And the Winner Is ...

When we announced, just over two weeks ago, that The Rap Sheet would hold a contest to give away one signed and numbered copy of Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing--which is finally being released today under the William Morrow and Company imprint--we really had no idea how we were going to choose a winner. We finally settled on the concept of a limericks contest, with the book going to the person who sent us the cleverest Leonard-related five-line limerick by this last Saturday, October 27.

As we suggested in our introduction to this contest, “Feel free to integrate the titles of Leonard’s novels or any of his characters into your submission, or you might incorporate one or two of the 10 rules of writing that this author has spelled out before, and about which we assume he has more to say in his forthcoming book. Alternatively, you could set out deliberately to break as many of his rules as possible in your limerick. Anything you can do to make your doggerel distinctly Leonard-esque is fine with us. Extra points will be given for rampant creativity.”

In all, we received 22 submissions. A terrific response. Some of the entries were pretty funny, though a few were overloaded with Leonard book titles (and betrayed little understanding of the author or his work), while others failed to quite capture the precise rhythm of limericks. As one of our judges remarked, “I found myself wanting to rewrite them just to get the rhythm right.”

To help pick a winner, I asked for assistance from two other Rap Sheet contributors: Linda L. Richards, who’s also a novelist and the editor of January Magazine; and Kevin Burton Smith, the creator and editor of The Thrilling Detective Web Site. Individually, we sifted through the submissions, Linda recruiting her partner, graphic designer David Middleton (who reviews art and culture books for January), to help narrow down her choices. In the end, there were three entries that showed up on all of our lists, though not always in the No. 1 position. And from those, I’ve selected the winner. It was sent in by Robert Holland of Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and is entitled “Less Is Elmore”:

At his best, he is not even there.
No descriptions obscure our true care.
All his characters speak
In a voice so unique
That their innermost selves are laid bare.

Publisher HarperCollins, the parent company of William Morrow, should soon be sending Holland a limited-edition copy of Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing. We hope he enjoys receiving it as much as we enjoyed giving it away.

Rather than simply dispose of the other entries to this contest, we want to share with you the two runners-up, at least. The first of those comes from Barbara Fister, a novelist (On the Edge) and academic librarian in rural Minnesota. Her entry is called “Elmore Leonard Pens a Break-Out Book”:

When a bullet puts him on the fritz
Vincent Mora relies on his witz.
As soon as he’s able
He goes to the table
And rakes in a helping of Glitz.

“I’m not much for limericks,” Fister admits in an e-mail note, “and I break a lot of the rules, but I find them fun to apply to other people’s writing--especially the ‘try to leave out the parts that readers tend to skip’ one. My appreciation of Leonard started years ago when I picked up a copy of Glitz, which is still one of my favorite books of all time. Killshot is another that is hard to top and has one of the best women protagonists written by a man ever. Leonard is not only a master of understated humor and natural dialogue and the acute detail, like the photo of Jesus that Cruz notices hanging in an apartment in City Primeval (when he shows it to a friend--it’s a photo!--the friend doesn’t get it, but it still cracks me up), but he also has such enormous fondness for all of his characters--the halt, the lame, the wicked, and the truly stupid--that it makes me believe the universe is a more generous place than it appears.”

The second runner-up comes from Michael Chaney, who’s been a criminal defense attorney in Los Angeles for 26 years, and is currently at work on Gator Bait, a novel that he calls “a half-assed rip-off of Elmore Leonard.” Like Holland’s entry, Chaney’s alludes to Leonard’s infamous 10 rules:

Elmore wrote this in red,
“Guy talks, you only use ‘said,’
And never but never
Begin with the weather,
And stay out of the character’s head.”

“I’ve been reading Elmore Leonard since the mid-’80s,” Chaney explains. “I was in a used bookstore on Westwood Boulevard. I picked up a paper copy of Swag and gave it the old first-sentence test and was knocked out. Then [I] read more and couldn’t believe it, the part where Frank’s summer-weight suit is “made out of that material that’s shiny and looks like it has snags in it.” And Frank “has on” a nice smile. I knew more about Frank than most writers could have told me in a long chapter. Pure genius.

“I went on to read all Elmore’s books, some half a dozen times. ...

“Bottom line, for me, Elmore is Hemingway with humor, plus more interesting characters and much better dialogue. He’s written a dozen flat-out masterpieces. Why hasn’t he won the Nobel Prize?”

We want to thank everyone who participated in this contest. And we look forward sometime to reading Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing ourselves. Funny thing: Even though we have now given away a copy of this brand-new work, the book has not yet shown up in The Rap Sheet’s mailbox. Go figure.

Wit Honors

As long as original crime-fiction limericks continue to appear in our e-mailbox, we’ll consider any and all of them, and publish those we like best. Today’s two selections come from Chicago short-fiction writer Patricia J. Hale:

Writer’s Glock

There once was a mystery so fine
Except for the missing last line.
The writer was stumped
Until her spouse slumped
His death quicker than the story design.

