Mock Turtle by Tasker Hepplewater

Thanks to The Guardian 

Title: Mock Turtle 

Author: Tasker Hepplewater 

Publisher: not known 

Source book: Gaudy Night by Dorothy L Sayers

While Harriet Vane is investigating sinister goings on at her alma mater, Shrewsbury College, Oxford (well, strictly speaking, in between times), she is doing her best to finish her new book; Death ‘Twixt Wind and Water. She has five suspects, neatly corralled in an old water mill with no means of entrance or egress except by a plank bridge, and all provided with motives and alibis for a pleasantly original kind of murder… but somehow her plot isn’t coming together. One of her characters, Wilfred, is behaving so tiresomely that by tea-time Harriet puts her manuscript away and sallies out to a literary cocktail party. 

To everyone’s astonishment Mock Turtle has been selected as the Book of the Moment. One distinguished adjudicator announced he finished reading it with tears running down his face. The author of Serpent’s Fang suggests they must be tears of boredom; but the author of Dust and Shiver thought they were tears of merriment brought forth by the unintentional humour of the book.

We gather that Tasker Hepplewater has married Walton Strawberry’s latest wife’s sister. Mock Turtle is apparently about a swimming instructor who contracts an unfortunate anti-nudity complex through watching so many bathing beauties that it completely inhibits all his natural emotions. So he gets a job on a whaler [hunting whales] and falls in love at first sight with a Eskimo, because she is such a wonderful bundle of garments. So he marries her and brings her back to live in a suburb where she falls in love with a vegetarian nudist. So then the husband goes slightly mad and contracts a complex about giant turtles and spends all his time staring at the turtle-tank at the aquarium. And still there’s room in the book for some powerful anti-Fascist propaganda.

I really do worry about 1930s literature. If a 1930s writer spoofs a 1930s book it always seems too weird to be possible. I mean, does this sound weird to you? It sounds extremely weird to me.

See also The Sands of Crime by Harriet Vane.

Also mentioned in Gaudy Night are Ariadne Adams (possibly soon to be announced Book of the Fortnight by The Morning Star), The Squeezed Lemon, Primrose Dalliance and Jocund Day.

Thanks to SEE Turtles