House Guides for Colonel Mustard’s Cock Hall Murder Weekend. Folk tradition would make him the prime suspect on the strength of the confession “I said the sparrow, with my bow and arrow, I killed cock robin.” Indeed his anti-Robin Hood career of removing all literary and cultural value from his original subject ‘English’ - starting with that prime Aristotelian imperative: Plot - and replacing it with the social economy texts, business sponsorships and Fake News studies of The Illiteracy Strategy was largely driven by his desire to clear his family name of the original murder and of “the way this laid me open to the threat of potential future Blackmail by Dead Author.” Certainly benefits from Cock Hall and Little England passing to Mustard and out of the radical English process fostered by the two murder victims Squire Robin Peacock and Dr Black but Sparrow’s character tends more to hype than to homicide. Has invested his cuckoo nest egg (derived from getting other people to do his increasingly lucrative jobs for him) in an English Language School/Chinese Money Laundering Business in Hubei Province and divides his time between the two. His cash donation heritage walks scheme along Washport’s mediaeval waterfront – supposedly to fund a museum - (see the Your Washport Fake Local News and Advertiser’s weekly front page splash, editorial and local MP centrefold) was a masterpiece of money laundering on which he now lectures all over Trump’s America.
‘Dr Blake’ (Black/ Blak) Author’s protean avatar in his Murder Story. He seems to treble as 1. ‘Blak’, a foreignized pen name, possibly Eastern European, possibly Jewish (his cottage is called ‘Jerusalem’) as 2. ‘Black’, the original murder victim in Cluedo, an English archetype but also, via the connotations of colour and race, a self-identification with outsiders, the oppressed, the unrepresented, the shadowed - art giving a voice to those who don’t have one in society, as with the many female protagonists in Greek Tragedy – and 3. via his very English Christian name and third variant spelling of his surname ‘Blake’ – the old spelling of ‘Black - (and again his cottage-name ‘Jerusalem’) to connect with the Radical freeborn English native tradition of William Blake, visionary author of ‘Jerusalem, a poem about the revolutionary New England fought for by the Parliamentary side in the English Civil War. We have to remember though that all of these variants only a nom de plume for Dead Author aka Author Ransom, the “Unacceptable Face of Post-Postmodernism” and the Severed Head of Norfolk Noir. When accused as Blake/Blak/Black of the Squire’s Murder, maintains that he “wasn’t there”, he was “on the cellar steps, the victim of a previous crime.”
The Priest Previously Known As The Reverend Bullfinch Rook-Lark, fully immersion re-baptised in the Styx as Canon Dove after a near-death experience deathbed-visiting his old Jesus college soul mate Squire ‘Cock’ Robin, one of several SUV-loads of Covid spreaders among his parishioners who brought back the then incurable virus back from the 2020 Cheltenham Gold Cup, to their home village of Little England, its subsequent wildfire spreading through Communion cup and wafer and laying on of hands, officially sanctioned as not a ‘social gathering’ but an Act of God. An unusual suspect (there is a campaign to remove him from this list to Other Characters) without motive or intent. If he did it, he certainly never meant to, is heartily sorry, his guilt is intolerable to him and he promises never to do it again.
The Victims. (These previously Listed characters here regarded again specifically as victims and thus with a greater emphasis on why someone might want to kill them.)
Squire Robin Peacock, Cock of Cock Hall; 13th Duke and chief landowner of Little England In The Styx; a recent convert to Green farming and politics. An amateur author positioned as a Robin Hood of Loxley Hall on the side of the Common Man (though his Cock Hall ancestors enclosed much of the actual Common in the 16th and 19th centuries) he has lately become a patron of visionaries and authors on his Estate, and of LETSCOBBLE the world-famous archaeological dig on his land. His great economic and political rival in village affairs is Colonel Mustard.
Dr Blake (pronounced ‘Black’ with a silent ‘e’ variously spelled ‘Blak’; ‘Blake’ and ‘Black’) pen name of Author Ransome, (aka Dead Author) the Anti-Social Sociologist (pace Shaw) and a devout purveyor of kitchen-sink socialist surrealism. Passionately believes there IS a Society just not the one he actually lives in; existentially denies and relentlessly attacks in Little England in the Styx. Self-isolated with his wife as a lifestyle choice long before Covid, though longing to be a National Treasure, catches Covid, dies surrounded by all who understood him (none) after which he is furloughed as a ghost-writer by the Clued Ouija Board. His alter ego, avatar and shadow of his former self is ‘Dr William Blake’, with that silent ‘e’, a Blakean-visionary and outsider, found dead on the cellar steps before the story begins and nevertheless accused of his own murder (and the Squire’s) by Mrs White on the basis of his colour. He later appears with the Brown Lady as a headless ghost. His maternal grandfather Mordecai Blak died– part of an Eastern European contingent totalling 20% of the British airforce - during the Battle of Britain; this ‘deliberately foreign’ version of his pen name enshrining that oft-forgotten foreign aspect of Our Long Island Story’s Finest Hour. His use of ‘Blake’ – the old spelling of ‘Black’ as in ‘a blake moor born in Barbary’ – recognises the contribution made by slave coast Africans to the British economy (including an opulently gracious rebuild of the West wing of Cock Hall in the 18C) and protests against the Atlantic Slave Trade. Obviously, these pointed variant spellings might provoke racist attacks on Author from and cast suspicion on members of LEIP/BYO (Little England Isolation Party/ Bring Your Own). The fact that Mordecai Blak was a half-Jew also potentially adds the entire world, especially followers of those famous Gentiles Jesus Christ and Karl Marx to our list of suspects.
Captain Hastings, Poirot’s Watson, a warm-hearted military veteran like Watson and foil to Poirot’s genius but nowhere near as bright as Watson. Is found in an archaeology trench on a Murder Weekend with an arrow in his eye.
Dead Author’s Wife See Other Characters
The murder weapons
Corona (‘crown’, ‘halo’; ‘the dome of body parts like those of the head or cock; ‘the luminous envelope of concentric white light around the sun’) virus. A global serial murder weapon with the terrified world in its clutches throughout the story. Used to kill Robin Peacock. And 3 million others.
A scythe used to kill Dead Author/ Dr Black at conference several weeks before while everyone looked the other way.
A Norman arrow used to kill eye witness Captain Hastings through the ‘I’
The Detectives
DI Ken Hill, a rooted ‘ local’ and very protective of his area but also paradoxically alienated from his roots by being fast-tracked through a Critical Theory degree at UEA in the 1970s. His still waters run deep and very much faster than his surface appears. On another level he is the spirit of place; in this case, of the story’s haunted Norfolk setting (‘Icenia’) and a personification of Ken Hill, whose wooded hill and Wash shoreline was associated with Bronze and Iron Age religious practices. Also linked to ‘Kenning Hall’, lost palace of dead Saxon Kings; Norfolk Dukes absent in the Tower and later in an Arthurian Castle in Sussex, and divining knowledge. Has hidden depths, of buried Celtic gold.
DS Len Wade Ken’s faithful old school Broadland Sergeant, worried about their lack of progress in solving the Coronavirus Murder but also tending to shoot off on tangents in his anxiety that slow things down even more. His name means ‘slow moving stream’ and links with Great Witchingham, site of the last duel in Norfolk in 1698, its squire slain by the squire of Blickling Hall, probable birthplace of Anne Boleyn, England’s first and only beheaded Norfolk queen…. (etc etc, see page 61)
DS Lynn Washport-based reinforcement, a veteran of mean streets and mean drug crime and tickled by her holiday homicide among the North Norfolk ponces. Wants to be Miss Scarlet and thinks everyone else does too. Believed by some to be DS Len in gender transition.
Poirot from Belgium ie an emblem of Britain in Europe; an embattled ally whose neutrality Britain has guarded by treaty and action – including two World Wars - since 1839. More recently, by extension, via Brussels, an emblem of Britain in the EU. A modernist detective, characterised by concrete images (the moustaches, the egghead, the shoes, the art deco dialogue; the green eyes glowing like a cat’s, the incisive plot-driven narrative) Utterly foreign, a continental bachelor-dandy cartoon of cuisine, couture and cosmopolitanism yet paradoxically also an English institution, the alien-genius Holmes to the conventional English wounded Watson war veteran nice but dim friend Captain Hastings. And yet. Like Marple, makes Hastings (and many ‘macho’ English detectives) look much more of an idiot than Holmes ever did Watson which makes its own point about continental theory (Freud?) over English pragmatism/ public school twitism/ patriarchy. Where his beloved friend is a romantic fool where women are concerned, Poirot has instead a genuine empathy for the female, a sort of Agatha in Belgian trousers. His ‘feminine’ intelligence (egg shaped head) and justified cynicism is warmed (like Marple) by empathy and a protectiveness towards young love and an ability judiciously to forgive. Very much the urban cosmopolitan Catholic European to Jane Marple’s rural Church of England.
Jane Marple (‘Jane Austen’?) An Anglican, One Nation, Old Tory apotheosis of Village England. Viz, a Great Power engaged in World Wars with wounded young Captains and got-rich-quick colonials returning to loved home shores only to miss the wide open spaces, enterprise and derring do of Empire. In short a Great not a Little Briton. Also an Old Maid sympathetic to Young Lovers. Like Poirot characterised by concrete details, motifs and tropes: the handbag, the Victorian raiment, clear blue eyes, the ‘absent minded’ incisiveness, the tics of walking round in a circle and saying ‘now what does that remind me of I wonder?’ Broadened by travel but sees the World in her Village and her Village in the World. Identifies universals like Evil or Lucifer as her foe. Too realistic about fallen humanity to be a Liberal but too good-hearted (and genuinely Christian) to be a Neoliberal.
Chlorinated Intelligence Agent Frank and Mark Adams, “Government contracted on a private number.” A private double agent working out of a secret double (Room 101A) room in Cock Hall on a contract for Colonel Mustard but also under cover for American interests in Little England. Attempts to solve the Covid case in classic “Big Sleep’ tough-talking Philip Marlow style but his double vision is Trump Private-I’d by an equation of any public health enterprise against the Covid crisis with Reds under the Hospital Beds. On a theory that might help the common good, Frank declares “I can’t share it, man. It’s Mark’s.”
PC Plot PC Plod’s political correction.
WPC Plot For those who assume PC Plot is a man. She may be but ‘assume’ makes an ass out of you and me.
Chief Constable (John) Melton naively brings in Agatha Christ Eyes (Poirot and Marple) from AC/OCD to help/replace the existing team led by Ken Hill, at the behest of Superintendent “Market’ Law of Bourgeois Realist Plod. His epic career is a sustained effort to regain the Lost Eden of a Greater Britain. A Don Quixote in a world of Sancho panzers.
NHS Pathologist dies on the front line of the pandemic and vital DNA evidence is lost with him.
LETSCOBBLE The Little England In The Styx Clued Ouija Board Basement Level Excavation is a community archaeological project run as a strict anarcho-syndicalist collective investigating thousands of years of Little England in the Styx Village Murders – Bronze Age poisonings; suspicious Boudiccan burials; Bodies hidden in industrial Roman ovens; Viking war crimes; Church intrigues; entire Norman crimes scenes moved; Soil Extinctions; First War World Aerodrome mysteries all in a search for a national character, motive, opportunity and modus operandi. At the time of writing, still unfound. But behind LETSCOBBLE is a cabal code-named ‘The Clued Ouija Board’ a crack team of supreme beings so over the top secret they are named after and merged with the field of enquiry itself – the Clued Ouija Board. Village rumours of terrifying Marxist ceremonies performed in the woods and fields and around the campfires after dark or of strange gender-subverting costuming rituals and even of an Irish jihad to overthrow the parish council and replace the Church of Little England with a fanatical Jesuit Islamic Buddhism can probably be explained by the organisation’s unusual administration (ie not Tory); by bearded archaeologists of both sexes trying to keep warm inside the nighted tents of their tilting field by putting on any clothing that comes to hand and by the desperate repeat invitation to entertain the spooked and trench-fevered diggers– any port in a storm - extended to the Stand Up Chameleon Formerly Known As Essex Man who politically and culturally rebrands himself every year (most recently as Sham Rock the Irish protest singer) in a bid to beg another gig for his three non-sequitur non-sectarian sectarian singalonga-brexit knee jerkers (merchandise available from his Stand Up Chameleon Formerly Known As Essex Man Sham Rock-emblazoned van). The Clued Ouija Board are in actual fact top-secretly digging for Boudicca and Arthur’s graves as part of their quest for the Celtic roots of Britain; and whatever the Super says may unearth information relevant to our present two murders.
