Terry and the Pirates

Sometimes I played around with the form of my adventures in Babylon. They would be done as booksthat I could see in my mind what I was reading, but most often they were done as movies, though once I did them as a play with me being a Babylonian Hamlet and Nana-dirat being both Gertrude and Ophelia. I abandoned the play halfway through the second act. Someday I must return and pick it up where I left off. It will have a different ending from the way Shakespeare ended it. My Hamlet will have a happy ending.

Nana-dirat and I will take off in an airplane of my own invention built out of palm fronds and propelled by an engine that burns honey. We will fly to Egypt to have supper on a golden barge floating down the Nile with the Pharaoh.

Yes, I will have to pick that one up soon.

I had also done half-a-dozen adventures in Babylon in the form of comic strips. It was a lot of fun to do them that way. They were modelled after the style of Terry and the Pirates. Nana-dirat looked great as a comic-strip character.

I had just finished doing a private-eye mystery in detective magazine form like a short novel in Dime Detective. As I read the novel paragraph after paragraph, page following page, I translated the words into pictures that I could see and move rapidly forward in my mind like having a dream.

The mystery ended with me breaking the butler's arm as he tried to stab me with the same knife that he had used to murder the old dowager who'd been my client, having hired me to look into the matter of some stolen paintings.

"See," I said, turning triumphantly to Nana-dirat, leaving the murderous wretch to writhe in pain on the floor, the down payment for a life of thievery, betrayal and murder. "The butler did do it!"

"Ohhhhhhhhhh!" the butler moaned up from the floor.

"You didn't believe me," I said to Nana-dirat. "You said that the butler couldn't have done it, but I knew better and now the swine will pay for his crimes."

I gave him a good kick in the stomach. This caused him to stop concentrating on the pain in his arm and start thinking about his stomach.

Not only was I the most famous detective in Babylon but I was also the most hard-boiled just like a rock. I had no use for lawbreakers and could be very brutal with them.

"Darling," Nana-dirat said. "You're so wonderful, but did you have to kick him in the stomach?" "Yes," I said.

Nana-dirat threw her arms around me and pressed her beautiful body up close to mine. Then she looked up into my cold steel eyes and smiled. "Oh, well," she said. "Nobody's perfect, you big lug."

"Mercy," the butler said.

Case closed!

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14