Dead in a Flash

[I considered participating in a flash fiction contest this week, but my muse played a trick on me. Still, those of you who can guess the identity of Arty Mugworth and the other characters may enjoy my silly story.]

Killing Arty Mugworth

“Are you ready for the first question?”

Plonk. Arty Mugworth´s face landed slap-bang right in the middle of his shepherd´s pie, and his pint of Old Peculier spattered across the table.

“Come on, let´s have it,” a jittery woman hissed.

“Shouldn´t we just check if Arty´s okay first?” Peter Gotright tried.

“Nope. Let´s get on with it.” All the concentrated pub guests shook their heads, some quite vehemently.

“What was the name of Philip Marlowe´s first girlfriend?” Gotright asked.

At the table next to Arty´s, Vera Stronghope shrugged a few drops of Old Peculier off her crumpled mac.

“Finally a fair chance to win this year´s pub quiz, pet” she whispered to Charlie Fox next to her.

——————————————-

PS: I had a good, long blog round today, but I had to give up commenting on a couple of Blogger blogs. Sorry; I´ll be back some other day.

About Dorte Hummelshøj Jakobsen

I am a Danish teacher. In my spare time I read, write and review crime fiction.
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8 Responses to Dead in a Flash

  1. Margot Kinberg says:

    Dorte – Oh, I love it! Not only have you done a great job with the characters, but you’ve created a funny story, too. :-). Thanks

  2. Kelly says:

    I don’t know who these folks are, but I enjoyed the clever little story.

  3. Barbara says:

    Old Peculiar? Must be Melrose Plant.

  4. Sorry – you’ve got me foxed! Funny though.

  5. I am glad you like it, but it is a sort of in-joke so I decided it wasn´t suited for the contest – to understand every bit of it you´d have to have participated in CrimeFest in Bristol or at least to know the writers I met there (AND their characters).

  6. Joanne says:

    I had a laugh anyway – the names always bring a smile to my face.

  7. Joanne: good to hear it makes sense in its own right. I wasn´t quite sure.

  8. lrbauthor says:

    She’s done it again!

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