Captain Hastings Amateur!
Other Characters
Dead Author’s Wife, Author’s long-suffering wife and semi-detached (cottage) narrator. The Sane Wife in the Lockdown to Martha de Mustard’s Mad Wife in the Attic. When she (Dead Author’s Wife) also perishes in the pandemic (Feminist critics have campaigned - so far unsuccessfully- to have her promoted from Other Characters to the List of Victims) her ‘reliable’ Narrative Voice is replaced by a Grumbling Appendix of Revelations, Hallucinations, Vanity pressed; ‘Hybrid’ publishing; Unreality TV, Radio and Social Media Broadcasts and masturbatory self-releases; her rather plain truth by a beautiful Vision (through a glass stained-ly) blending a chink of Light with a lot of pretty lies. It is not true that Author had business cards printed identifying their Marriage as Author Ransom BA and Author’s Wife; it IS true that both identified ‘Bachelor of Arts” as their profession on their Wedding Certificate as they married for love, penniless and without prospects, only entering the teaching profession and the Civil Service respectively as a last resort when Author’s first nine volumes of sub-verse failed to attract a publisher.
Postmodern-Post-man Pat. Arrested in pursuit of his public duty by private vigilantes for trespassing on private property. Public hospitalised by Covid and, when in NHS Care, led a public protest at the privatised shops selling quack medicines, virus-transmitting ‘PPE’ kits; obesity drinks; heart attack crisps and stroke sweets: and generally acting like he owned the place. Some, including the Old Stalinist Professor Plumski, believe that Postmodern Post-man Pat and other unsung public service and/or wage slaves like NHS Pathologist; Nurse Minus 350 Million; Doctor, Ploughman, Shepherd, Barman and Rubin are the true unsung heroes of the story.
Butler He didn’t do it (but did he see it?)
The Galadriel Coch Rhi-Bens, A Welsh Mountain Family Robinson ancestral Iceni owners of the Cock Hall Estate - lured East by that old Logres-longing Hiraeth to seek their Iceni roots in Cockley Cley (which they call ‘Llanfairpwllgwyn gyllgogerychwyrndrob wllllantysiliogogogoch’.) They fetch up at their real homeland Cock Hall by ‘mistake’. It’s been a long time since 61 AD: they feel it in the water and smell it in the earth but they are unnerved by the ups and rolling downs of Icenia and traumatised by the fens.
Chef ‘Gammon’ White Mrs Wight’s incompetently entitled nepotism-promoted son. His signature dish – replacing before the Squire is even cold the previously favoured Peacock Au Vin - is Snobside of Brexit and, at Christmas, Castrated Cock.
The Brown Lady The ghost of Dorothy Walpole Townshend; wife of ‘Turnip’ Townshend; sister of Sir Robert Walpole, and the heart that joined them when that family firm was thriving and ruling 18C Britain and its incipient Empire. Now a heritage asset but will not haunt to order; a browned up Mrs Wight often substitutes.
Members of the Cast are played by Members of the Cast.
THE TEXT
(“Who Killed Cock Robin?”)
Prefix
"Who killed Cock Robin?" "I," said the Sparrow,
"With my bow and arrow, I killed Cock Robin."
"Who saw him die?" "I," said the Fly,
"With my little eye, I saw him die."
"Who caught his blood?" "I," said the Fish,
"With my little dish, I caught his blood."
"Who'll make the shroud?" "I," said the Beetle,
"With my thread and needle, I'll make the shroud."
"Who'll dig his grave?" "I," said the Owl,
"With my pick and shovel, I'll dig his grave."
"Who'll be the parson?" "I," said the Rook,
"With my little book, I'll be the parson."
"Who'll be the clerk?" "I," said the Lark,
"If it's not in the dark, I'll be the clerk."
"Who'll carry the link?" "I," said the Linnet,
"I'll fetch it in a minute, I'll carry the link."
"Who'll be chief mourner?" "I," said the Dove,
"I mourn for my love, I'll be chief mourner."
"Who'll carry the coffin?" "I," said the Kite,
"If it's not through the night, I'll carry the coffin."
"Who'll bear the pall? "We," said the Wren,
"Both the cock and the hen, we'll bear the pall."
"Who'll sing a psalm?" "I," said the Thrush,
"As she sat on a bush, I'll sing a psalm."
"Who'll toll the bell?" "I," said the bull,
"Because I can pull, I'll toll the bell."
All the birds of the air fell a-sighing and a-sobbing,
When they heard of the death of poor Cock Robin.
Act 1.
I. The End of the Line
Squire Peacock lounges over the white marble floor,
No rope round his neck; no knife in his back,
No candlestick pestling his little grey cells,
Just the world in a virus, a corona attack.
All the wanna-nobs flocked to Cock Hall( ) last night
Snob-noshing beneath feudal chandeliers,
Watching Cavalier points under courtesies,
Filles fiancéd, fillies fielded, fences, finance, feudings, fears.
Now, as still as his statues, their host lies dead,
His white palace frozen and under a cloud
His Olympian, cut-diamond, snow queen is caught
Like Clytemnestra clutching a red-handed shroud.
DI Ken Hill, DS Len Wade, in Conservatory with masks,
Bag up the hanky, "If you’re on there, we’ll find ya!”
"But one dropped it in Argos – no, Iceland - with one’s lover.” “He
Was picked up last night, with your diamonds, in China!"
Lady Peacock protests, to Chief Constable Melton,
"Why would I murder the Last of the Peacocks?
He's the father of half of my children," (she snorts) “my
Cock, lock and stock; (sniffs) my chocs, rocks, and frocks."
Mrs White, the Housekeeper, pure as driven snow
Blockading the Mistress from 'these lowlifes', steps up:
"Ditch the Peacock au vin, box the Snobside of Brexit
And keep all these doors to the Outside shut."
Old Iceni crime scenes and Welsh caravans
hurtling East on Celtic routes to Little England in the Styx
through a privatised transport of isolated bacterial cultures going West
(carrying the murder hanky) not to mention Postmodern Post-man
Pat’s bright red van, its owner arrested
by a masked Private Plod for ‘letterboxing’ 658 properties
and 2 metres up Snow White’s elephant SUV rear
stockpiled with shopping while the NHS serves on empty
and a souvenir edition of the Daily Authoritarian Past Tense Straight Linear Cause-Effect Oxygen-Supply-Demand Semi-Detached Bourgeois Realist Plot In-My-Beginning Is-My-Middle-England-Ever-After Revenge Narrative
heavy with the story of Mrs White’s cancellation
and replacement by Dr Orchid, Dr Black's secret daughter,
while an overfed fox in Saville Row actor’s clothing
jeers in from the hard right into the middle of the road
to lead her extinction rebellion
barking about National Health Servants who “need to be applauded to do their jobs.”
Block the Boudicca Trail up the B666. "This
Ain't the road to ‘Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch*’
This is the road to Dis."
The Brown Lady appears with a headless Dr Black,
Are you seeing ghosts, milady, or old sins coming back?
Snow White takes them out in a panic attack:
"Not part of the cult-cha; not part of the pack!"
* “The church of St Mary in a hollow of white hazel, near to the rapid whirlpool and to St Tisilio church, near to a red cave” (A vital clue revealing the entire narrative of the murder and the identity of the murderer in an ancient encryption. Not lost on Chris Rea.)
II. Cock Hall
III. Ken Loses The Plot
"Boss, we need this result, all the Lounge Billiard Ballrooms;
All the hounds on The Eastern Daily Mail;
All the Skulthorpes and Death-Creakes of self-isolation
Will cue our coronas to Cock, if we fail.”
"Have a night off in Lynn with the Neighbourhood Watch,
Catch the best show in town on their CCTV
Watch the Linnets. Relax. The CC's brought in two of his own,
Old Agatha Christ-Eyes from AC/OCD..."
"We’re the Freud Squad, n’est ce pas?" bows ol' Ercule to Jane.
She drops a purled stitch and smooths her church lace,
Jumpy as a polter in Guist,"Oh indeed!" going pink,
"Cock Hall, like Hell Hall, is a very lonely place."
"And a Chaos of flowerbeds, imbecile that I am,
My ideas as deranged as PC Plot’s rouge-stained collar."
"There’s a fire in my brain and an ache in my heart,”
Coughs Jane, "of what does that remind me, I wonder?"
His grey cells detain her woodland-nymph foot
In a slender Paris shoe that mounts a soft stair
Of Victorian passion through seven dropped veils,
L'amour a la mode… Achoo!... avant la Grand Guerre....
An Herculean stud exploding from tight city trews
Hits smartly the small of Miss Marple's back,
“J’ai désole! C’est le crime de passion, ca!" But she’s hooked.
“Two Eyes,” hers answer, “to follow the murderer’s tack.”
Old Roman Remains and self-Brexit car jams
jarring up a beach road
through Little England in the Styx
jerkily mis-directed around the ruins of ‘Jerusalem’
Dr Blake’s visionary folly, originally a chapel;
since the Death of the Author, a shrine,
and, after serial deconstruction,
a pocket-sized postmodern pastiche of Styles holiday home
for Mrs Wight’s beach whale SUV
parked outside her fridge and TV
to save her the trouble
of having to waddle
and closing the public highway to the sea
by California-dried matinee private idol CIA heart-throbs
Frank and Mark Adams filming Midwinter Murders;
Thought for the Day with Private Fraser
(“WE’RE ALL DUMED!)
and an episode of Top Cat
where he gets the world back
‘for not liking me’
with the President of the United States.
Block the Boudicca Trail up the B666. "This
Ain't the road to La Dolce Vita in Paradiso Elysium.
This is the road to Dis."
The Brown Lady appears with a headless Dr Blake,
Tarot card Britains facing forward and back.
Snow White takes them out in a panic attack:
"Not part of the cult-cha; not part of the pack!"
IV. The Seat of Power
In a waking dream of un-buried murder,
Christie’s Argus ‘Eyes’ descend to the gun room below,
"Under all the tall storeys and ivory towers,
At the base of the noble mind, here, we know.
The viral Prof Plum has Scarlet’s software on his hard-drive!
"In your what-happens-next, whodunit waits upon 'I would'
Your class is the village's vampire, my child,
The dead past sucking its rosy future's blood.
"Now your father lies dead in a corona of thorns,
Evil future injected in God’s old lead money veins,
Play their Roman church candle shtick Fall Guy- and boom!
Nothing on earth to lose but your chains."
"All those grey, blue-rinsed, white lies they told me, Aunt Jane!
For that ethical farmer, so reverend Green
Just to ravish Dad’s blood-watered crops, not me!
Plumski's deep-frozen spirit was never so mean."
"But his youth’s fever dream in an old man’s fevered crown,
“Through your guilt”, Poirot cries, “is controlling your brain!"
"Life is Evil Made Do ('Made Old, You Old Maid!' sobs the Prof)
Or Made Good. Be the star of her fallen morning!" pleads Jane.
Prof remembers that spring atop the winter palace,
The warm youth he was… she has now. And then
To save her young heart, he blows out his brains. Poirot ducks.
Marple sighs, "An heroic, unhappy, almost English (dead) end! "
Old Saxon boneyards and island-nation-sand-rammed
white builders' man-vans behind a fallen apple tree
not to mention Postmodern Post-man Pat in a moonstone-bright
Ghost Office delivery juggernaut for Mrs self-island Wight -
in her self-unconscious authoritarian past tense
daily dis mall newspaper that hates Britain showhome
straight linear cause-effect oxygen-supply-demand
semi-detached bourgeois realist plot in-my-beginning
is-my-Middle-England-ever-after revenge narrative
planetary-extinction-with-farm-views cul de sac -
of Argos ventilators; Amazon vaccines;
morgue suites from Iceland; gowns and masks from China;
and a private hospice the size of a small town
from Dis Mall Bathware, Kitchen & Hall
behind a rather remote-looking doctor
to whom she just gave her symptoms
being tracked 20 gridlocked miles out of Lee Harvey Oswald Drive,
Washport, by THE CYBERTROLL SHOUTING “WHODUNIT!”
HE CARRIED HERE IT IN HIS TARDIS! HE’S A NASTY MAN!
(“we all dunit! says Ken Hill. Non, Noes Poirot
“we are all the murderer and all the victim, oui,
but the self-isolation in the public spirit,
and the self-isolation of the self-interest,
are not at all the same
there is one here who murders society itself,
who is not at all le good bourgeois
he appears on the surface;
in his Chelski-blue shirts and his boots of Bahrain
and his Mend & Make Do & Die PPE Kits
of Little England in the Styx.
he is the one to blame; as the coroner will explain;
HE is the Cain;” “or SHE,” coughs Jane)…
Block the Boudicca Trail up the B666. "This
Ain't the road to Midsomer Maidens In The Woods Next The Tavern.