Dead Dick

There once was a gumshoe so devious
With planned whack of rich client most previous
He got all his money
A necklace for his honey
Too bad she proved equally mischievous.

Think you have the comic chops to write your own crime-fiction limerick? Send entries here.

Puttin’ on the Doggerel

Today’s trio of crime-fiction limericks all come from the colder, northern reaches of the United States. The first was penned by Wausau, Wisconsin, resident Karyn Powers:

As a “protag,” I favor the guy
Who wakes up with mud in his eye
And blood on his clothes from
His collar to toes
With nary a clue as to why.

Then we have two by Sandra Seamans of Northeast Pennsylvania. The first, which she warns “might be too naughty” for publication is titled “Menopausal Prostitute”:

There was an old lady from Meade
Who was tired of bending her knees.
So she got her a knife
And started to slice.
Within hours her evenings were free.

Seamans’ second entry, “Irish Blues,” begins with the line I used to head my original post about crime-fiction limericks:

There once was a gumshoe so green
That he came close to losing his spleen.
He chased down a thug
Who rearranged his mug
For the love of a winsome colleen.

Please continue to e-mail your best original limericks here.

A Rhyme to Kill

Much to my surprise, the crime-fiction limericks continue to trickle in. Our first offering today comes from Scotland’s own Calum Macleod, an ex-columnist for Sherlock magazine and a contributor to the e-zine Shots. “Thought you needed a limerick about a Brit detective to balance up the ones about Americans and Belgians. And it’s topical,” he writes, by way of introducing his delightful “Elegy for Inspector Rebus”:

An Edinburgh inspector called John
Used to work here, but now he’s gone.
Told him: “Here’s your fare for the bus,
Now don’t make a fuss.
We’ve given your desk to Siobhan.”

Next comes this “attempted limerick” from Gabriella Papic of Toronto, Canada:

Needing poison, our killer, a rube
Tried luring a scorpion with an orange ju-jube.
But the critter preferred licorice all-sorts
And stung the man round the back of his gym shorts.
You can catch the whole thing on YouTube.

Think you can do better? We’ll see. Send your submissions here.

So What Became of the Bodies?

Well, no sooner had I mentioned that there’s been a shortage of entries to The Rap Sheet’s crime-fiction limericks contest, than over the transom winged another contender. This one comes from Jack Getze, the New Jersey author of Big Numbers (2007). His grisly but welcome submission:

A serial killer named Fred
Had no use for some hollowed-out heads.
He gave them to Knute
Who thought they were cute
On the frame of his four-poster bed.

Again, if you would like to try your own hand at penning such blarney, please send entries here.

For Better or Verse

It can’t be said that crime-fiction limericks have been flooding Rap Sheet headquarters ever since we announced that we’d post such lighthearted verse on this page. However, we did publish an initial spill of this sort of doggerel, and below is one more entry, dispatched in our direction by blogger, short-story writer, film/TV critic, and fiction editor Gerald So:

A thief tried to break-and-enter
The home of a recluse inventor;
A fine laser beam
Aborted the scheme,
Piercing his heart in the center.

If you’d like to try your own hand at an original crime-fiction-related limerick, please send it here.

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.

There Once Was a Gumshoe So Green ...

Last week, while I was filling in for editor Linda L. Richards over at January Magazine, I posted an item about “The Great Limerick Craze of 1907”--“one of the greatest crazes ever to grip the British nation”--and how the UK’s Independent newspaper is now asking its readers and other clever souls to compose their own “best last line” for a limerick that was at the center of a contest run by a different publication 100 years ago.

This was evidently the impetus for Mary Reed, who with her husband, Eric Mayer, writes the John the Eunuch historical mystery series (Six for Gold, 2005), to concoct some limericks of her own--crime-fiction related, of course:

Debonair sleuth Philo Vance
Agreed to be put in a trance
Under hypnosis
He kicked up his toeses
And a red hot fandango did dance

St. Mary Mead villagers sought
An exclusion order from court
To the judge they did say
When Miss Marple’s away
Our crime rate drops down to nought!

When Detective Lord Peter proposed
Harriet Vane was disposed
To refuse him again
But accepted him when
To ask her in Latin he chose

Reed confessed in an accompanying note that such limericks “are a lot harder to write than they seem, and I just demonstrated it ...” Nonetheless, in a light-hearted spirit that seems wholly appropriate to this International Talk Like a Pirate Day, I want to offer space in The Rap Sheet to anybody else who thinks they have what it takes to craft one of these five-line poems around some character or convention familiar from crime and mystery fiction. We’ll publish any entries we receive over the next few days.

Oh, and if you need some literary inspiration, check out Wikipedia’s entry on the subject of limericks. Or delight in these two bits of doggerel about the “world’s greatest consulting detective,” from a book called The Limericks of Sherlock Holmes.

E-mail your best original limericks here.