Squire of High Potternews by Daphne Farquitt

Thanks to Culture Trip
Title: Squire of High Potternews

Author: Daphne Farquitt

Publisher: Not known 

Source book: The Well of Lost Plots by Jasper Fforde 

The resident cad and philanderer in Squire of High Potternews (also a Jurisfiction Agent) is Vernham Deane. Thursday has always found him very pleasant and polite when she meets him in the Jurisfiction offices.

The working title for the next Daphne Farquitt book is Shameless Love. Vernham Deane speculates that the plot will include a rustic serving girl who is ravaged by a cad and then cruelly cast out to have her baby in the poorhouse, only to have her revenge ten chapters later.

Vernham Deane thinks it is very unfair that his character is condemned to drink himself to a sad and lonely death. He has applied countless times for an Internal Plot Adjustment but has always been turned down. He asks Thursday if she can persuade Miss Haversham to look favourably on his latest application.

Vernham Deane disappears at the same time as the maid servant Mimi (who he ravages and casts from the house); she was due to return to the plot but did not. This all looks very suspicious. Especially as investigators find a copy of a refusal from the Council of Genres narrative realignment committee: they will not allow the plot to be changed.

It turns out that Vernham has been investigating a dastardly plot with his Jurisfiction hat on, but he reappears and marries his one true love; the maid servant Mimi. Squire of High Potternews subsequently loses popularity because it has a happy ending.

Daphne Farquitt is a prolific and popular author. She published her first book in 1936 and by 1988 had written three hundred others exactly like it. All her recent boxed sets are becoming collectors’s items, and the huge interest generated by a complete set of her works in a walnut display case causes a massive rumpus, or possibly a fracas, at the book sale Thursday and Miss Haversham attend. And, a little more exotic, she has a huge crustacean readership. To highly evolved Arthropods, Daphne Farquitt’s work is considered sacred and religious to the point of lunacy (see Lost in a Good Book).

Another Daphne Farquitt book is Canon of Love. And, somewhat sensationally, scumbag politician Yorrick Kaine turns out to be a minor character from a 1931 Daphne Farquitt self-published book (only 100 copies were printed) called At Long Last Lust (see Something Rotten). Kaine is doing his best to buy or confiscate every single one of the hundred copies and the original manuscript so that nobody will discover he is only a fictional character.

Thanks to Secret London 


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