This is the road to Dis"
The Brown Lady appears with a headless Dr Blake.
She’s running late with all the traffic; she’s speaking through the flak,
"Krishna's Eyes in your Peacock tale: give them back!"
Snow White takes them out in a panic attack:
"Not part of the cult-cha; not part of the pack!"
Act 2.
I. Colonel Mustard's Counterplot
After life's coughs and splutters, the Squire sleeps well,
(Mustard's unconscious death-wish to be Squired can't stop him)
But the Christie slams shut and England’s unsolved,
Not coughing in its sleep, more asleep in its coffin.
Dick Sparrow, a Super Head in the Clouds of (un)Doing,
Out of office (all) hours, baton-slick, born to run,
Guards the van of a new charge, retraining the House guides
In Heritage Homicide Holiday Fun!
"It's political correctness gone m-mad!" trumps the Colonel
As his bust of Dr Black is burned. "That pike-lip: it's
An original colonial design!" "Norman, you're political in-
Correctness gone mad," says Miss Scarlet, "you're Auschwitz.
"Your ‘omniscient’ Nazi counterplot with private alib-Eye
Would 'remove' PC Plot (and lady suspects from his scene
To your kitchen/bedroom) wipe your hand from the Blade, unbreakably
Frame: Black for Dad, Brown for Plum... and petrol-tank Jack Green!”
The Colonel’s private Market Force glides over from Burnham
In a fleet of Chelsea tractor, each the size of his mother’s hearse
(As Eve falls) private wealth-cushioned against the potholes
To the Common, where a cold cougher pinches the private purse.
“When my Vikings scythed Blake’s head off at your Norfolk Noir launch
Of his PRIVATE I'S-ATION AND THE MURDER MOST FOUL
OF ONE NATION BRITAIN , I ‘solved’ the Death of that Author
But his ghost possesses Cock Hall, damn his black bestseller soul!"
Old Viking murders and self-escape yachts/ through titanic migrant waters/
spilling Undead Rule Britannia landslides
of beached red herring
yanked out of the frying pan of Europe
into a twin tower safety burger to take out
live far eastern markets
and kit-supplied far eastern science
from these global-virus-conquered,
Nelson Victory lanes
by double cross-eyed 2020 vision
under-cover commie chefs Frank n Mark Adams
(“Government contracted on a private number.”
“You’re a marked man, Frank”;
“You’re a franked man, Mark”)
behind the Black Shuck Headline Hell Hound
of The Baskerville Telegraph
chasing a wild goose:
a big game bargain-hunter in a mask
shooting 30 miles up to a Lidl in another town
in a top-of-the-range rover (clapping the NHS out of one window;
taxing its leave-to-remain out the other;
driven by no kind of need except ‘GREED IS GOOD’
keeping the wheels of capitalism and coronavirus turning;
chuntering “there IS no society
it’s up to the individual not the State how we risk our bodies
and those of our neighbours and colleagues…
until we need the NHS, the BBC, the RAF
to save our little I-land of alien nation)
Block the Boudicca Trail up the B666. "This
Ain't the road to Valhalla in the Havens on the Haystacks next the Sea.
This is the road to Dis."
The Brown Lady appears with a headless Dr Black,
Ghosts of an Empire Colonel Mustard wants back;
Snow Wolf takes them out in a panic attack:
"Not part of the cult-cha; not part of the pack!"
II. Captain Hastings’ Elimination
I’m snowed in at The King’s Head by holiday Homers
Who park three 4 by 4s EACH in lanes built for the horse!
And a Berlin Wall roadworks winter-timed by the council
To suit this Public House not the PUBLIC of course.
It can’t be Scarlet, though she Nayed the squire her father
And his bridal nomination, she loved them both (sur)really;
Her flirtation with the Prof was just a lovely filly’s folly
With an NHS-under-bed Red, a free and PPEasy.
“Nor Royalist Lady Peacock, though she ‘Dissed’ the squire her husband’s
Agreeing their daughter’s union with Radical Green Jack
Well, we know who wore the jodhpurs in the Peacock marriage.
No need to kill a spouse she could whip to Dis - and back;
“Nor the Colonel with his Nasser-splintered one-eye Eden glass
And private fly that saw him die for Eve’s attention since Eton,
Private selfies on the Oedipus trail, rewarded then, as now,
With Abel’s Caining and that private after-healthcare with matron.
(“Not on our NHS that hawks, with bright crack-papering bills,
ALL FOR SOME; SOMME FOR ALL; NO FUTURE; NO VACCINE; NO ANTIBIOTICS
But why we need an implant and a whitening root canal
And ALL the latest BARGAINS in surgical cosmetics!!!)
“Nor Black & Brown, whose Looks could, couldn’t Murder in a Library
From which they’ve been expired. Nor Jack the Public Green
In a Scarlet Study: he gave me his Old School word. And so
Beyond our DI Ken, a Last Trump over Poirot… it can only… have been:
M-m-m-AAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH -”
Old Civil War siege-works and laughing Cavalier
one eyed lockdown-breaking
Good King Charles Interpretation of History pub-tours
sponsored by Specsavers (should have gone to Oedipus)
2020 vision private double-cross four-eyed by Kentucky-fried,
California-dried CIA agents Frank n Mark Adams
(“Government contracted on a private number”
“You’re a marked man, Frank”;
“You’re a franked man, Mark”)
staking out a lost Castle of Perseverance
in an angel-wing mirror
cracked from side to side
between the Word on the street
and a Marlow hip-pocket vision of the bay
It’s a paradise… lost:
fig leaves and Freudian slips
on the new line between the public
and the private
I
still working the First Murder case
from dawn to dewy Eve like
FOREVER because WE dunit, Mark.
(you mean like Oedipus, Frank?
Oedipus is all right if you like modern.
I mean like CAIN, Mark)
grave=gridlocked
behind a coffin cul de sac
parallel nosy parker
in a white elephant SUV
with out of REAL estate plates
Block the Boudicca trail up the B666.
This ain’t the road to a New Model Millennium of the Saints.
This is the Road to Dis.
The Brown Lady appears with a headless Dr. Black
And an All-in-all Saints commonwealth, plain English Jill and Jack.
Snow White takes them out in a proud by panic attack.
Not part of the cult-cha, not part of the pack.
III. PC Plot’s Arrest
"THERE'S BEEN ANOTHER MURDER!" over-acts the Superhead
In the dug up Saxon boneyard, then sees the grave’s for real:
Captain Hastings in the trench, a Norman arrow through his 'I'
Ghost-written there by Mustard as 'The Squire' who cuts this deal:
“I’m your born-to-be-General and life’s dealt m-me a loaded hand.
You can put your m-mortgage, children’s centre, white & blue shirt on me.
You can bank on another M-Mayfair house, another Grenfell hotel,
A neo-liberal M-murder case unleashing m-my Land of the Free
To trump as one (Mrs White too loud) “Build a Great Wall around China.
Send all the corona-sick yellowbellies; owlish Gretas; fires, bugs, rains;
Locusts, floods, foreign bodies, nasty reporters; hurricanes (you want
Fries with that vaccine?) back where the virus came…
“Mustard’s Holiday Hearths (with Chef ‘Gammon’ White) the new Kings
Of Cock Hall, will keep all our outlets open; all our inlets closed.
Together, we can carpet bomb the pinko out of this commie corona
With our hyper-ventil, market-leadin’, privateer overdose.
“Comme les généraux de mon pauvre capitaine Hastings à la Somme,
Your Private I’s too narrow, a troll’s blind glare at the Sun,”
Cries Green Eyes, glowing. “Game’s Up, ‘General’! Come into Mummy
For Supper,” pleads Jane. “NO! Let’s get this M-murder d-d-d…THUMP!” -
“We harrest this minimalist counter-plot against Who Killed Cock Robin
For asset-strip/un-solv/ing the Excalibur Brand of Britain,”
Truncheons WPC Plot, “No account for the Cat what killed ’im
Could be so far behind the lines, so blithely underwritten…-”
First World War Aerodrome man-shells Somme-being Back from the Front to be blown up the ammo-box stairway of their Safe Bilayati Homes
and a ten-seater-one-man bandwagon right up its own ass
underwritten off through an ambulance
accelerated to a standstill by a Stop Cat
wall-eyed and simpsons-complexioned in the headlights
undertaking the middle of the road to conduct
Scheidt's Symphony N. 2 in D Trump Major
with a riot gun and a bottle of thick bleach
and a big white Lie to cancel every reckoning
round the bend
of toilet creek
down the
free
way
to hell
mouth
first
“i will make you
phishers of men
- that’s phishers with a PH
world-sellers
- and PH WITHOUT the science -
if you follow
ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME
to the End
of the World
(NO thank you, says Frank.
No. Thank YOU, says Mark)
Block the Boudicca trail up the B666.
This ain’t the road to the New Jerusalem Without the Walls of Gaza.
This is the Road to Dis.
The Brown Lady appears with a headless Dr. Black
And the ghost of the brave new world of the young, which no wall can attack.
Snow White takes them out in a panic attack.
Not part of the cult-cha, not part of the pack.
IV. The Reveal
Colonel Mustard, in the Dining Room with smoking Revolver,
Asks where any secret passage to Happiness is.
"There's no Way Out," sighs Eve Lady Peacock, "no 4-cornered flights
From this Clued-Ouija Board, just the Night Train to Dis.”
DIS APPEARS! The plot convenes. The Freud Squad Argus-pans. “We indict!
In every room. With every weapon... The Snow Queen of Has-beens,
The Black and Cock Robin, breakfast cereal murderin’ … MRS WHITE!" …..
"I ’AD TO BLEACH THE ’OUSE OF ALL THE BLACKS, BROWNS AND GREENS!”
“You’re not Lady Peacock!” Mustard tears off her mask,
“What have done with my Lady P?” “I AM her and shall forever be
Eng-land as it is in Heritage! Your Lady Daily Male, your buried Hastings,
Your Mustard-servin’ Cod-Psycho Private I, survivin’! Your ‘Me.’ Marry Me!”
Mrs White is marched away and Winter goes with her.
Spring is back on the menu, multi-coloured and diverse.
Dis approves as Jack Green is betrothed to Miss Scarlet;
Dis agrees as Poirot blossoms and a primrose Jane demurs.
Dis untangles the Brown Lady, reveals Parvati-Proserpina
In a Wife-of-Turnip-Townshend ghost-disguise!
Dr Black blows his trumpet, England's foundations rock,
Green Eyes dances Blue Eyes into the sunrise.
V Finale: The (Happy, Everliving) End
raised stone age axings, raised bronze age barrow murders;
raised iron age death-works
and plastic age illiterate-banner-capitals
get-my-own-back-private-enterprise-
against-the-world plague wagons
(that’s my name on there)
behind a nose-trussed eve peacock in a broken ambulance
accelerated to a standstill
refusing colonel mustard’s death-bed proposal
of “a public stage for our private parts”;
overtaken by a hearse full of plum burnt red herring
undertaken by a hell’s angel
bat-released from lockdown
cresting the hill on one wheel above happy valley
blowing the last trump
THE HUMAN RACE IS OVER
AMERICA FINISHED FIRST
behind chlorinated cia agent frank and mark adam,
‘to be frank, mark, with a marked frank, and a franked mark,
we’re plucked’;
‘to be mark, frank, with a marked frank, and a franked mark,
we’re -;
behind dick sparrow spotted on a mobile
serially murdering squire peacock’s reputation
in the daily mall,
cancelling culture from the curriculum
(delete who killed cock robin;
insert advert studies for colonel mustard’s businesses;
delete break the class ceiling;
insert tom jone’s fielding, pupil self-assesed good writting
and speeling; how animals runed poor mr jone’s fram;
delete literature;
insert the ‘striving for comp
etence’ market brand academy
‘now the third best sponsored numbschool in dis on sea south!’
spinning sunset west down a progress-listing poster)
while serially overtaking himself overtaking
the long slow coach to diss
down a diversion marked ‘this ain’t the road to helhoughton
this is the road to FLOOD
into an oncoming agriculatural juggernaut…
leave the boudicca trail down the b666
to bronzed, new-aged, post-modern diggers jack green and miss scarlet
at the altar in the greenwood with the bluebells. this
ain't the road to hiraeth, that long-longing-logres-home-grief to be elsewhere. this
is the road to bliss.
