Liner Notes for A Grave Situation

 

Liner Notes for A Grave Situation

I hope I made it clear what’s going on here, but in case I haven’t – this graveyard is a place that Schneemann uses when he wants to fake someone’s death. In case someone decides to investigate, they’ll discover an actual grave and headstone, witnesses to the burial, and a pair of eccentric graveyard keepers who will bore them to dea… bore them to tears with inane stories. Maybe other things get buried here, things he wants hidden or kept safe. What this isn’t is a place to bury actual bodies that need to be got rid of for one reason or another. What do you think this is? This a nice respectable graveyard, not a place to get rid of the horrible remains of murderous mistakes. Why the very idea.

He’s got another site for that kind of thing.

Comic gravediggers are not quite as common in fiction as Mr Totts suggests, almost as though he seeks it out – or has it pointed out to him due to his profession. The pair comes from Hamlet, which is in fact the classic pairing of clowns. One sophisticated, making satirical comments, the other common, the straight man or butt of the joke – or simply the one who does a lot of slapstick. And never the forget the important element of a comedy duo – the straight man gets the punchline just enough to keep us on our toes.

I hope you enjoyed the crime plots, or at least the two that were actually fun. Usually I would say these are ones I rejected for full stories, but I wrote this as the second story in the sequence, after I’d done the first one and realised it had legs, but before I sat down and came up with ideas for the rest. Maybe these were solid gold and I’ve wasted them on a single paragraph joke! Still ideas are cheap. If I need inspiration there are new crimes being committed every day, even if they’re mostly the same old ones. And of course funny things happen too. Even if I didn’t come up with ideas from inside my own head just a quick scan of the news would give plenty of fertile thoughts to be turned into fiction.

This is a somewhat slight story, a bit of background for the others and a few good jokes. On the other hand this is a modern version of Edwardian stories, the sort of thing where someone has something explained to them. Modernised of course, streamlined, given a bit of contemporary fizz I hope.