Twll-Ddu 15

THE STORY SO FAR: A series of brutal and unprovoked acts of fannishness has left amateur investigator DAVE LANGFORD baffled. In his secret office (22 Northumberland Avenue, Reading, Berks. RG2 7PW, UK) he broods, distraught, as fresh dossiers of evidence fall daily on the doormat. But now, shrewd questioning along lines suggested by MIKE GLICKSOHN has broken down the cover-story of lovely JIM BARKER (see cover), and the ghastly picture painted by this new knowledge (see cover), when interpreted in the light of evidence already collected (see last issue's cover), can mean only one thing...

Chapter 15: The Villain Unmasked!

By a cunning subterfuge remembered from Sunday night at Skycon, Langford gathered all 250 suspects in the bar.

"I have gathered you here," said he as he locked the door, "to unravel the most baffling and complex case of my career. It has been a three-pint problem."

"Praise be," murmured his sidekick Hazel. "It's usually nearer seven."

"First," said Langford, "we have the curious incident of the bouncing cheque."

"The cheque didn't bounce!" shrieked Holdstock.

"That was the curious incident, considering that you made it out for 'three prunes'."

"It was a joke, a joke, I meant to write you another. It's all Angus Wells's fault, he wrote this cheque once and his writing was so bad that the bank thought he'd put 'prunes' instead of 'pounds', and that's where I got the idea ..."

"Be very careful in future, Robert. This time you got away with it. The bank did cash the cheque, and you have your copy of The Necronomicon ... which brings me to George Hay! Perhaps Mr Hay would like to explain his relationship with Margaret Thatcher."

"She turned me down," snarled Hay. "I only asked her to tell me the Tory Party's plans for space colonization, but she wouldn't even come to look at my Pulsar covers."

From a hitherto unnoticed secret passage peered two mysterious identical twin Chinamen, clutching bottles of a poison unknown to science – but such was the intensity of the scene that nobody noticed.

"And there we have it," said the great detective, meditatively injecting a cc of The Glenlivet into his femoral artery. "The case is complete; the facts all hang together. Now let me summarize the problems... Why did Harry Bell keep hitting his head on 7a Lawrence Road? As an explanation, the admittedly tremendous reaction-force developed by his digestive system is just not good enough. Why did Chris Atkinson want a new, cream-coloured carpet? Only the shallowest intellect would insist this is but an excuse for holding no more drunken, fannish parties. By what means did John Brosnan (of all people) get a good review in New Scientist; who said that debonair Graham England would never be invited to a PickersWalsh party; and how does this tie in with the fact of Alun 'Iconoclast' Harries's exclusion from Welshfandom gatherings on the flimsy excuse that 'he's a cretin'? And why did Dai Price move away from Newport at about this time? Why did Tom Jones maintain that Joe Nicholas wasn't a BSFA member? You see how the pattern begins to emerge?"

Glances of shock, amazement, incomprehension, apathy and disgust were exchanged among the suspects. Greg Pickersgill and Simone Walsh turned a variety of colours; R.I. Barycz looked strangely shrunken; Keith Walker's expression was unreadable.

"I'm still trying to work out the Coptic for unemployment benefit," murmured Hazel.

"But there are other questions which must be asked," Langford declared, "and luckily one minor villain has turned Queen's Evidence to tell us what they are." Under heavy guard, D. West entered; the brutal police interrogation had destroyed his sense of balance, and he was unable to stand upright.

"The questions about the Yorcon programme book?" Langford snapped.

"Why is the chairman's address signed with a skull?" droned West. "Why do the portraits of the committee include someone with his head in a bag? What does the article by Ian Williams mean? (And how come it gets printed at all, considering the way he gets insulted in the introduction?) What are the MEASURES which the Astral Leauge will take if readers do not immediately pay 50p for their FREE memberships? And who is this obscene person Gonad the Barbarian?"

"Answer those questions and the case is finished," the detective said, drawing a few piercing notes from the portable typewriter which aided his meditations.