“it’s going to be all right!” ejaculates dis
as scenes from the passion in an easterly procession
line the walsingham way
and heavens above
turn st mary's snowdrops through an orientation
to daffodils of fire
in the grail woods around all in all saints
through death, jane remembers,
with poppies,
to love.
dis ceases; frees parvati and the head of dr. black
as little england’s shell starts to crack.
its self- i-solation, its dracula virus-attack,
re-i -dentified with the all in all, re-i-dentified with the anti-drac
who gives the lifeblood back….
LOVE
rolls the die; his dying role; his ace, king, queen and jack;
ALL part of the culture, ALL-IN-ALL of the pack.
NB. The Text was climax interruptus before the Reveal by a page semi-detached from its spouse-Narrative (“The Wife’s Story”) whether in an accidental interleaving of Dead Author and Dead Author’s Wife’s papers or by Authoritarian Design is unclear.
*
Poirot’s eyes glowed as green as Ebony our red herring cat. He purred a moment (Poirot not Ebony) then declaimed his vision to the well-read room. “There was a detective story set during the Battle of the Somme. It purported to expose the bourgeois absurdity of the genre by showing the authorities fixated on a single murder while, all around them thousands were mass-murdered. But this case is different. Here we attempt to bring to book the mass murderer itself, the wielder of the coronavirus. Who is it?
“DI Ken Hill has not received the DNA results on the handkerchief left beside Squire Peacock’s body at the scene of the crime. NHS Pathologist contracted Covid 19 on the front line of the pandemic. His letter was delayed and then lost in the confusion and he has since become one of its 40,000 victims. So we must solve the murder by reason alone.
“I have always said it is character that reveals the murderer. The character of the murderer, but yes, but more importantly of the victim. What is there in that character which provoked the murder? So we must ask – Who was Cock Robin?
“There are four answers to that question. He was Robert Walpole, the Enlightened Democrat. He was Robin Hood, the May King. He was, as our Iceni predecessors and ancestral owners of the Cock Hall village estate believed, Coch Rhi Ben (“The Red King.”) the Sun. And He was, as our Covid-touched Canon Dove now believes, as one with Our Lord. Jesus Christ. All of these are associated in some way with the Light.
“You will notice that Easter never really happened this year. It was locked down. Somewhere outside of this Clued Ouija Board, the world has moved on towards some kind of light, yes. But that world is only a pale reflection of this one. And we have remained in the Winter.
“So we have the character of the murdered man. Light. Now we enquire into that of the murderer. Who would want to kill Cock Robin? Who would wish, like some CS Lewis Witch, to keep us in the winter and in the dark?”
Dick Sparrow twittered. “My family have always been blamed for it, completely out of context, but you’ve got to ask what sparrow-hater wrote that damned text and why.
Who Killed CR?
"Who killed Cock Robin?" "I," said the Sparrow,
"With my bow and arrow, I killed Cock Robin."
….(etc)
Poirot purred, “So you become a teacher and rewrite the story, with your ancestor as the hero. And when that doesn’t convince, because a child of five can see it’s stupid and the fakest news ever, you turn history into a gifte shoppe heritage trail and write stories themselves out of the secondary school curriculum with the falsest story of all that we no longer need stories even though stories are how we tell ourselves who we are all our lives and that some ethical truths are presentable only in the form of narratives. But Myths, as Dr Blake discovered, never die; and Legends never lie. Your ancestor – jealous perhaps of his rival’s popularity and his pretty red plumage - did kill Cock Robin. You are guilty only of the meaner crime of depriving children – and we are all children at heart - of the deep truths of European folklore and replacing them with a marketing campaign to sell yourself and your propaganda skills to the highest bidder. Keeping everyone in the Dark. Sending everyone The Wrong Way.” –
(Wife became fatally ill with Covid during this section and never completed her Story)
The Wife’s Story (as if we’d believe her!)
(narrated by Author’s Wife)
May 13 2020 was a lockdown day like any other in “Jerusalem” our North West Norfolk cottage. My husband is Author Ransom, the writer. You probably haven’t heard of him. Self-isolation and social distancing have been in place since we came here nearly 40 years ago. Even the first 20 when technically he was a teacher at the local comprehensive. As a lifestyle choice. He lives a private life and his private life is his daily enterprise. The coronavirus pandemic has merely confirmed his misanthropic lifestyle.
And once the lingering chest infection, contracted in November, which he recently feared might be the virus, cleared up in the middle of an unusually Lothlorien April, he’s never been healthier. For weeks, he’s not been within two metres of all the thousand bugs that flesh is heir to; that we sign up for as members of human ‘society,’ Our bank balance has never been healthier either. For the first time since he retired from his salaried teaching position, we have lived within our means. Mainly by not being able to spend all three weekend lunchtimes in our regular gastronome’s corner at the King’s Head.
The roads are dead quiet. Even more than usual. Even their occasional market-driven sound and fury through the village, signifying nothing but spoiling everything, along the mettled ways of time past and time future, completely silenced. Nature has emerged from all the suffocations of Man like a May morning. If you live in the country like us, that is. I can only imagine what lockdown might be like for families who live in the towns.
Little England in the Styx has always reminded our increasingly diminishing visitors of something out of Agatha Christie, long after we accepted its rather marshy backwater as the new normal. The railway station closed in 1963. When we asked on our first day here, when the next bus was, we were told “Tuesday.” Market day in Washport. Now both the market and the bus are gone. There is a steam train along the coast where you can get the (coal smoke and steam-whistle) 4.50 from Paddington Experience and Peacock Hall has been planning a Murder Weekend where you can pay to experience a classic Country House Murder, complete with a Poirot or Marple detective and a big reveal around the final dinner table on the Sunday evening. Every now and again a TV company investigates the possibility of a Sunday night drama in which a ‘documentary’ about the Murder Weekend is in progress and a real murder occurs. The parvenus on the parish council are keen but real Norfolk resists them as it has always resisted modernity; with an unanswered greeting, or a track that disappears in the middle of a haunted field.
*
We're the restless ghosts in the winds and rains,
Funneling the valleys, sweeping the plains,
Inlets and warrens that run underground,
Unbridled pathways, unquiet streams,
Haunted hidden corners of rootless sound,
Hives of Iceni, dead and unqueened,
By bronzebreasted redcrests violently weaned
We're the baby who wails for her dead mother's breast.
We are dead keening women, whispering grass,
The breath in the lilac and bluebells, the blast
Through the pale yellow oak leaves, hawthorns
And nettles. And that shout, queen of warriors,
From your victory chariot with your triumphant
Horsemen around you! And that salt chill of a winter's
Reprisals that blighted twice twenty summers.
We're the mother who wails for her new baby's death.
We are the cries in the corn, the harrowings hooted
Under moons of hunger, in the squeals of the hunted,
The creaking of geese through night-forest fears,
The unresting dunes and the moaning wave-break,
We're the memory that's cankered two thousand years
Of Celtic blood with an unhealing ache,
We're the oracles lost in the noise diggers make.
We're the dead daughters wailing for the end of the world.
*
Still waters have always run deep here and all the stiller for the lockdown. The traffic that ran through to other places to work; the holiday home invasions; the dwindling-numbers primary school all wiped out by that dramatic announcement in March: STAY HOME, STAY SAFE.
Today, Author went out for his daily exercise. The only difference being that he had to negotiate all the others now taking it. A brisk tramp up past Magazine Cottage (where a backwoods Cavalier armed and led a royalist coup against Parliamentarian Washport in 1643) along the remoter stretches of the Peddars Way thinking about Boudicca. A skirt along the East wing Civil War extension of Peacock Hall, avoiding the lockdown joggers and the Heritage Centre (its Maypole Manor House possibly once visited by the young Norfolk girl Anne Boleyn when it was still a Priory) and back over Ken Hill. Then home past the archaeological dig, avoiding the cyclists, thinking about all the layers of village history and pre-history...
*
Now as a summer dawn paints the ripening green-gold spears of Iceni corn a battle blood red,
Boudicca turns her attention to provincial governor Suetonius Paulinus.
This seasoned professional soldier marching hot-foot from his rout of Welsh tribes in the West,
Concentrates his army at a place never really identified but some believe near Fenny Stratford on Watling Street...
She is history not myth but remember
History is written by the vicar
And she neither wrote nor won.
No freedom, no future, no fun.
Rome had to win or lose an Empire,
Britain had to win or simply expire,
And with it the Western horizon,
No freedom, no future, no fun.
Procurator Decianus Catus
Spoke down his nose, spoke down his anus,
"The Emperor claims the dead king's kingdom"
No freedom, no future, no fun.
There’s no future in your Roman dream,
Your traffic lanes and your shopping schemes,
Your soapless baths and your manly steam,
The Iceni queen bee is making free
With your city!
She danced to the wardrums, warhooves, hornwhine,
Exhorting, as Romans were drilled into line,
Her race to fling back the squares of London:
No freedom, no future, no fun.
Now her rebels hole up, where home is none,
On roots thin as hope and a dream of Britain,
Hunted through nettles and thorns, their soles stung:
No freedom, no future, no fun.
Her hard core Iceni's last stand and fall
Is the longest, fiercest, stubbornest of all
But is crushed - like flint - in The Battle of Thornham:
No freedom, no future, no fun.
There’s no future in your Roman dream,
Your traffic lanes and your shopping schemes,
Your soapless baths and your manly steam,
The Iceni queen bee is making free
With your city!
"Our Roman matrons have a place too
In a civilised home: I could offer you
A place in mine: dresses, baths, decorum:"
No freedom, no future, no fun.
Death-and-glory queens, country dragons:
Whores of fashion in Camolodunum,
In Roman roses their own scent gone,
No freedom, no future, no fun.
The salts that she sowed in the Squareheads' wounds
Return in a wash that will sour our lands
But they couldn’t chain her to the History of Rome:
She chariots a tide in Whitehall home!
There’s no future in your Roman dream,
Your traffic lanes and your shopping schemes,
Your soapless baths and your manly steam,
The Iceni queen bee is making free
With your city!
*
Author was going to extend his walk as far as the grounds of Houghton Hall to enjoy the riot of emerald leaf and May blossom in the woods but he suddenly ran out of energy and felt a panicky soreness in his throat. Hay fever, he desperately hoped, with that great weariness of everything that often follows his weeks of manic creativity. The physical walks and rides aggravating and not at all balancing the mental marathons of his opus. If he wasn’t reciting the whole work aloud by overworked heart, he was thickly plotting and replotting it in his mind. He’d cycled to Houghton Hall the day before only to wonder what its alleged ghost the Brown Lady (late of this parish, the erstwhile sister of Robert Walpole and wife of Turnip Townshend) made of the lockdown. (“Would it put her out of business along with the and the rest of Norfolk Heritage?”) And he suddenly felt that lurch of perspective in Anna Karenina when we see the scene we’re in through the shockingly different eyes of Levin’s dog. Only in Author’s case it was the enormous wild boar piggy-eyeing him, peeing copiously with bestial ease – not to mention prolonged, guiltlessly un-delayed gratification – all over his carefully painted scene.
*
Brown Lady of the Haunted Halls
Where root and pig are rife
They say he killed her in his wrath
Who loved her more than life.
‘Where eyes should be, dark hollows were,’
Said one bold guest at Raynham
Another shot her shadow as she
Disappeared behind them.
What I have seen, I pray to God,
I’ll not again, Geist outen!’
Cried George IV ‘I will not sleep
Another hour at Houghton!
She died the queen of Norfolk’s reign,
First Lady of the Whigs,
They took her photo on the stairs
In 1936.
She loved her Viscount Charlie true,
She loved her brother Robin,
She was the heart that joined them when
The family firm was thriving.
And now she spooks the titled dogs
That guard the beds at night
And gives her guests in Halls, on stairs
And blackout roads a fright.
For love’s the witch to rule them all
Who more than turnips love
What are we else but rutting swine?
She answers from above:
I was the queen of Norfolk’s reign,
First Lady of the Whigs,
I am the Ghost of England Past,
The Circe of her pigs.
*
When Author came in, he reached for his long black comfort shelf of Agatha Christie. “2020 is the 100th anniversary of the first Poirot novel,” he announced, enjoying the Christie-estate slim back hardback grey pages and limpid font as much as the art deco clarity of the story. Then he had his nap and after that dived deep into his Mac screen for another manic afternoon’s work. I reminded him at 4.30 pm and at 4.45 pm that the aga was on for him to cook dinner. At 5 pm he finally rose in response and started chopping.
