From issue 58 of Focus the third of my pieces of flash fiction “inspired” by the common writing errors and bad habits catalogued in The Turkey City Lexicon. This time I go toe-to-toe with a “burly detective”:<\/p>\n
This useful term is taken from SF\u2019s cousin-genre, the detective-pulp. The hack writers of the Mike Shayne series showed an odd reluctance to use Shayne\u2019s proper name, preferring such euphemisms as \u201cthe burly detective\u201d or \u201cthe red-headed sleuth.\u201d This syndrome arises from a wrong-headed conviction that the same word should not be used twice in close succession. This is only true of particularly strong and visible words, such as \u201cvertiginous.\u201d Better to re-use a simple tag or phrase than to contrive cumbersome methods of avoiding it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The Turkey City Lexicon<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n
This could be trouble, <\/em>thought Harvey Hampton, the space-toughened astronaut. He tapped the console screen, hoping, vainly, that there was some kind of error.<\/p>\n
An alarm started to howl.<\/p>\n
\u201cBridge?\u201d The thickly-accented voice of McKay, the bluff Scots engineer, cut through the blaring siren. \u201cBridge! We have a situation \u2013 \u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cReally?\u201d The hotshot space-jockey made no effort to hide his irritation with the engineer’s stating of the bloody obvious as he slipped lithely into his seat, pulling the harness tight across his body. He killed the siren\u2019s banshee howl. The ship trembled. \u201cTell me something I don\u2019t know, Chief.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve lost the automatic stabilisers, we cannae hold her!\u201d A sudden buffeting almost flipped the The Desperate Endeavour<\/em>. \u201cYou\u2019re gonna have to land her manually laddie.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cDamn!\u201d The broad-shouldered rocket-wrangler ejaculated as he began to work furiously at his console. The starship juddered violently, but the wilder oscillations were dampened, the ship was back under its pilot\u2019s control. \u201cEngineering? Engineering! Can you give us the power to get back to orbit?\u201d<\/p>\n
There was the sound of something heavy smashing into something hard, a soft moan and then silence.<\/p>\n
\u201cChief?\u201d<\/p>\n
There was no reply.<\/p>\n
“Damn and blast!<\/p>\n
The slick-faced space-pilot dipped his head to his shoulder, scraping sweat from his brow with his uniform\u2019s epaulets as he frantically tried to bring the nose of his ship up into a shallower angle of attack. He tried again to raise engineering.<\/p>\n
\u201cI need more power…\u201d<\/p>\n
The only sound on the comm channel was a low hiss.<\/p>\n
The quick-thinking flyboy ran his fingers over the panel. He tried to reinitialise the automatic landing system but the console burped an error message.\u00a0 Shaking his head Harvey swiped away the overlay of pilot aides, revealing the basic flight controls. Warning lights flickered, their descent vector was still too steep. They’d burn up.<\/p>\n
\u201cWell, it looks like we\u2019re on our own,\u201d muttered the strong-willed steersman. He patted the console. \u201cCome on Dessie<\/em>, let\u2019s get us down on the ground.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
From issue 58 of Focus the third of my pieces of flash fiction “inspired” by the common writing errors and bad habits catalogued in The Turkey City Lexicon. This time I go toe-to-toe with a “burly detective”: This useful term is taken from SF\u2019s cousin-genre, the detective-pulp. The hack writers of the Mike Shayne series […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[19],"tags":[42,92,134,102,35],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p27AP7-zy","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2204"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2204"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2204\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2605,"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2204\/revisions\/2605"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2204"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2204"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2204"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}