"Well, at least it's more interesting than the Mancon programme book," West whined as he was led away.

"But wait!" John Collick wailed. "What are mulligrubs?" A copy of the Shorter Oxford Dictionary was flung at his ignorant head, and eagerly he riffled through it – only to find page 1370 missing. The Fiend of Fassett Road, Kingston had struck again!

Langford hiccuped. "The witness Holdstock will now reveal the full truth about the 'est' consciousness-boggling course for which he and Sheila each paid £150."

"Oh, it was really great," said the rising young author without looking up from the two novels he was writing. "There was this session where we imagined ourselves climbing up inside 400 foot high daisies, and another where we appreciated fruit and learnt to savour it. God yes, I remember this woman going to the microphone afterwards and saying how she'd violated this grape with her tongue and thrust herself inside it, pretending her tongue was a penis you see, and she said 'Now I know what it feels like to be a man.' And afterwards Sheila found she could visualize the structure of her toast at breakfast, and it was so fascinating she couldn't bear to eat it. And I got up in front of the microphone, and I was really embarrassed, but I related to my embarrassment you see, and –"

"The final piece of the puzzle I must supply myself," said Langford hastily. "We've heard a lot about various Americans propositioning Peter Roberts and [even] Graham England (who claims his temptress was a groupie obeying the orders of hospitable Mike Glicksohn). But what of Joyce Scrivner's alleged attempt on Rob Jackson while he was lying helpless in bed and they were 'discussing fannish politics'? The details are obscure, but my informant claims Ms Scrivner was heard to say: 'Doesn't Rob recognize a pass when he sees one?'"

"Personally, I find it helps to tell Rob these things in writing," murmured Coral. "Even then, you have to choose your postmark very carefully."

Meanwhile, Leroy Kettle fell over in a guilty fashion; a voice unknown remarked, "I only divorced you because you were so clumsy."

"So," said Langford remorselessly, "the puzzle is complete. This vast mass of evidence can point only one way. Another triumph for Langford! The person responsible is one so innocuous that nobody believed him capable of the least outrage: I refer, of course, to Ian M—"

"Just a moment, Langford," said gruff old Dr Jackson in a heavy voice. "I happen to know that speaking of oneself in the third person – even in a fanzine – is a common symptom of mental illness."

"And I happen to know that this Langford has just completed a book on flying saucers!" said the man from the David & Charles Detective Agency, in brutal tones.

"I can't believe it!" Pickersgill gasped.

"You can prove nothing," cried the white-faced Langford.

"Oh no?" The BSFA Company Secretary smiled satanically. "When I discovered how you'd tried to implicate me in Jim Barker's 'Captive' racket, I started checking up on you. I have here a certified copy of the cheque you wrote to Messrs. Bombast & Fustian Ltd (Gilders of Refinèd Gold, Lilies Painted While You Wait). The place where you bought the polysyllables!"

As the crushing import of these words sank in, Langford dived for the window, only to trip over the still unconscious and fantastically decorated form of Joe Nicholas. Crashing through the glass, he fell fourteen floors and was horribly impaled upon Alan Dorey.

Mind how you go.


GROVELLING & CRINGING DEPT.

A quick obeisance to Keith Freeman (paper) , Eve Harvey (electrostencils, though not for TD), Greg Pickersgill and Simone Walsh for hospitality and things, Leigh Edmonds as TD's Australian agent, Jim Barker for the cover and D. West for the bit inside the cover which is nothing to do with me, dunno how it got there boss.


Cryptozoic

Sitting here on the eve of TD's fifteenth outbreak, I feel this great wave of nostalgia, which I believe is Greek for 'pain in the nostrils'. (Which reminds me of how pleased Chris Priest said he was upon discovering the word 'proctalgia'. I wonder why.) Perhaps it's just the whisky talking, but I reckon anyone idiot enough to reach issue 15 (the first TD was handed out at Mancon) might as well go mad and declare a special nostalgic issue – and besides, a cunning re-use of older stuff would mean so much less material to write.