After dinner, we watched the news: Boris being Churchillian about how the British Government was dealing with the Coronavirus (except Churchill never got himself blitzed). We had our baths. I played him my new songs.
*
Don’t got to work,
Don’t go to school,
Stay in your homes
Keep the two metre rule
From the council Estates
To the posh ones with Parks,
From high fashion and high finance
To their slave kids in the dark;
From the Poles to the Equator
Supermoon into eclipse,
From the fjords to the deserts
Temperate zones to the tropics…
Can’t breathe…
Don’t got to work,
Don’t go to school,
Stay in your homes
Keep the two metre rule
Come and heal us with your caring
Then go back where you came,
You’re not from round here
We don’t know your name;
From the centre of the cosmos
To Little England in the Styx,
From the heart of Little England
To each human breath’s limits…
Can’t breathe…
Don’t got to work,
Don’t go to school,
Stay in your homes
Keep the two metre rule
Blitzing Brits for Blighty
As the Beast from the East
Spits his cold War into Salisbury
Then we go off piste;
Playing truant from the Test,
Now we’re top of Death’s class,
Lord Hee Haw dressed as Churchill
We are such a silly ass.
Can’t breathe…
*
He joined in on his bodhran on the last one, a little feverishly though I didn’t notice it at the time.
There was an empty hour before our usual long evening of Nordic Noir on TV so we filled in by playing Cluedo. I sipped a glass of red wine. Or two. He poured himself a third bottle of Corona. We ran through two complete games before and unusually he lost one. He successfully accused Professor Plum in the Study with the Revolver and then gave away the second game by rushing in on Mrs White in the Kitchen with the Rope. I had the Rope.
“I’ve always wondered how the murderer gets Dr Black’s body onto the cellar steps without anyone seeing.”
“Aren’t there secret passages?” I got up to draw the curtains and noticed the birds weren’t singing-. …. It was snowing! In May.
*
A moon of May and a shining hour
Hunted hind harried in the gloom
And passing fair is the fading flower
Fa la la la la la la la la la.
You stalked me softly who later flew
Hunted hind harried in the gloom
And kissed me bold, wild and free and new.
Fa la la la la la la la la la.
With lips of young, sweet and dangerous rose
Hunted hind harried in the gloom
That like the blood-red of summer blows.
Fa la la la la la la la la la.
So wild to hold though I seem so tame;
Hunted hind harried in the gloom
I lost my heart when I won the game.
Fa la la la la la la la la la.
A Tudor rose and a May queen’s throne.
Hunted hind harried in the gloom
I plucked them both and now both are gone.
Fa la la la la la la la la la.
I lost my soul for a golden band
Hunted hind harried in the gloom
That bows the neck as it forced the hand.
Fa la la la la la la la la la.
I lost my head for a peerless hour
Hunted hind harried in the gloom
And my True Thomas in the tower.
Fa la la la la la la la la la.
Six headless horses to lead me home;
Hunted hind harried in the gloom
A headless coachman; a hollow crown.
Fa la la la la la la la la la.
*
“Secret passages? Only in the corner rooms. No access to the Cellar there.”
There was blood in the snow. No, a dead robin. Our cat Ebony’s twenty white switchblades, 5 glistening in each paw, and thirty white mouth sabres, had ripped to death yet another Christmas.
Author was just listing the four corner rooms - Lounge, Study, Conservatory, Kitchen - when he noticed Squire Peacock’s body behind our sofa. “Jesus! What’s that?”
“Not a mouse?” I trembled. I hated Ebony’s kills but when she brought wild rodent life into my cottage and chased them into hidden inaccessible corners where they died, putrefied and finally maggoted, I hated it even more.
“A man! It’s the Squire!” He felt the pulse in the neck. “He’s dead!”
“Don’t touch the body please Sir.”
“Who the hell are you?”
“DI Ken Hill. This is DS Len Wade. And WPC Plot.”
The central pillar supporting our cottage’s upstairs rooms seemed to grow taller as in a fairytale; the room suddenly larger and grander. The floor was too small. The Cluedo Board expanded massively beneath our feet to fill it.
“Where the hell am I?”
“In a great deal of trouble, Mr Black.”
“Black?”
A row of six hostile faces regarded him. A WASP-ish looking man of military bearing, with grey blond hair, said in a rasping voice. “This’ll teach you to shoot your mouth off.”
“What?”
“Your radical digs at decent society out here in the sticks have come back to bite you on the bum haven’t they, Blake? You’re always bleating “There IS a society” and attacking my private enterprise in print in the name of some common weal but you’re just as bourgeois as the rest of us. Just a lot more petty. You’d stab every one of your competitors in the back and sell their vision down the Acheron River just to add their tiny slice of the ‘co-operative’ market to your own. Just as I crush my competitors for my very large share of the really competitive one. You employ no-one and no-one buys what you’re selling. You contribute nothing to the world except criticism. You’re no loss to this community, frankly.”
“All right Norman, just because Blak’s Children’s History of the Slave Trade sold 30 copies – 30 more than your hard-backed stiff-lipped Memoirs of A Lost Empire Part 6, From Eden to Aden,” scoffed Plumski.
“Still mouldering away unopened on the church bookstall,” laughed Scarlet.
“Blak was never part of the pack” sniffed Mrs Wight. “Not like Lady Peacock and Yourself, Colonel Mustard.”
“And Plum, Scarlett and me?” enquired Jack.
Mustard ignored both interjections. “One less Black is one less problem to police as far as I’m concerned. If you’ve murdered Squire Peacock, they should put a rope round your neck and kick away the chair.”
“Oh indeed, Colonel Mustard,” Mrs Wight nodded enthusiastically. She was the privately contracted housekeeper-manageress of Cock Hall and had established her son ‘Gammon’ White there as master chef. But any time the thrusting Mustard’s Holiday Homes moved in and took over the rather feudal Peacock enterprise was all right by Mrs Wight.; it would stymie the Plumski-groomed ravings of the Squire’s errant heir Miss Scarlett, currently leading the woke charge to CANCEL her. As reported in a cutting from the Daily Brexit concealed in her corset.
The Cancel Culture is replacing the Cock Hall Housekeeper after 60 years, deciding that she is too dated. She will be replaced by another female called Dr Orchid, adopted daughter of Dr Black, in a move to break gender stereotypes.
Middle Little England trembled with fury and indignation reading this, wondering if the counter trumpets of a culture war would ever sound. But Mrs White wasn’t dead yet. A Mustard’s Holiday Home takeover would turn back that particular gender clock and many others besides. Notably Scarlet’s dubious attachment to Jack Green, the ethical farmer whose lands adjoined the Cock Hall Estate. Scarlet’s Bando-republicano-themed red and black interior-designed Spanish Restaurant in Burnham Market, The Café Au Lait, (pronounced Olé), had embarrassed the family long enough.
Jack Green gave his beloved Scarlett a reverend look not lost on a Lady Peacock anxious to prevent their politically correct and in EVERY way undesirable marriage.
*
Alas my love you do me wrong
To cast me off discourteously;
And I have loved you oh so long
Delighting in your company.
Greensleeves was my delight,
Greensleeves my heart of gold
Greensleeves was my heart of joy
And who but my Lady Greensleeves
I have been ready at your hand
To grant whatever thou would’st crave;
I have waged both life and land
Your love and goodwill for to have.
Greensleeves was my delight,
Greensleeves my heart of gold
Greensleeves was my heart of joy
And who but my Lady Greensleeves
Thy petticoat of sendle white
With gold embroidered gorgeously;
Thy petticoat of silk and white
And these I bought gladly.
Greensleeves was my delight,
Greensleeves my heart of gold
Greensleeves was my heart of joy
And who but my Lady Greensleeves.
*
More flame coloured taffeta Basque separatist and the blood of a Red than sendle white and heart of gold in Scarlet’ case. But they still made that song their own, much to the apoplexy of Lady P, who preferred her agent provocateurs in an underwear drawer. Fortunately Scarlet’s grand passion for Jack seemed to have dwindled of late, albeit in her equally unsuitable enthusiasm for the ravings of Professor Plumski.
NHS pathologist, mask-less and without proper equipment, intervened. “The Squire has died of a massive dose of the Covid 19 administered at least 7 days ago. Your suspect –”
“Suspect? I wasn’t even there!”
“A likely story,” said Mrs Wight.
“I’m not even Blak.”
“Yes, you are. All over.”
“And you’re white all over. Mustard’s yellow all over. Lady Peacock is blue all over. Green’s green all over. Scarlet’s red all over. Plum’s purple all over. Colour doesn’t define us, does it?”
“Yes.”
“It’s just a pen name. And it’s Dr Black to you.”
“It’s just Black to me, actually.”
“He’s a persona, a mask. B-l-a-k. A mixture of William Blake and the colour. The Artist as overlooked rebel outsider; a shadow; an absence. Not the same guy who sits down to breakfast and suffers and gets a severe supraspinatus tendonopathy with sub-chromial bursitis from typing all day.”
“You should have thought of that before you placed yourself at the scene of the crime.”
“I’m not at the scene of the crime. I’m not even Black. Except as a persona. And even then I’m on the cellar steps, dead. I’m not the murderer here. I’m the victim of a previous crime.”
“Well you look like the murderer to us,” said Mrs White.
“Quite white, Wight. Very White Anglo-Saxon Pwotestant of you to say so, ” barked Mustard.
“Us?” enquired Jack Green sardonically. “There is no US”.
The pathologist coughed. “If you’d just let me finish. Dr Blake only just arrived here, D.I. Hill. And the Squire was poisoned with the corona virus 9 days ago.” Pathologist indicated the Usual Suspects ranged across the Cluedo-boarded floor of ‘Jerusalem’. I suggest you look among this pack of liars for the perpetrator.”
*
Jack Green shimmied across the Ballroom floor with the candlestick, keeping time to the tune he and Scarlet used to call their own. “Oh I am Fortune and the Lady Greensleeves’ fool,” he cried -
A section of the Wife’s Story has been redacted here; possibly NHS Pathologist’s lost post-mortem on the Squire or the famous Car Chase – DI Ken Hill in his VW Polo making a depsrate bid to save the planet by chasing down Colonel Mustard in his (much faster on the straights but much less nippy round the corners lanes and cul de sacs top of the Range Rover containing the Dr Black’s head and Solution to the Murders under golf clubs, Amazon parcels and huge bags of holiday loot in the boot) through the lanes, estates and fields of Little England in the Styx (filmed on location in Beirut) which killed fourteen people, injured twenty seven, did £4,789 worth of damage to dwellings including all those not standing empty as holiday cottages and ended in a grave-ploughing pile up in the churchyard of a nearby hamlet and which if published might have led to Colonel Mustard getting some points on his license for speeding.
“There was a menacing footfall behind him. “Detective Hill’s compliments Sir and you are wanted in the library,” said Butler.
*
D.I. Ken Hill peered out of the great West window of the Library of Cock Hall. You could see Lincolnshire on a clear day. The March sun had set over the Wash. The gathering gloom swallowed up the woods, falling gently in the dark towards the Fens and marshlands, which cultivation had never quite secured from their timeless past under the sea. A very different Norfolk from the sheep hills and pretty cornfields through which Ken had travelled to the crime scene early and a reminder of something primeval.
“There are three Norfolks,” said Jack Green suddenly in the shadows at his shoulder. Ken jumped about three feet and hoped he hadn’t noticed how much Jack’s stealthy appearance had unnerved him. “This is the one with hidden depths. The Coch Rhi Bens, that Welsh mountain family Robinson, who came looking under Cock Hall for their ancient village (thinking it was Cockley Cley, but drawn to the right earth by a deeper instinct than Mustard’s ‘Iceni Heritage ’ trail) well, let’s say our Wicked Fen wasn’t the high point of their weekend.”
“Take a seat please, sir,” said the detective. “Three Norfolks?”
Jack remained at the window. “Quietly seductive rolling heathland along the north coast and northern interior. You’re standing on that now. Sleazy broads in the deep south. Bewitching Fens to the West. Little England in the Styx is mostly the first and Cock Hall Farm commands some of the best mixed farmland, sea views, pretty valleys and hills in Norfolk, along with mine, but from this window you can still see Wicked Fen the old railway station, closed 1963, and the ultra-fertile Western extremes of the Squire’s estate. She’s Fenny that way.”
“I see from Dr Blake’s ghost-writing that the Peacocks have been here a long time?” said Ken Hill, indicating again that his witness should sit.
