Alan Gould

On Drought and Crime Fiction

The hawk’s a comma in our air,
which means a thriller’s hatching there,
   some morsel up for a kill,
and magpies carol with opinions
to their avian companions
   the measure of this thrill.
But O, the crows are unimpressed,
who take the longer interest,
  And fear the plot is very thin
    and though the good guys win
  one notes the Dry that’s settling in,
  how everywhere it’s settling in.

It’s true, diversity is down,
the coarser species struggle on,
  our trees like twisted girders.
Yet lady sleuths in orange suits
hotfoot our slopes in their pursuits,
  to solve the casual murders,
The watching crows who lack that zeal
Must nonetheless pursue their spiel,
   Can plots be safe, and yet risqué?
   Are stiffs so very everyday?
   If villains exit right, well hey,
      what reason for dismay,
  except this Dry is here to stay —
 imagination’s overlay.
 
Was this the hillside years ago
where wildflowers in tense flambeaux,
  starred each in its is-ness?
What was it in the mind allowed
each breathing creature’s amplitude,
  its hallowed ground of business?
 The plain-chant of the crows in chorus
 promptly puts the case before us,
    that casual cadavers,
    chopped by chef’s own cleavers
provide the climax that is clever,
where clues abstracted from saliva,
at last must blow the lady’s cover
while proving she’s a shrewd observer,
    Of homicide’s palaver.

The hawk is falling like a thought
Upon some nothing caught up short,
  a plot is neatly sprung.
But crows keep up their diatribes —
   Don’t spare us detail that describes
      just how this victim’s hung.  
  Give us that moiety of blood —
  that titillates our neighbourhood,
   where corpses are convenient food
   in every raptor’s livelihood,
 
    persist the serious crows
    who like to discompose,
    pronounce the moral crows
  who moralize, but not in prose.

Also by Alan Gould in this issue