Poetic Injustice

A week ago, we asked Rap Sheet readers to submit for posting original limericks built around characters or situations familiar from crime and mystery fiction. So far, responses have been ... well, few. We’re still hoping for more submissions. In the meantime, though, we want to share the limericks we have already received.

Jonathon Nichols of Rochester, Minnesota, who describes himself as an “admirer of most things Stout, Simenon, Christie, Tey, and other dead writers,” sent us this five-line allusion to Hercule Poirot:

I write this from beyond the Curtain
Fastidious still, but not hurtin’
The little grey cells
Which served me so well
Can’t spare me from Miss Lemon’s flirtin’.

Vince Keenan, a Seattleite and former Mystery*File film writer, who now blogs about pop culture, winged a couple of entries over the Rap Sheet transom. With them came a note explaining that these were “[d]one Ogden Nash style. Which means I cheated.” Nonetheless, Vince, a clever pair of poems:

Spenser the brave Beantown sleuth
Is famed for his cunning and couth.
Fans love Hawk and Pearl
But the problem’s the girl
Some wish he would cut Susan looth.

A New York detective named Scudder
Downed bourbon until he would shudder.
The proposition was losing
So he soon stopped his boozing
And pulled himself out of the gudder.

For my own modest part, I decided to try completing the limerick whose initial line served as the title of the post in which I introduced this unusual contest:

There once was a gumshoe so green
He took on a client unseen.
But when he went to collect
He found no cash and no check,
For his patron was only thirteen.

Well, enough said about that last one, eh? The question is, do you think you can do better yourself? Send any and all original limericks here. We’ll post ’em as we get ’em.