Jack turned from the window but continued to stand there, a looming shadow in the dusk. “One of England’s oldest Saxon families. They survived because no Norman could find the causeways like they did. Especially in King John’s day when the Wash was three times the size it is now. Wicked Fen was what they drained and reclaimed from the sea. But since the agrarian revolution the Peacocks have exhausted their soil; over-tilled it, killed it with chemicals. It was when the Squire saw the Saxon soil excavated by the LETSCOBBLERS and diggers under his own fields that he realised what a treasure his family had squandered. And that I could manage his air and water better.”
“Hence your serial arrests as a student for vandalising his GM crops?”
“Direct action, yes. Sometimes it’s the only way.” Jack laughed, his young handsome face suddenly very attractive. “I’d have been in rather hot water if his daughter Scarlet hadn’t been there with me.”
“Partners in crime. So you made common cause with his heir?”
“And fell head over heels in love, yes, in a shared passion for saving the planet and an organic rebellion against her ghastly old school parents. But that’s all off I’m afraid. The love affair, I mean.”
“Along with your influence over the Squire? Is that why you decided on some direct action regarding the Squire’s actual person?”
“Eh?”
“If you couldn’t Green the farm by marriage, you decided to do it by murder?”
“Believe me, DI Hill, I’d kill to save that land and bring it under Green jurisdiction like my own model organic farm. He’s got the one thing I haven’t: the old Boudiccan hill, perfect for a line of wind turbines. We could be a beacon to the world, like Turnip Townshend was for his, this time securing its survival rather than just harnessing its potential. But the Squire was going Green anyway. He saw the rich soil of his ancestors; he saw my farm; and he fell under the spell of Dr Blake’s history of his Saxon family: Robin Hood and the Death of One Nation Britain 1066-1984. He was Greener than me by the end. That’s the irony. As soon as Scarlet saw I wasn’t a rebellion against her father she lost interest.”
Ken nodded. This accorded with the Scarlet he had profiled in his list of suspects.
Jack concluded bitterly. “All the Squire’s murder has done is strengthened Lady Peacock’s hand, a hand about as Green as Colonel Mustard’s jaundice. Cock Hall will be a Mustard’s holiday camp and show farm now before the old Squire can turn in his grave.”
*
A few days after this, I insisted that Author stop work and let me nurse his Covid fever, which was now at its height. This Text will be the Death of you,” I said. He was unusually buoyant. Laurence Fox had Dissed the NHS on Twitter“What kind of profession needs to be applauded just to do their jobs?” and Author’s retort “What like an actor you mean?” had gone semi viral, accumulating three hundred and fifty likes, about three hundred more than usual . He told me he had one last character page to compile – there’s always one more last page – “I’ve finally captured this character” and then he could go to his rest. “Give me ten minutes.” He worked for two hours at a Covid fever pitch until I forced him to quit, save and close down. I helped him into bed, his head spinning. He lapsed into a semi comma, Then I came down to – Author’s Last Words; a character piece on (I assume) DI Ken Hill.
Named for the woodland in which he was born,
Between fierce Wash and Snettisham torc,
A UEA fast-tracked, field-seasoned copper
Gone green in his old age, and branded a dork
In the Queen Boudicca, surveils wild pigs;
Takes present-tense statements from wildlife, fungus, frost;
Drags wild goose trails through the spooky Celtic chase;
Goes ape if you swat a parasitic wasp.
Super ‘Market’ Law bleats, “You used to be tough!
DI Maximum Tillage, the bull of the farm.
Humanity Hall has a serial Cain
And a list of suspects as long as my arm:
“2000 species, 1500 acres, 5 employees,
4 support Universities, 6 research campaigns
And a global wildlife site for a crime scene.
Just find me the one mulched the old squire’s brains.”
That day on the hill when the Vision hit:
A species lost in a drain-water grave,
Or a green that won’t all come out in the Wash,
A climate corona-ing the crest of a wave,
Screaming “Land can be used to fight climate change,
To manage the health of air and water,
As a space for nature and people to breathe,
Instead of a counter for lambs to the slaughter.”
“You’ve lost the counter plot!” Super throws the Book,
An authoritarian bourgeois realist text,
“You can’t ken a Murder by sniffing the air
And counting foreshadows as what-happens-next!”
Grumbling Appendix (to be removed IF an NHS bed becomes available )
Dead Author’s Will
Being the Unfinished Will and Old Testament of Author Ransome (aka ‘Dr Blake’ pronounced with a silent e) interrupted by his Murder and found under his moved corpse in the cellar.
The Great Britain of Agatha Christie’s books is a global culture, embracing and speaking to the whole world (albeit in imperious English) with world-shaking characters engaged in and/or returning from Empire outposts or archaeological digs in Mesopotamia or from winning World Wars etc etc. The Little Englanders in the Styx of “Who Killed Cock Robin” retains the shrinking Breck’s Isle Briton’s Empire view of innate superiority only without the huge pink map, international importance or global perspective.
Poirot’s twin sleuth Miss Marple – the two buttoned up geniuses meet and work a case together at Cock Hall (and also fall unrepressedly in love) in a postmodern liberty never taken by Christie herself – though Marple’s village of St Mary Mead does feature in the Poirot novel ‘The Blue Train’ (cousin of The Orient Express, the 4.50 to Paddington and fatal grandmother of my own Night Train To Dis) - is, like Poirot, an outsider, indeed is that pretty much unheard of in the sleuth genre then, not just a woman but an elderly nosy spinster, an interfering ‘old maid’. The Village Cat. An Old Pussy.
The profound darkness and moral pessimism of Christie’s Murders is disguised by the happy endings; reassuring Papa Poirot/ Aunt Jane masterminds and the touches of PG Wodehouse comedy in the settings, tropes and characters: the wounded and brave but still ‘sub-Watson’ foil that is Hastings, the large wooden but decent and incorruptible MET policemen (Japp etc). As a general tendency, the most dark of all stories of all tend to feature Marple and the Poirot stories include some with a lighter touch. Marple sees Evil with a capital E in every village– she has a mind like a sink but points out that a sink is hygienic; she takes a dim view of humanity based on experience, but she is also a moral fighter with a Christian mission, often guiding the young from folly to a real love she seems to have lost herself somewhere during the Great War.
Marple especially of the two Christ-Eyed sleuths seems well versed in Freud and modern theories of the unconscious drives behind our actions but ‘le psychology’ is a key aspect of both Marple and Poirot stories. The gun room “at the base of the noble mind” at Cock Hall which a Marxist might identify as the economic base and military might of Capital might equally be analysed by a Freudian as the unconscious mind, that explosive and unstable combination of divining wisdom, Hamletian fragility and/ or id-iocy. (Either way it is “The Seat of Power” driving the world of the story.) While the attraction of Christie is the way Poirot and Marple soothe the ache of the world in the solution of a Country House murder puzzle, the merciful escapism never denies the pain. At some level it continues to address it.
I have a complete collection of Christie hardbacks and read them during troubled times – ie constantly - and this started in adolescence as a welcome escape from studying complex A level texts and critics in order to get to University (aka my real life.) When I mentally broke down under the jailbreak strain of perming D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers with G Wilson Knight’s holy-smokes on Shakespeare, reading Christie gave me place to start to convalesce – perilously, gratefully - before having to go back to those emotional trenches.
“The Mysterious Affair at Styles” (written 1916, published 1920) is a modernist masterclass of spare characterisation, concrete dialogue and clarity. It only falls foul of modernism by being a public discourse actually read by lots of people rather than being posh graffiti on a private wall no-one looks at. (“The Slim Volume” might be a good title for a Murder Mystery about Poetry’s once gregarious public Body being found dead on the unused fifth floor of an academic Library; the clue in the slim volume/ literary periodical being that not only was it only ever taken down from the shelf by the poets featured in it but that even they only read their own entry.) That other 1920s classic of modernism “The Waste Land, or The Death of Poetry As A Popular Art Form In A Slim Volume” (published 1922) on the other hand, hermetically translated as we all know from its original French by the poet himself, represents a Society-
Aggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!
Will left unfinished at Author’s Death
DI Ken Hill’s Statement (as if…!)
Colonel Mustard pulled a few old school ties to get me taken off the case. Author’s deceptively reliable narration presents this as a counterplot against itself, an attempt to turn a postmodern detective story into an advert for Mustard’s Holiday Hearths: viz, his planet-polarising-private one-eyed-multinational-totalitarian-climate-change-denying-big-business-bourgeois realism.
Plumski’s gunpowder plot to blow up Cock Hall, helped by a Scarlet he had programmed with his own vision, was always a Red Herring. While Agatha’s Christ Eyes were lured to the cellar, fighting that long-cold culture war, following a dead end, the real coup had already murdered Author, Peacock and One Nation Britain and was sending its enormous private market force of SUVs from its base in Burnham Market to annex Cock Hall for Mustard’s slave-waged holiday empire. That is the real gunpowder plot under the Text.
Mustard’s alt-right Guy Fawkes plot under the real dialogue of our times was never an alternative COUNTER narrative. No alternative counter narrative tries to blow up all the others, any more than a proper harmony or a counter melody tries to drown out the main tune. Mustard’s was a SUB plot that wanted to be THE plot, a subtext without a text, wanting not to engage with or counter or modify the Parliament of the plot but to blow it up and replace it. People rightly feel sorry for Guy Fawkes and the dreadful tortures he endured but he wasn’t a saint or a hero sacrificing himself for a better world (though he doubtless died believing so). If he hadn’t been caught he would have been the agent of an elitist absolutism, a counter Reformation to end all Reformations. Like Trump making a Freedom of Speech Speech Silencing everyone else’s Freedom of Speech.
I got it wrong at first assuming Author’s English Murder was the plot that needed foiling and subverting. (That serial front page Daily Mall false lead of Lady Peacock dropping hankies like a whore’s drawers all over the board with her diamond-Lover, Dick, APPARENTLY luring us away from the Dead End ‘Reveal’, the actual Red Herring of the Mustard-sponsored Christie-cliché Red under the flowerbed in the Cellar plotting to blow up capitalism.) But that Chimneys trope was always just a Private-Cod-Psycho-Eyesed Red Herring waiting to be burnt. In fact, Author’s Plot was PC, open, liberal, diverse, pluralistic, humane and democratic and Mustard’s neoliberal counterplot against it an anything but liberal coup, a Fascist Trump card against the game itself; individualism and freedom for one individual only. A deconstruction of deconstruction by deconstruction.
I had to stop reading against the Text and trust Author’s Vision instead. My Statement of the case will of course be discredited for ‘a lack of balance’; as in the Tory-led BBC guidelines where one has to say “Millions say millions fried in Auschwitz but on the other hand some say at least the train services were never disrupted by strikes or delays.” Well, it makes a change from ‘Cock Up Ken’s Cock All’ in the tabloids.
Mustard hated me for looking the other way into the future of the planet when I interrogated Jack Green’s direct action against Mustard’s Holiday Hearths-In-Association-With-Chef-Gammon-Wight’s Privatisation of The Common. So he made it his business to retard my career. DS Len Wade strongly believes I shouldn’t say this – so the only career to suffer should be mine - but if the Linnets hadn’t been on CCTV that night (one of the benefits of promotion to the National League) I’d have been sorely tempted to Green my face and join that direct action against Mustard myself.
Interview terminated 11.11pm 11 November 2020
Lady Peacock’s Cooked Book Her Christmas Eve Deconstruction of the Case
What about the cat? One of the many missed holes in Author’s story is that its reception obsessed over that cat; was certain the cat (a serial murderer of robins) answered the title’s question. Every time the cat disappeared from the text, there was uproar in the village that the villain be detained. WPC Plot was so neurotic about Ebony the cat happening to be black that she forgot the much more important fact that Ebony was a CAT. This is what happens when you let a folk tradition be complicated, infected and generally queered by Blacks.
Never take any character’s statement on trust, says Author, everyone has a motive for gossiping their version of what someone else says. Everyone leaves their bit of axe grind in their ‘objective’ witness statement. But the postmodern detective applies that to Author’s story as well. Kill off Author’s prejudices (I believe it is called The Death of the Author) and the following emerges. Squire Robin (Author’s patron, my faithful Cock, the ‘Cock Hall Cuckold’) was beset by anti-Napoleonic delusions of grandeur –Robin Hood; Robert Walpole; ‘one of England’s oldest Saxon families’ - and in a fever of cuckold-paranoia about Norman Mustard being my lover. Mustard, for all his self-interest, is devoted to his disabled wife of 70 years, Martha Dowry, as Mrs White knows to her chagrin. Martha Mustard, sadly incarcerated in the Mustard attic since her attempted suicide, is why Wight doesn’t protest at her own wrongful arrest. If she can’t have Mustard, and he told her so that very morning, in a scene Author avoided “(I waited all my life for Mr Wight. He never came”) life has lost all meaning for her.
