“As any schoolboy might expect,” writes Violet Crepuscular, the Queen of Suspense, in Chapter DXXVIII of her epic romance, Oy, Rodney, “Scurveyshire has its share of cold snaps!” The exclamation point is added to make it more suspenseful. Read all about in in Violet Crepuscular’s manual, How to Write Good ($22.98 plus postage).
Ah! But what no one expects is that during this horribly cold snap, the water in the Vicar’s backyard wading pool has not frozen over! (More suspense.) And late that chilly night, peering out her bedroom window with binoculars to see if anyone is daft enough to be running around with no clothes on, Lady Margo Cargo, sweeping her lenses back and forth over the forbidding arctic landscape, suddenly spots the ungainly monstrous head of a monster popping up from the water in the middle of the pool. But when she sweeps back, the head is gone… with only a few baseball cards left floating on the surface.
If only the telephone had been invented already! She could roust Constable Chumley out of bed to come over and investigate. She could rouse her crusty butler, Crusty, but he has threatened to shoot her if she wakes him. You can only get so much mileage out of being the richest widow in Scurveyshire.
Here the chapter ends abruptly, doubtless to build suspense. Please don’t ask what happened to Chapter DXXVII. There are some things mankind was never meant to know.
We may not know for certain what happened to Chapter DXXVII, but there may be a hint in those baseball cards floating on the surface of the wading pool! (More suspense. I’ve been reading Ms. Crepuscular’s writing manual.)
Not that baseball cards had been invented yet, of course, nor had American-style baseball. I suspect a time machine is involved somehow.
Either that, or Violet is guilty of an anachronism.
If Violet was actually a competent author, she would have called it “How To Right More Goodlier”.