My search through the files started with Vole, an 'underground' school magazine concocted by myself, Dai Price and a few cretins. (Yes, that wretched ecology rag stole our title without permission.) Thanks to the weird atmosphere of school life, comments which would barely keep TD readers awake turned out to be dynamite in Vole: the school held three staff meetings in as many days to decide whether Vole's wicked editors should bo cast out or merely flogged to death. (For some reason we got away with it and produced a second issue; but moral cowardice prevented its distribution.) I looked through Vole just now and found some quite good things in it... none of them by D. Langford.

At Oxford, I palmed off a humorous bit on the OUSFG magazine Sfinx (as misspelt in all the best Octopus SF Encyclopaedias and also in Black Hole 16 – where someone believes the acronym for Ministry of Defence is U.K.A.E.A.). I knew the jokes were OK; most of them had been ripped off from Marty Feldman's TV shows. I still have a sneaking affection for this piece, because when I first met a younger and more impressionable Hazel, she recalled that Sfinx and said: "Not the Dave Langford?"

"How about if we get married?" I replied (admittedly several months later).

Then came SF Weakly, Martin and Liese Hoare's amazing conceptual fanzine. I predicted several years ago that this parody of SF Monthly would carry a Seacon ['75] report in its first issue – however, this underestimated the editors' lethargy. But while SFM still festered and pullulated on the literary scene, I wrote the Hoares a version of its dire "Query Box" column and now, sadist that I am, will freely dispense extracts from what was my First Fannish Article! Fasten your sick-bags, readers...

"Is it right that all the letters in this column are written by the editors?"
[Julie Davis]

You guessed it. By way of balance, though, all the answers are sent in by ignorant readers.

"I see that both Larry Niven and Robert Silverberg have beards. Is this true of any other great SF writers?"
[Robert P Holdstock]

We understand that Ursula Le Guin is quite clean-shaven.

"I have just read Foundation and Empire (having mistaken it for Gibbon's Decline and Fall) and thought it quite good. Could you tell me whether or not Asimov is planning a sequel? Has he written any other books?"
[Peter Roberts]

The 1940s editions of Astounding, in which Gibbon's Decline and Fall first appeared, are now fantastically expensive and rare, far beyond the means of such insignificant persons as you. So there.

"Common themes seem to run through SF writers' universes: for example, Anderson, Asimov, Clarke and Heinlein have all referred to places called Vega and Betelgeuse and Alpha Centauri. Is this some sort of in-joke – or if not, what's the inside story?"
[J Cornelius]

Dunno; life is full of oddities. I'm still trying to work out why all the letters I get have the same address on the outside...

Take heart, the worst is over now. The Nostalgia Express zooms forward to 1977, when precocious Richard McMahon demanded an article, then produced a couple of personalzines mentioning how I had not been forgotten, then vanished. Probably this was the result of over-exposure to the ills of the Langford car (remember TD12?): now it's your turn, as the piece creeps back to its rightful home...

The Hole In Reality

That Justly Famous WAHF Column

The letter column is, so far, omitted.

Vivat Regina

A great wave of patriotism is surging about behind the AWRE security fence: the Queen is dropping in this summer to open a new building devoted to lasers. At once I saw how moving this opening ceremony could be made, with Her Majesty pressing a button to activate the laser and zap a cardboard replica of Mr Brezhnev which symbolically blocks the entrance. Or they could use the laser beam itself as the ceremonial barrier; instead of attacking a (doubtless red) tape with scissors, the entire Royal Family could push a massive leaden screen to block off the beam and allow everybody to enter the building without fear of bisection. In fact the official word is that the Queen will be pressing a button to operate this wonder of public spending; my spies, however, inform me that the secret masters of the MOD have no intention of trusting her with the real controls. (Foreign blood, y'know ... security risk.) When the regal finger comes down, it will merely sound a buzzer in the hidden control room, where some wretched commoner will actually trigger the laser.

"Is anything going to happen, Director? Should I be pressing harder?"