Colonel Mustard the Trumpian entrepreneur, with his Holiday Homes and alleged Eastern European wage slaves, is Yellow, and my dear this is simply the Yellow Peril of Victoriana politically corrected for the limp-lipped woke reader, too weedy to call a Chinaman a spade. Yet my notorious lover – the so-called “Lady Peacock’s Lover” - turns up in China. Where the virus was invented. This is never pursued.
My handkerchief, on which the virus is carried, is dropped (in a cancel culture misquote of what I actually said and of the forthright manner in which I actually said it - I said that Clytemnestra was queen of Argos, where I holiday in Greece, which is how I am regarded during my vacations there and when asked further if I had been there during the credit crunch, added “no, Iceland.” In any case, what was that canaille Dead Author doing rifling through my drawers?) Hence I am made to say, in a guilty manner, that my prohibitively filigree Desdemona label handkerchief, on which the virus is carried, is dropped ‘in Argos, -no Iceland’ implying that Nation is now simply a sort of global shopping mall keeping the wheels of capitalism and coronavirus turning rather than the sacred blood-soil of one’s motherland and misrepresenting evidence which would surely exonerate my faithful White of murder.
Now reread the whole Text again, against its miserable grain, armed with that knowledge by a reliable class of narrator. (Oh and if in spite of Covid, you still want to stay on with us at Coke Hall for Christmas, do try Chef’s traditional Breck’s Isle castrated Cock au Mustard with those Brussels.)
Please stand to sing Hymn No 9, No 9 in your The Church of Little England Hymn Book, A Jolly Good Friday
Jesus was an Englishman,
The Son of Grace (WG),
Cured a hundred Limbs on the Village Green
And a Leper before the Last Tea.
Jesus remained a gentleman
Though the crowd’s game wasn’t cricket;
Carried His Cross with stiff upper lip
And was, only politely, anti-Semitic.
And a Merry Christmas to all my readers. Lady P.
Coke Hall, Little England in the Styx, December 24 2020.
Covid’s Metamorphoses: A Revaluation by Prof. Leon Plumski
The Walking Undead phase of Late Viral Capitalism is using the global Covid virus as a devastating postmodern murder weapon to seize first Little England in the Styx and tomorrow the world. In a Planetary Extinction Happy Ending, Colonel Mustard marries Eve Lady Peacock ("a public stage for our private parts”) and appropriates Cock Hall for his slave-waged Holiday Hearths empire, thwarting the late Squire's plans for the greening of his estate and the marriage of his heir, Miss Scarlett, to the reverend Jack Green, ethical farmer of the adjacent rolling open arable, pastoral, wooded, river valley, coastal plain, drained marsh and heathland. A nationwide witch hunt for Black, the invisible and reliable Author accused of murdering the Squire, begins.
Blake had been dead for three weeks on the cellar steps at the time of Peacock's murder so he couldn’t have killed the Squire. Public Eye DI Ken Hill saying so incurs the wrath of fake news Headline Hell Hounds on the Baskerville Telegraph and Beeston Mail; not to mention Mustard's old Etonian and Bullingdon Club schoolchums/ Mustard's Holiday Hearths investor Super 'Market' Law, who takes him off the case while Chief Constable John Melton (London Grammar and Cambridge) makes wet liberal speeches about our green and pleasant land lamenting DI Hill’s dismissal instead of insisting on his reappointment and being ready to back that insistence up with direct industrial and agricultural action and armed struggle. This unholy trio are last seen playing golf as a Flood of sewage ascends the Waste Land links, insider-fiddling while the planet burns.
Without a proper socio-economic context for Black’s Text, we are in danger of releasing Squire Peacock from a properly gruelling interrogation. His ‘progressive’ self-dramatization as some kind of modern-day Robin Hood of Loxley Hall conveniently Lincoln-greens over his reactionary class role as Capital, labour-exploiting landowner of the Cock Hall estate and major investor in the retail Empires of Iceland, Argos and Amazon. Why does the Text so vehemently attack Lady Peacock for this and not her husband, the actual owner and slave-wage employer of (among many other wage slaves) the much-maligned Mrs White, a complete dupe of The Daily Brexit and drilled with every reactionary idea on the planet certainly but in economic terms no less an honest exploited proletarian than Postmodern Post Man Pat, Nurse Minus 350 Million, Doctor, Shepherd, Ploughman, Butler, Barman and Rubin and many other scandalously underwritten Heroes of any properly contextualised Text? Why doesn’t Postmodern Post-Man Pat get a love story and a Happy Ending rather than those gentleman farmers Scarket and Green? Is Peacock so very different from his class ally Colonel Mustard simply because he farms land rather than provides holiday homes? If you answer a rhetorical question with a resounding ‘No’ , is it still a rhetorical question? NO!
Ms Scarlet Green (formerly Miss Scarlet Peacock) has asked to be disassociated from this Revaluation.
Colonel Mustard’s Defence
PRIVATE KEEP OUT. THE PUBLIC WILL NOTE THAT THE BOUDICCA TRAIL; THE LITTLE EDEN COMMON; LETSCOB; THE HELL (FORMERLY COCK) HALL ESTATE AND THE CHURCH OF LITTLE ENGLAND WHILE FORMERLY A PUBLIC FREE FOR ALL ARE NOW PRIVATISED AND ADMISSION PERMITTED ONLY TO PATRONS OF MUSTARD'S HOLIDAY HEARTHS. (YES THAT DOES INCLUDE THE NOW INVITATION-ONLY TRADITIONAL ALL-VILLAGE CAROL PROCESSION) BY ORDER OF PRIVATE-GENERAL MUSTARD.
REMEMBER "Greed is God and There is no society, only a Privatised I." (Until we need the NHS.)
Colonel Mustard; your Cokeservative & LEIP/BYO candidate.
Backword by General Mustard, PDQ and Cocktail Bar.
(Please note that the General's pre-coup rank of Colonel is erroneously retained in early editions of these sleevenotes to the tie-in album* of the revised film)
When I took over this story, it was a spineless deconstruction of bleeding-heart-Green-behind-the-ears-PC plots about war-fleeing Belgian refugees sleuthing over here to take our jobs and Old Maids from St Mary Mead. I imposed an immediate bourgeois realism, privatising its uncompetitive social criticism into a drama of Author's deconstructing individual psyche. I rebranded it 'YOU Killed Cock Robin!' after our ancient Breck's Isle nursery rhyme. I sold it to Heritage and funded the adverts by closing down local children's centres. I eliminated the visionary and inclusive nonsense of spelling 'Blak' the old way ('Blake', with a silent e) in an effort by the enemy to make him seem less foreign. Then when all my immoveable objects were in place, I unleashed the irresistible counter-Text “WHO Cancelled Mrs White!!??”
The Cock-Eyed, Public-Eye claim made in THE TEXT that The Brown Lady embodies the haunting debt of our Empire to the East and West Indies is given short shrift in my Book. The listener will deduce (see Chef 'Gammon' White's traditional 'Castrated Cock with Mashed Brussels Cooked Book') that, on the contrary, 'The Brown Lady' (reputedly the ghost of 'Turnip' Townshend's wife and Robert Walpole's sister murdered by the former when the Whig family firm of Walpole and Townshend was expanding British colonial investments as Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary in the early 18th century) represents the menace of dark races and foreigners to our national business.
My plain statement and fully audited account of the Case ends with fanatical eco-farmer Jack Green 'wanted' by the police, his self-extinction rebellion tipped over the edge by young M-Miss Scarlett's rejection. If that's not a motive for killing her father the Squire - and it isn't - I don't know what is! As for the preposterous allegation that 'Jerusalem' our national hymn was written by a socialist, see my "m-memoirs of Empire Volume 6 1956- 1969: From Eden to Aden" (available on the Church of Little England bookstall priced thirty shillings). Pshaww!
Now perhaps we can finally get this M-m-murder done!
Coke (formerly Cock; subsequently Hell) Hall, Little England in the Styx, December 25, 2020.
* REVIEW "Proper bourgeois realist storytelling narrated in a Radio 4 lady voice with pleasant tonal musical interludes." Dick Sparrow, Mustard's Holiday Hearths Review.
“ At Last A REAL English Murder!” The Daily Self-Unconscious-Authoritarian-Past-Tense-Straight-Linear-Cause-Effect-Oxygen-Supply-Demand- Semi-Detached Bourgeois-Realist-Plot-In-My-Beginning-Is-My-Middle-England-Ever-After-Revenge-Narrative-With-Farm-Views-Cul-De Sac Mail.
What Butler Saw
In a private capacity, Sir, permit me to affirm that I saw nothing that I would feel at liberty to divulge, being bound by my service to His Late Grace the Duke who is unable to advise me and died without confiding to me his wishes on the matter.
In a public capacity, I saw Captain Hastings enter the Lounge of The King’s Head, the flagship hostelry of the Cock Hall Estate, which on that afternoon was staffed by Cock Hall Housekeeper Mrs White herself, resplendent in her dazzling white Cock Hall livery, that Tuesday being the occasion of Barman’s day off. Offduty Barman was, however, next door, conversing in obsequi gravitas with the potboy Rubin in the Public Bar about the decease of His Grace and, in the common phrase, ‘drowning his sorrows’ with a gallon of Cock Up. Their conversation was tempestuously interrupted by Shepherd holding the External Board of Fare, which he appeared to have wrenched bodily from its concrete anchor in the rose garden, complaining in tones not incommensurate with Bedlam that Mrs W was selling his Pie. The incident was escalated shortly afterwards by Ploughman leaping from his violently parked new juggernaut tractor, which he had smashed through the main door (rather than going round to the tradesman’s entrance) breaking Jack’s head, tumbling Jill and all but leaping over the bar to remonstrate with Mrs White that the Cock Hall Estate, breaking centuries of noblesse oblige, was proposing in future to charge him for his Lunch. Nurse Minus 350 Million ran in from tending Jack and Jill to protect Mrs W from their violence with her begging bowl and everyone clapped her. At this moment of crescendo and climax, the public telephone situated in the private Lounge rang and Captain Hastings answered it.
“Poirot? I’ve solved the case!”
“Mon ami, where are you? Can anyone overhear you?”
“There’s no-one here except me. I’m in the King’s Head Lounge.”
“Ma foi, but this Murderer is crazed, cunning and desperate. I beg of you to show the discretion. You may be overheard from the public bar.”
This was true. Not only Captain Hasting’s hearty English tones but Poirot’s telephone-edged Belgian vocals were ringing intolerably in my NHS hearing aids. And the subtle alteration in Mrs White’s ample visage showed she had heard them as well. She uncoiled away from Ploughman and Shepherd and slithered into the Lounge, teething herself with an arrow from the Strongbow on the bar. I saw her; and I saw that she saw not me.
“We wants Old Cock Hall not this Mustardising!” thundered Shepherd. “Wha-!”
“Oi. We was talking to you!” roared Ploughman. “…Ere, where’s she gorn?”
They eye of Captain Hastings did not witness her because he had turned away from the bar of the Lounge to cradle the phone and (he fondly assumed) preserve the secrecy of what he told Poirot: an audit of exonerated suspects eliminating everyone… except the white hiss of fury behind him. He turned as she struck.
Pandemic Memorial Day 2120 (on which pandemcakes are made)
One “M’aidez” 1/5/2120, a day consecrated to all the people who died in the Lack of 2020 vision, Blodwyn Bettws, secretary of TORC, the local Boudicca Discussion Group, a gentle gossipy middle-aged Welsh female parishioner long settled in Little England, is walking her dog Cei on an idyllic May morning in Ken Hill woods, in the now wild-reclaimed and Green-managed grounds of a defunct 18C Estate, when a golden adder slithers across her path, causing her to lose control of her bowels but also to feel a sudden reasonless hope and joy. Cei starts burrowing in the old ruins of what had once been a Warrener's Cottage and turns up some human bones there, shallowly buried with gold torcs and other Celtic arty-facts which cause Blodwyn to wonder if after a lifetime of searching, she may have found the long lost grave of the Iceni Queen. (Or even King Arthur...).
