A CHRISTMAS STORY

A Christmas Story

or

It Was a Dark and Stormy Night

Merry Christmas to all. I was returning felicitations to my pal Jim McGhee, a fellow hack, and it ended up as a whimsical pastiche. I would appreciate your professional critique (hopefully free of charge). 

A Christmas Story: It was a dark and stormy night as the crime writer sat down at his Edwardian writing bureau to write. The shadow of a shadowy figure moved across the deserted shadowy garden and the french windows’ silken curtains flickered and wafted negligently in the night-time breeze as the shadowy figure entered the well-appointed yet gloomy interior. He had had had enough, the dark shadowy figure had concluded, of the crime writer's infuriating denouements when a mysterious figure never before mentioned entered the narrative, guilty of the lurid crime that had baffled all. Well no more! On he crept in the shadowy shadows. The crime writer was illumined by his small low-powered computer screen, a hand behind him silently rose (a vicious dagger in silhouette against the nicotined ceiling) and plunged as the crime writer wrote his final words in this world: “A Merry Christmas to all my rea...”

Written by my big brother Stuart McKinlay.

Stuart: Incidentally, I’m swithering whether for consistency of scene-setting verisimilitude, in the night-time breeze should be in the dark and stormy night-time breeze, but I’m not precious about it. Continue to have a Merry Christmas. Judge and Jury: The nicotined ceiling, I hear you aver, is a splendid sleight of suggestion, placing the reader in an involuntary ambiguity: acquiescence in false concrete reality, the ceiling, and an abstract judgmentalism, the nicotine, the real and unreal at one. While abhorring the dastardly deed accruing before their very mind’s eye, simultaneously thinking the victim deserves all he gets for smoking. Another triumph, I hear you cackle, as you continue with your Merry Christmas. It's only self-parody.

Stuart: A Christmas Story: 

It was a dark and stormy night as the crime writer sat down at his Edwardian writing bureau to write. 

Neil: There is so much compacted into this opening and enticing hook-line. For, the reader is immediately made aware of the time of day (i.e., “night”) and the mood of the day (i.e., “dark and stormy”). Thus, the ambience of the set of the scene is set. The reader can just about hear the intermittent window-spatters of gusts of rain as he/she peels back the damp and heavy drapes to attempt to peer penetratively through the electrically charged oppressive darkness in a subliminally subconscious attempt to assist the introduced subject (i.e., “the crime writer”) to find his muse. Though the “Edwardian writing bureau” is suggestive of an ordered train of prosaic thought, it does add to the sullen and sombre atmospherics as the writer, the crime writer, takes up his pen to write, er, i.e., his fired-up and somewhat dimly-lit word-processor. 

Dorothy (Neil’s wife): Surely this cannot be set in Scotland?

Stuart: The shadow of a shadowy figure moved across the deserted shadowy garden and the french windows' silken curtains flickered and wafted negligently in the night-time breeze as the shadowy figure entered the well-appointed yet gloomy interior.

Neil: The previous mood for the reader is lightened somewhat by this longish second sentence. The story’s antagonist, though yet opaque, is early identified. A garden of shadows. One shadow solid. Instead of having to negotiate limp and cumbersome Edwardian drapes the crime writer’s nemesis now is able to enter his study on the silent wings of the night-time breeze. A shadow without easily becomes a shadow within, metamorphosed by french windows and silken curtains. A killer butterfly? Nay, a great ghastly and hairy garden moth! One cannot help but think of an Edwardian Dracula, yea, verily, a Victorian Dracula transforming himself into a little bat to flutter through a window in the search of and scent of blood. Anticipation! The scene’s intensity rises along with the hairs on the reader’s neck. Hackles and atmospheric crackles. So-o-o Hitchcockian!

Dorothy (Neil’s wife): This cannot be set in Scotland! 

Neil (Dorothy’s husband): Okay then. Why can’t it be set in Scotland? 

Dorothy (Neil’s wife): “A Christmas Story”, that’s why! “The french windows’ silken curtains flickered and wafted negligently in the night-time breeze”. Give me a break! It’s freezing in Scotland at Christmas!

Neil: Er, good point wife.

Stuart: He had had had enough, the dark shadowy figure had concluded, of the crime writer's infuriating denouements when a mysterious figure never before mentioned entered the narrative, guilty of the lurid crime that had baffled all. Well no more! 

