Tag: Sir Lancelot

Who’s Been Spying on Violet? (‘Oy, Rodney’)

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39 Romance novel cover parodies ideas | romance novel covers, romance, book humor

Chapter CDLXXXXI of Violet Crepuscular’s epic romance, Oy, Rodney, crashed to a suspenseful end with the sudden arrival of Thir Lanthelot the lisping knight from King Arthurth Thecret Cathtle. She introduces Chapter CDLXXXXII with an unexpected gambit from Lord Jeremy Coldsore.

“How do we know you’re really Thir Lanthelot?” he demandth. (Stop that, Lee!) “You’re in full armor, with your visor down. You could be anybody, in there!”

“Tho itth like that, ith it?” parries the knight. “Very well! Hold thith lanthe while I take off my helmet.”

Off comes the helmet. Underneath it is a woman. Constable Chumley’s mother, in fact.

That anguished scream you just heard is Ms. Crepuscular, who has just discovered a comment made by a reader last week suggesting that the lisping knight will turn out to be somebody’s mother. We can allow publication of only a small part of Ms. Crepuscular’s lament.

“How dare you spill my plot? I’ll murder you, whoever you are! Everyone who read your ham-faced comment last week knew exactly what was going to happen! How did you gain access to my notes? Eeeeeyaaaah!” And so on.

(“Mum?” says Constable Chumley. He is still hanging on by his fingertips to the edge of the cliff. We don’t call these stories cliffhangers for nothing.)

In any event, Violet is too upset to continue. “It’s times like this when nothing but a floating ball of toothpaste in a tall glass of Jack Daniels can get you back to normal!” she obstreporates.

Tune in next week to see if she’s back to normal.

A Rainy Sunday, and King Arthur

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Image result for beram saklatvala

I ordered this book last week, and have been devouring it. Just can’t put it down.

All right, I’m a King Arthur buff. It’s my mother’s fault for telling me stories of Sir Lancelot. She could’ve had no idea how intently I was listening–what was I, three years old? When I was a few years older, I read my King Arthur picture book over and over again until it fell apart.

Two things make Mr. Saklatvala’s 1967 book stand out from the crowd.

First, it’s really cool! He delves into the messy, jumbled records of Dark Age Britain and the Middle Ages and ties things together that I never saw tied together before. The fragmentary records left of the last gasps of the Western Roman Empire are especially illuminating. True, the confused state of the record makes it impossible to prove any definite conclusions about Arthur. But Beram Saklatvala makes me nod my head and say to myself, “Hmm! Y’know, it really might’ve been that way!” Anyhow, who doesn’t love an enduring historical mystery?

The other thing is the mystery of Saklatvala himself. He’s almost as shadowy a figure as King Arthur. All I’ve been able to find out about him is a) he wrote some two dozen books, mostly on English history, and b) he sometimes used the pseudonym, “Henry Marsh.” Oh–and his middle name was Shapurji–is that Indian, Parsee, or Iranian? But his writing style is a comfortable read. It makes me wish his book were longer.

So it’s raining really hard today, but I’ve got a door into the year 500 A.D. and I can easily escape before the Saxons get me, just by closing the book.

I am amazed by the number of primary or close-to-primary sources Mr. Saklatvala brings to bear, some of which I’ve seen no other writer use.

This has got to be the coolest book I’ve read this year.

Memory Lane: Sir Lancelot

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My mother was a voracious reader with a love of history and legend, and she passed it on to me. I grew up on stories of King Arthur and his knights, especially her two favorites, Sir Lancelot and Sir Galahad. My brother and I had toy knights by those names: they wound up having a lot of adventures with animals, dinosaurs, cowboys, and cars.

In 1956-57 there was a TV show, Adventures of Sir Lancelot, which I made sure to watch. I remember particularly well an episode in which Sir Lancelot discovered an out-of-the-way Roman fort manned by legionaries who didn’t know the Roman Empire ended some hundred years ago. Very cool!

All these years later, thanks to my mother’s stories, I’m still a King Arthur buff, still reading and writing about him and his times. Someday I’ll have to tell you how I figured out how the story of the Sword in the Stone was very likely true, albeit somewhat garbled by the passage of centuries.

Oh, to put on my armor, sling that shield across my shoulder, hop up onto my mighty steed, snatch up my lance, and ride out on adventures! My mother lived long enough to see my Bell Mountain books in print: I hope she knows that she was the one who got me started.

Memory Lane: A Rainy Day

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Image result for images of toy knights

Sometimes on a dreary, rainy day, my father let us take the slats out from under our mattresses, set them up across the beds, drape the throw rug over them, and pretend that we were camping.

Having done so, my brother and I would break out the toy animals and dinosaurs and set them on adventures. We never got into army men, but we did have a couple of toy knights, which my mother identified for us as Sir Lancelot and Sir Galahad. Under the shelter of our make-believe tent, Sir Lancelot and Sir Galahad enjoyed some exciting times exploring lost worlds full of dragons, jungles, the North Pole, and the planet Venus.

Assisted by assorted lions, rhinos, elephants, stegosaurs, and giraffes, our knights overcame aggressive tyrannosaurs, hostile natives, and alien beings. Sometimes we resorted to Grandpa’s old stone building blocks and endowed the knights with castles and forts that had to be defended. A gigantically overgrown Dimetrodon was their biggest challenge, but they were up to it. Occasionally they would recruit bands of cowboys on horseback to help out.

It was amazing how time flew by, when we were doing this. Did I mention that we had lots of little toy cavemen, too? They usually found their way into the story, sometimes as the good guys, sometimes as the bad.

Video games? Fah! Who needs video games?