Local DI Ken Hill, great grandson of Our Ken, calls LETSCOBBLE (the Little England In The Styx Clued Ouija Board Basement Level Excavation, est. 2000) to the scene and fears because of their shallow burial that the bones belong to a more recent murder. The experts of LETSCOB announce the disturbing news that the bones are not modern but belong to a recently stolen display skeleton (an 8C Saxon farm worker murdered by a warrior Dane) in LETSCOB 's historic excavations on the Cock Hall estate. Fearing the worst, Ken asks to see the display skeleton's opened grave and finds it filled with the long lost corpse of Undead Author (pen name Dr Blake with a silent e) late of Jerusalem cottage, a visionary working on the history of Cock Hall and missing from the original DI Ken's unsolved scene on the 'Cluedo' cellar steps of Cock Hall. “We’ve finally found the Body of the Text!” whoops the Clued Ouija Board. “It’s all happening again,” groans Ken.
Endnotes: Some critical theorists allege that a deadly and unprovoked cyber attack on THE TEXT around the time of Author's Death caused the Endnotes to lose their numbers meaning that we have no way of linking them to the specific parts of THE TEXT Author intended. Others (including Dick Sparrow's Murder Weekend activities leaders) read this is a deliberate and delightfully neo-liberating deconstruction inviting readers to find the follow the clues and make the connections themselves. For example, "Self-Unconscious-Authoritarian-Past-Tense-Straight-Linear-Cause-Effect-Oxygen-Supply-Demand- Semi-Detached Bourgeois-Realist-Plot-In-My-Beginning-Is-My-Middle-England-Ever-After-Revenge-Narrative-With-Farm-Views-Cul-De Sac" in the text seems to align exactly with its identification as"The Daily M**l" in the endnotes.
“The Daily M*il.”
Much critical ink has been spilled over this line. Some feminists insist that it is a witty empowering of the panty, a frivolous garment traditionally associated with the sex-objectification and frilly reduction of women. Why should it always be TROUSERS that signify power? thunders Cruella de Vil in the Daily Mail’s sycophantic review of this novel. Why not the unambiguously FEMALE garment worn with such empowering grace by Her Ladyship? Others argue that the witty joke - like the lady-pant– is very much on the hen-pecked Cock.
“The Daily Ma*l.”
The locally abbreviated name for ‘Peacock Hall.’ Its long history, “Saxon foundation, Civil War change of hands” Walpole-Townshend Enlightenment graces (paid for by African slaves); Room 101A “full of Death Kites from China” (secretly occupied by the CIA since 1984); Krishna’s Eyes in its Peacock Tail (stolen like Wilkie Collins’ Moonstone, from fabulous India) - not to mention its extensive grounds embracing a Bronze Age to First World War excavation site; a Boudicca Trail, a ‘Hereward’ Fen and a 14C “Canon Bullfinch Rook-Lark” Church of Little England - embody the whole of English history and pre-history. Cock Hall is England as a haunted house with a closet full of skeletons; a Brown Lady on the stairs, a mad wife in the attic and a Black (Blake with a silent ‘e’) in the cellar. The 'Cock Hall Estate' with its grand rolling parks and extensive woods is not to confused with the ghost council estate of the same name.
A village idyll ‘out in the sticks’ of North/West Norfolk. Its higher ground, the highest in West Norfolk, is heathland with stunning views of the Celtic, Roman, Saxon and Viking shores, Herewardian Lincolnshire across the Wash and the North Sea. On its pleasant green slopes and pastures and beside its still waters, sheep graze. Its two historic farms are mixed – arable (corn, sugar beet, peas) pastoral, pigs, sheep, cattle, horses - and both now run on Green rewilding principles; others – poultry, rape- maximum tillage eyesores kept out of the public gaze or show farms (owned by the cancerously expanding Mustard’s Holiday Hearths) are maintained mainly for holiday homers to walk their second home greyhounds or for tourists to admire on their way to the resorts. The woods and grounds are a flutter of pheasants, partridges, woodcock, wild geese, peacock and deer. The village’s red-roofed houses and cottages are set in a wooded Happy Valley along which the quiet River Styx flows, swift and deep at some points, meandering lake-wide in the woods of the Cock Hall Estate, (a symphony of ducks, wild geese, rooks and herons, eery-calling birds of prey and on stormy or foggy days seabirds drifting inland); dwindling at others into a stream and at others still into marsh, reeds, bog or nothing. Whether it proceeds to flow seven times around Dis (or Hell) as the principal river of that classical underworld, by whose waters the gods swore unbreakable oaths, is (I swear to gods) known only to its dead, including its world-famous and village-feared bogeyman Saxon boneyard, skeletons preserved by the boggy soil. The village includes ‘Jerusalem,’ Dr Blake’s visionary folly of radical England, now a holiday unit owned, gnomed and domed as a Daily Mail showhome by Gammons, a subsidiary of Mustard’s Holiday Hearths.
Dead Author’s fictional name for Washport probably from the Welsh “Llyn” Lake.
Marple and Poirot were not the only detectives led up the Lost Garden path on this wild goose chase by the Fake Newshounds of the Baskerville press. Even D.I Ken, schooled in the opposite deconstructing tradition at UEA and his young mind, like Scarlet’s, now old, like Plumski’s, blinded by Critical Theory to the Murder Text staring him in the face, could not avoid the old trope. Viz, the original Death of the Author at the Norfolk Noir Conference now had a Body on the cellar steps and a murder weapon (the Scythe) but it still lacked a Suspect. Who had it been, under that cloak-and-dagger hood? thought Ken. Suddenly Cock Hall felt more like Christie’s Chimneys – a Chequers of espionage– than her usual 5 storey Murder Mansion of Styles. Ken found himself suspecting ‘Mad’ Professor Plumski and his underground campaigns run from the Cock Hall cellar. Plenty of old cloaks and antique farming implements down there, including scythes. And Plumski had been furious when Squire Peacock gave Blake the Keynote Speech for his Norfolk Noir Conference, displacing Plumski’s evil Marxist-Stalinist critique of the entire detective genre, of which his daughter Scarlet was so besotted. Did the Squire then have to die too, as part of Plumski’s Higher Cause of Bringing Down Capitalism? Was the lovely Scarlet even in on the double murder? If Agatha’s Freud Squad Christ Eyes could stop spooning with each other in the manner of an early T.S. Eliot poem for a few minutes, they could do worse than train their 20th century visions on Plumski’s cellar, where Marxist economic base met Freudian id, the horny black truth under the pretty white lies as Cellar-Dead Author William Blake put it. Pretty good at finding the ticking bomb under the civilised discontent...A classic Christie Red herring, maybe, but there was only one way to find out. Though on Lost Garden of Eden leave and officially warned off the case, Ken wanted to check an unpaid hunch that the scythe attack by a hooded assailant had interrupted Black’s speech at a critical moment. Ken rubbed his aching temples, took off his smeared spectacles and wondered if this would cast any light on the equally dramatic timing of the murder of the Squire (in the Squire’s case, the night before he was due to announce the Greening of his estate).
In Colonel Mustard’s Counterplot, female characters are only allowed in the Kitchen or the Bedrooms (the Untold Upper Story - or ‘Fourth Wall’ as it were - of the Cluedo Board) unless you go private in which case you can bid for starring roles in the Lounge, Hall, Conservatory and Ball Rooms and important supporting roles in the Library and Study. The Billiard Room is People with Balls Only. The Ball Room is now a Rifle Range.
On the Feather.
The annual “Private I’s–ation and the Murder Most Foul of One Nation Britain” (Britain was the old name for Breck’s Isle) Conference occurred on Dec 32 2019 and Dr Blake’s Lecture (“The Mysterious Affair At Postmodern Styles”) began: “Agatha Christie may turn out to be the Shakespeare of the future whereas the Serious Literature of the 20C like her contemporary T.S. Eliot , in fracturing the link between poetry and the mainstream, may well have consigned the ‘slim volume’/poetry quarterly to a ghost life as posh graffiti on a private wall no-one ever looks at. Imagine if The Waste Land had had a proper reveal like the first Poirot novel, The Mysterious Affair At Styles (written and set in 1916 and published in 1920, two years before Eliot’s masterpiece) or her Second World War update The Moving Finger (1943), where a shot-down RAF pilot convalesces in an obscure country town as old and deep as England, a “rural England…of lost pre-eminence…with its roots on the past.” My venue today, Little England in the Styx, a true bastion of 21C Breck’s Isle, is planning to host a Christie Murder Weekend here at Cock Hall every year. Our host’s eminent Estate boasts not only a haunted ancestral pile and an ancient Roman Way (our Welsh delegates today, the Coch Rhi Bens, the original Iceni landowners of what is now the Cock Hall Estate, are a reminder of a Britain older than England) but also a long-running archaeological dig tracing its entire existence from the Bronze Age to the First World War…. But what IS a 21C Country House Murder? Visitors in search of their various versions of The Norfolk Paradise venturing down “The Boudicca Trail” and drawn instead by their own demons (and the spirit of our age) up the wrong road, to Dis. Cock Hall is the only place to stay on that road. A Haunted Hall with English stereotypes moving around a ‘Clued-Ouija’ board. And, like Hotel California, you can check out any time you like. But you can never leave – CRUNCH!!!!
At this point of Blake’s lecture, the Scythe fell.
In Oedipus Tyrannos, Oedipus investigates the murder of his royal predecessor and traumatically uncovers that he himself - the detective - was the murderer. But who is the detective? The Text (at the level of this particular verse) appears to insist it is Colonel Mustard playing his private cod-Eye Murder Breakfast culture warrior’s pure white English folk source “Who Killed Cock Robin?” (which Black’s Text has been reconstructing, deconstructing, Blak-ing and generally queering) “I said the Fly with my private I, I saw him die” says Mustard in this unspoken Con-Text with a pun on ‘saw’ as a murder weapon - through a not very reliable Nasser-splintered one eye Eden glass. The Text clearly accuses Mustard of Trumping the Fact of Black’s murder with the Murder-reconstructing Fake News that Dead Author (aka Dr Black) killed the Squire in the Murder Lounge three weeks AFTER his own Death, with Lady Peacock’s dropped hanky, presumably while de-composing on the cellar steps with his head scythed off. And implicitly asks – why would Trump ‘detect’ this? Well, because he himself is responsible for the Murder or at least implicated in its cover up. But at the level of the canto (spoken by Captain Hastings) the Text identifies not Mustard but Captain Hastings as the bumbling amateur detective indiscreetly clearing all the suspects – except MRS WHITE - in turn on a phone in the very public Lounge Bar of The King’s Head, in the fatal hearing of someone who silences him before he can name them. “It can only have been M-” surely Mrs White (he has already exonerated Mustard) ? But – if the detective is the murderer- the silenced Text could have been about to say “It can only have been Me.” Thus, the Text accuses the bumbling amateur Eye Captain Hastings, in blind Oedipus fashion, of murdering the Squire whose murder he is ineptly trying to solve. But Captain Hastings couldn’t, after all, reconstruct a Murder to save his life and even if he could why does he then immediately end up dead himself?. And, more obscurely still, reading against the grain of the Text, the professional Public Eye DI Ken Hill (whose name elides as both ‘Kill’ and ‘Die’) spends much of the investigation deconstructing the Text with his Critical Theory. Is HE the detective signalled by the phrase “private selfies on the Oedipus trail” and therefore the Murderer? At the level of genre, Contextualists might add that Agatha’s Christ Eyes, Marple and Poirot, as the archetypal detectives of this English Village/English Country House Murder, are therefore the leading suspects in any deconstruction of the genre as an Oedipal quest. And our search for the Oedipal detective doesn’t stop there. Reception theorists would say the Reader herself is the detective, blindly tracking down her own gleeful ghastly complicity in the Murder, and without her the entire Murder genre would cease to exist. And, if so, the Reader couldn’t have done it without a lot of help from the Author, a major accessory to Reader’s Murder: in fact, while he clearly couldn’t have done it without her, she couldn’t have done it without him either. And I haven’t even mentioned that, in the social and economic context of capitalism, the investment by Colonel Mustard’s sleazy golf pal Super ‘Market’ Law in Colonel’s scheme to rebrand the entire Village as a multinational Lidl England in the Styx for second holidaymakers makes that superdetective’s reading of The Murder as murderously Oedipal as any conflict of interests could be; while at the level of ‘English’ itself as a cultural repository of Liberal Humane values, under whose angel-wings the Country House Murder nestles as a (cuckoo-ing?) sub-genre - the quixotic policing of the Paradise Lost of Little England’s Green and Pleasant Land by Chief Constable John Melton –blind to the sordid machinations of Eve Lady Peacock– are themselves perhaps the most telling Oedipal self-deception of all. In short, if the Detective dunnit, the list is endless. (see List of Detectives pp.---)
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