I took a pile of books to my local Oxfam bookshop recently and, in a fit of counter-productivenesss, for every 10 books I donated I bought a couple of replacements.
Amongst the books I bought were some Penguin’s from the 1940’s/50’s and are true pulp fiction – the literary equivelant of a film noir.
I’d love to be able to write something more creative than a staff appraisal casting the subordinate in a surprisingly positive light, so I thought I’d suggest the old GCE English Literature, wet playtime game we used to play a couple of decades ago, but without such a draconian set of rules or Mr Harrison going on about how things weren’t as good as twonce they were..
Anyhow, in the style of a bad thriller novel, I thought I’d suggest we all take a few sentences or a paragraph each to see what we turn up..
So I’ll start then you lot take over!
The wind blew in from all directions. He pulled his coat-collar up, took a drag from the cigarette he’d just lit and marched across the court-yard. His faithful spaniel scampering ahead,he disappeared into the night. Things would never be the same again…
Tags: bad thriller, collective, english literature, film noir, game, pulp fiction, write a novel
Eighteen month’s earlier, Jack Cartwright was sat in the office of McIntyre Engineering wondering why he considered being a draughtsman in the first place. Aged twenty-one, Jack had left his local grammar school full of so much enthusiasm. A scholarship boy, it was his parents proudest moment to see him attend there, but now he resented them for the path his path had taken: designing valves for boilers on distant locomotive engines.
This is how he found himself, one day, stood in front of a dour, brown-bricked office off The Strand. He went in a free man, he came out with the King’s Shilling in his pocket. It was 1913 and little did Jack known that his life was about to change forever.
As Jack walked around London, half in a daze, he sensed great things would happen.
“It won’t be long before they’re talking about me.” Jack murmured to himself, as he passed two gossiping women in the street. Of course, what Jack didn’t realise, was they were…
“That lad, Cartwright ‘is name is!” Mrs Angela Price said to Miss Lilian Wickes, a girl ten years her junior.
“Is it true?” Lilian asked.
“Of course it is! Heard it from Mr Drake ‘imself, I did! The lad’s parents keep in regular contact with Mr Drake, ‘e’s been getting ‘imself into some bother ‘as that one!”