POETIC JUSTICE

by Charles Ardai

One of the things I remember most fondly about reading Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine from the old days was just how broad a definition editor Fred Dannay had of what counted as a short story. He’d publish excerpts from great novels, if he could find a snippet a few pages long that contained a reference to a crime and its solution–once, I recall, he excerpted a piece of Don Quixote as “Sancho Panza, Detective.” Another time he lifted a scene out of a Shakespeare play – a chunk of Henry VI, Part II became “The Adventure of the Simpcox Miracle.”

More frequently, he played around with the notion of stories told in verse–typically very short bits of doggerel with criminous themes, published to fill out the otherwise empty bottom of a half-filled page, but sometimes a whole page or multiple pages were devoted to these examples of “Detectiverse” (sometimes called “Criminalimericks,” depending on the form the verse took). In 1954, for instance, he brought T.S. Eliot to the pages of EQMM with a pre-Broadway appearance of “Macavity: The Mystery Cat.”

There have been more recent examples as well, though not many. John Dobbyn wrote at least two stories in verse that appeared in EQMM in the 1980s, page upon page of muscular anapestic quatrains telling stories of cruelty and survival that read like a cross between Jack London and Rudyard Kipling. These were not your abstract tone-poetry of the New Yorker school, all oblique imagery and subtle dissonances–they were honest-to-god stories that worked as stories, with characters, plots, and all. Only they had the extra layer of virtuosity and craftsmanship that goes with fitting those characters and plot into an unforgiving rhyme scheme and meter.

Of course, it should not surprise anyone that thrilling crime stories can be told in poetry, not when some of the best Victorian crime fiction (I submit) sprang from the pen of Robert Browning. Consider his famous dramatic monologue, “My Last Duchess,” about a brutish husband who has his wife killed for suspected infidelity: “She had/A heart—how shall I say?—too soon made glad,/Too easily impressed; she liked whate’er/She looked on, and her looks went everywhere./…This grew; I gave commands;/Then all smiles stopped together.” Or “Porphyria’s Lover,” about the psychopath who strangles his girlfriend and then sits awake all night with her corpse, amazed that “God has not said a word!”

And then, of course, there’s Poe. And Kipling. And, hell, even Tom Lehrer, if you remember his dark little ditty, “I Hold Your Hand In Mine.”

What brings this all to mind? Many years ago, when I started writing stories for EQMM myself, I decided one day that I would try my hand at writing one in verse; ignoring the fact that I have as much talent for writing verse as Robert Browning had for, say, playing Donkey Kong. I dreamed, specifically, of writing the world’s longest Detectiverse, something that would run not just five lines, like a Criminalimerick, or fifty, like “Macavity,” but five hundred lines, or more, and that would tell a complete story. And to make it harder for myself, I wouldn’t write in a form that allows the poet some room to spread out, like Dobbyn’s quatrains or Browning’s iambic couplets – I’d write it in double dactyls, the hyper-constrained form best known for providing the rhythm of the nonsense rhyme “higgledy piggledy.”

As some poet once said, “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp.”

Well, I reached and I grasped, and I wrote the thing–and then I read the thing, and then I did what any sensible person would have done and buried it deep in a drawer, forgot about it, and went on to more productive pursuits, such as playing Donkey Kong.

But somewhere between writing it and burying it, I must have showed it to my friend Lawrence Schimel, since just the other day I heard from Lawrence, and guess what he’d just found a copy of? “The Good-Neighbor Policy: A Double-Cross In Double Dactyls.” Twenty-one pages long, double dactyl after double dactyl tripping from here to the horizon.

I was certain the thing was unpublishable.

But Lawrence runs a terrific small press–A Midsummer Night’s Press–and he told me he was launching a series of light verse chapbooks, and that he wanted to publish “The Good-Neighbor Policy” as the first in that series. So I read it. And—

Well, Browning it ain’t. And Poe it ain’t. Even Tom Lehrer it ain’t.

But a story it is. An honest-to-god crime story, with characters and a plot and everything. A short story–very short, if you just tally up the words–but one that I like to think might not have been out of place in the pages of Dannay’s EQMM.

So I swallowed my feelings of awkwardness and gave the go-ahead. Which is why later this summer you’ll see a little itty-bitty book with my name on it shelved in the poetry section of fine bookstores everywhere. Look ma, I’m a poet!

Well, maybe that’s putting a little strongly. But a storyteller I am. And I have to say, it feels nice to push the boundaries of storytelling a little. Why shouldn’t a story rhyme, and scan, and so forth? Why not, when, for heaven’s sake, “Witness Protection Plan” is a natural double dactyl?

Me and T.S. Eliot. Has a nice ring to it.

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If I haven’t succeeded in putting you off the notion, you can find “The Good-Neighbor Policy” through A Midsummer Night’s Press or on Amazon.com.