Alfred Hitchcock – Lee Duigon

Big Brother and also Big Sister and Big Father | Book humor ...

In Chapter CCCXLIX of Violet Crepuscular’s epic romance, Oy, Rodney, we were told that only Lady Margo Cargo’s crusty old butler, Crusty, knows what really happened to Lady Margo’s collection of glass eyes, priceless jewels, and Royal Doulton china–and meanwhile, the entire population of Scurveyshire has been deputized to hunt down the aristocratic thief, Sir Robin Banks. We could hardly wait to find out what Crusty knows!

But we are dealing with a literary genius. In Chapter CCCL, Ms. Crepuscular treats us to a kind of soliloquy.

“Dear reader,” she writes, “I cannot but wonder whether it’s time to select a new cover for my epic romance, Oy, Rodney. Lately the Lord of the Tube Socks cover seems inadequate. A letter from former American League batting champion Pete Runnels says it so well: ‘The Lord of the Tube Socks cover seems inadequate.’ I didn’t get where I am today by ignoring Pete Runnels.”

The fiend! See how she tightens the screw of suspense! It is as if Alfred Hitchcock were to appear on the screen in the middle of Psycho and ask the viewers if he ought to change the title. “Perhaps The Birds would be better,” he might say. And you know that he knows we’re squirming in our seats!

Breathlessly we rush on to Chapter CCCLI. Upon my word! Still no Crusty! Where are Lady Margo’s jewels? Her glass eyes? Her Royal Doulton china? Is Crusty in cahoots with Robin Banks? And how are the deputies supposed to hunt him down, when nobody knows what he looks like? They very nearly lynch a traveling professor of phrenology from Oxford, having jumped to the conclusion that he was the aristocratic thief. Only a timely sonnet by Johnno the Merry Minstrel saves him.

We turn to Chapter CCCLII, onto to find, to our dismay, that it hasn’t been written yet.

Is there no limit to the tortures that the mind of a romance novelist can conceive?

Can we even be sure the chapters are numbered properly?

Wow! How many of us grew up drinking this?

For those spring chickens under 50, I am about to speak in mysteries.

The main use for Bosco was to stir it into milk, which encouraged kids to drink it. Milk in those sweet days came in bottles and was delivered to your house by the milkman, who took the empties from the milk-box on your doorstep and replaced them with whatever your order was.

If you just had to have milk that wasn’t in a glass bottle, you could get it in cartons from milk machines. In our town there was a milk machine every several blocks. I loved those! Milk was a quarter, and the machines were on these wooden platforms–which, after a number of years, would rot and have to be replaced. But before the dairy company could put on a new platform, all you needed was a jackknife or a sharp stick, and you were rich, rich, rich! It was amazing how many quarters slipped out of people’s fingers and through the cracks in the platform. Bosco, schmosco! Gimme a rotted-out milk machine platform any day. An hour’s poking around down there was better than an extra birthday!

Well, yeah, the Bosco was nice, too.

Cool piece of trivia: Bosco syrup was used to simulate blood in two black-and-white movie classics: Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead.

I’m glad nobody told me that in 1959.