"It's happened, your Majesty. Didn't you see the flash of light through that tinted window behind the bars on the other side of the safety barrier over there where I'm pointing?"

When the excitement has died down, the royal entourage will view displays of AWRE's wonders: the new improved Gatling gun which can cut down rebellious natives by the score, the radioactive caltrops to deter cavalry charges, the nuclear arsenal capable of knocking out anything Hitler could send against us. Also on show will be my letter saying: Dear Mr Langford, The estimate of plutonium in the lungs resulting from the whole body monitor tests at AERE Harwell is minus thirty-nine nanocuries ... (That's right: minus.) There will even be a working model of a pulsed reactor: since reactors tend not to do anything photogenic, a series of red lights are being included....

"That burst of red light, your Majesty, represented a power peak of 20,000 megawatts accompanied by a lethal burst of neutrons and gamma rays!"

The Queen swoons. Prince Philip dives behind a nearby equerry, and characteristically murmurs "Bloody hell." Before the AWRE Director can explain that this reactor is but a model, he is politely escorted to the Tower.

Meanwhile, our Court Correspondent can now reveal that Lord St Davids (aka Baron Strange of Knokin) is quite willing to open Seacon and to make a speech of any required length. Can Peter Weston afford to miss this opportunity of boggling the Americans?

Literary Corner

Paul Barnett of D&C sent along the letter from an aspiring author which follows; he added some unkind comments which included the words 'trying to pull my leg' and 'fabrication' and 'Try again, Langford'. I happen to be innocent just this once, but TD readers (mistrustful sods) will no doubt wish to judge that for themselves.

"... May I have your opinion on this suggestion for a non-fiction hook which would be both learned and humorous. I have already written the first 5000 words if you wish to read them. The theme is as follows: – To take the lesser-considered parts of the body, like the nose, ears, navel, knees, buttocks, toes ... parts that never seem to get the limelight in poetry, prose and song; like the heart and lips and eyes and hair. I am researching these 'forgotten' parts from libraries, reference books, quotations, and have already amassed much material. So far I'm working on the nose, and writing up all relevant issues ... unusual beaks like that of Cyrano de Bergerac and Bardolph; snuff, scent, handkerchiefs; the nose in myths, tribal customs, history ... many aspects of the feature.

"Then I shall go on to other parts of the body.

"A likely title is: –

HANDS ... KNEES ... AND BUMS AMAZE ME!
A Tour Round Your Torso

"I am a free-lance author with stories published in the Confession magazines ... I am adept with words; and specialize in humour."

Amazing but More or Less True

ROB JACKSON'S WEDDING UNCOVERED IN TD ... searing 500 word description of Rob's and Coral's nuptials hijacked by Harry Bell for purpose unknown.... PAUL BEGG MARRIED TOO ... the SFBC hitman, encouraged by ex-fiancee Judy, spent much of his reception explaining how his D&C book INTO THIN AIR was going to be a best-seller, unlike WAR IN 2080 ... fans in attendance included Andrew Stephenson (official TD chauffeur), Martin Hoare, the dread Gerbish and Bob & Sadie Shaw with a bottle of whisky whose existence TD's reporter was unable to verify.... JOHN ALDERSON INFLICTS CHAOS ON UK ... his fanzine CHAO now available from me for 50p/$1 in aid of GUFF.... ARNOLD THARG FOR BEST SHORT STORY HUGO, gibbers D. West.... END OF PAGE SHOCK HORROR REVELATION ... TD15 GOES TO PRESS.... 4-79

LAST WORD ... You have about a 50% chance of having a decent copy of page 7. The duplicator fell apart at this point and took three hours to mend – with brilliant improvisation of a missing part. I hope Uncle Peter won't mind, but I think I may have the only duplicator in fandom which incorporates a piece of a Hugo award....


TWLL-DDU 15

From Dave Langford

22 Northumberland Avenue
READING
Berkshire
RG2 7PW
UNITED KINGDOM

Only available for good reason
– or a GUFF contribution.