Neil: “He had had had enough”, the repetition of the “had” serves to add to the emotional intensity of the tale for the reader, as in the sense of tall, taller, and tallest, or better, kill, killer, and killest! One feels the heat of the scene and sees as it were lightning flashes from the dark cloud that has entered the distracted and unsuspecting crime writer’s airspace. The killer’s blood is running hot and the cauldron of death is about to boil over. There’s death in the black pot of infuriation! The “mysterious figure” adds to this murder-mystery indeed. Is he the garden-shadow incarnate? Is the shadow merely an accomplice? Coincidence perhaps? What is the “lurid crime” that this “mysterious figure never before mentioned” that is anachronistically baffling all with? Is it the present transpiring scene that is being referred to or the story the writer is writing? Or is it both? Uncertainty results in ambivalence. Oh, the story’s tension gets even more intenser! Is he some sort of time-traveller perhaps? A Dr Who-Dunnit? Call the police! Is there a TARDIS parked on a flowerbed outside perhaps? No, we see ahead that there is a “vicious dagger” in that shadowy hand. Not a sonic screwdriver in sight. So, it’s back to the drawing-board, make that drawing-room, for the would-be mystery-solving reader. 

Stuart: On he crept in the shadowy shadows. The crime writer was illumined by his small low-powered computer screen, a hand behind him silently rose (a vicious dagger in silhouette against the nicotined ceiling) and plunged as the crime writer wrote his final words in this world: “A Merry Christmas to all my rea...”

Neil: Again, very Hitchcockian. All silhouettes (with accompanying dramatic music!). Stimulated imagination rather than visual gratification. The “nicotined ceiling” is a master’s touch. It causes the reader to look up. Triumphal cackles or atmospheric crackles? Surely the latter. It suggests, nay, it, in an economy of words, denotes a dedicated writer, one whose very lifeblood is nourished by long hours of writing. The “nicotined ceiling”, caused as it were by fumes from burning midnight oil, all that hard work now about to go up in smoke! Then the irony of the writer’s famous last words as he stabbed them out on his computer. He wishes his murderer “A Merry Christmas” as the plunging daggered-hand closes the scene. Curtains. The irony curtain!

Murder-mystery = 1. Murder. 2. Motive. 3. Method. 4. Mistake. 

The narrative clearly provides the first three of these checkpoints but enticingly leaves number four unresolved and therefore unsolved. Though a “fan” of the writer, the killer ever remains shadowy. Will he perhaps resurface in a sequel or even a prequel to a sequel? No one enjoys being left hanging, swinging in the wind (even if it’s wafting “negligently in the night-time breeze” through french windows and silken curtains). Does this suggest, therefore, the bringing in of a Taggart to say, “Naebody move. Therrr’s been a murrrrdurrrr!”? Does the story really need a Nancy Drew or a Columbo, nay, on account of the aforementioned french windows, an Inspector Clouseau? No! Leave be. Leave well enough alone! Let the reader solve the crime during the wee small hours of the night, when, instead of sleeping the reader gets more entangled in the story, like a writhing fly in a sticky spider’s web. They’re still trying to solve the Victorian Jack the Ripper murders….

Stuart: Neil, I've got to hand it to you: a masterpiece of constructive deconstruction. Never has a satirical ragbag of maladroit cliches been awarded such inspiring forensic examination, delivered with delicious collaborative irony. A Christmas gift that in its dark and shady way just about wraps it up for the deceptive hand that had had the shadowy hand of fate held in its hands. One bows, again, to the master.

Neil: With your permission, I may just steal all of this and stick it on my Snow Off the Ben Blogpage? Or is that being too shadowistically shadowy?

Stuart: Brilliant idea. I’m out with the cat and was writing on foot, without reference. The dark and stormy night line is a famous Victorian intro ridiculed for being copied by would-be novelists. I am indebted to him for this, and I will pass on his name when I get home in a minute or three. 

Dark and stormy etc, first used by Washington Irvine, A History of New York (1809), and then Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1830), the more interesting perpetrator. “It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents — except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.” 

I see strictly speaking Bulwer-Lytton's words were not Victorian, but published seven years before heir-presumptive Victoria acceded in 1837 when she became 18. William IV was on the throne. Not a lot of people know that.