My good friend Andrew McAleer is resurrecting/reinvesting an old favorite. This month brings the first issue of Von Stray’s Crimestalker Casebook, which Andy and his father, John, founded back in the late 1990s as Austin Layman’s Crimestalker Casebook. Read more about the history of the magazine and its newest iteration at Mystery Fanfare.
I’m pleased to have a very small role in this new issue—writing a clerihew, which is a form of poetry invented by the venerable E.C. Bentley, author of Trent’s Last Case. (The C. in E.C. is for Clerihew, I should add.)
Here’s Wikipedia’s definition of the form:
A clerihew (/ˈklɛrɪhjuː/KLERR-ih-hyoo) is a whimsical, four-line biographical poem of a type invented by Edmund Clerihew Bentley. The first line is the name of the poem’s subject, usually a famous person, and the remainder puts the subject in an absurd light or reveals something unknown or spurious about the subject. The rhyme scheme is A A B B, and the rhymes are often forced. The line length and metre are irregular.
My clerihew honors Henry Von Stray, the Golden Age detective in stories written by Andy and his father—and now the namesake of the new issue, clearly.
I’m no poet, and the verse is indeed a little forced, but… I had fun writing it and hope others will enjoy too! And I’m glad to be sharing space in the issue with so many great writers, including Michael Bracken, Libby Cudmore, Barb Goffman, John M. Floyd, Gay Toltl Kinman, Stephen D. Rogers, Janet Rudolph, and Shawn Reilly Simmons… and is that John McAleer’s name I spot on the cover as well?