Tuesday, July 26, 2022

The Case of the Deleterious Dick Toc

 


My dear Holmes,

It is your most humble petitioner, Inspector Lestrade. As you well know it has been several months since I have last requested your assistance in the troubling matter of the obscene affairs of the odious Lady Chatterley and her grass-stained lover. Today I must once again humbly beseech your assistance with respect to these horrible people.

As you know we have been long keeping a jaundiced eye on the affairs of this nefarious couple. Ever since the disappearance of Lord Douchebag the Yard has maintained a check on the activities of this group of malcontents and subversives. We occasionally insert an operative into their circle to monitor their unseemly ways. Insertion is a poor choice of words and calls to mind an unfortunate vision as illegal insertions seem to be one of the goals of the group that surrounds Lady Chatterley and her shabby vegetable loving lover. The problem with attempting this mode of surveillance is that no operative can stand to associate with these two for more than a month or two as she uniformly expels them from her presence as she is mentally unstable and brooks no contradiction or even mild questioning. An acolyte lasts about as long as a mayfly in her unstable circle. 
 
However, a situation has arisen which requires your assistance. It appears that Lady Chatterley and one of her foppish spawn have instigated an correspondence with the notorious sybarite Oscar Wilde and his circle of rich and idle degenerates. They have been forward obscene renderings of male genitalia through her Majesty's post on numerous occasions. These drawings consist of artistic renderings of various penile perturbances which are drawn in slightly different poses. They are gathered together in a pile and then turned quickly to give the illusion of motion. They call this technique Dick Toc and it has become quite the rage in the social scene of catamites and degenerates.

You might ask why I am writing to you about these beastly practices, but I do indeed have an important reason. It appears that for some reason your brother Mycroft has received some of these obscene missives. I write to you to impart a warning to him and have him destroy any of these items he might maintain in his files before the Yard moves forward with the prosecution of these obscene practices. I feel I owe it to your family because of your invaluable help and our enduring friendship.

Please give my best to your brother Mycroft and inform him that the case of the Gibbon with the distended rectum in the Yorkshire Zoo has been dropped. Please note that the occurrence of what various physicians have termed monkey pox have been reported in those environs and he should be circumspect in his intercourse with his current circle of friends and acquaintances

I remain as always,
Your obedient servant,
Inspector G. Lestrade
July 25, 1898

5 comments:

The Dude said...

Nice, nice. I was hoping you would get around to the outbreak of monkey pox that is racing through her family - that has got to be of great concern to her.

However, I would have used the word "protuberances" rather than "perturbance", even though the latter does relate to deviations in the inclination and eccentricity of the orbit of a planet or comet, due to the attraction of neighboring planets. Lord knows they are all deviants.

edutcher said...

Chatterly is your white whale, I should say.

MamaM said...

On an Interesting Take on History, White whales, Starbucks and The Mocha Dick:

"In 1841, while aboard the whaler Acushnet, Herman Melville met William Chase among another ship’s complement. William lent Melville a book by his father, Owen Chase: “Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex.” Melville had read Jeremiah Reynolds’s violent account of a sperm whale “white as wool,” named — for his haunt near Mocha Island, off the coast of Chile — Mocha Dick. It’s unknown what led Melville to tweak Mocha to “Moby.” Good thing he did, and that Starbuck was the name he gave his first mate rather than his captain. Otherwise the novel would follow Starbuck’s obsession with a Mocha.

Owen Chase gave Melville his climax: As Essex’s boats were harpooning female sperm whales, a huge male, around 85 feet, rushed and holed the 88-foot ship, twice. No whale had ever sunk a ship. “The reading of this wondrous story upon the landless sea, and so close to the very latitude of the shipwreck had a surprising effect upon me,” Melville later recalled.

He initially planned a book about whales and whaling. Reynolds helped supply Melville with a more Stygian idea, by exhorting his men to attack Mocha Dick as “though he were Beelzebub himself!” — a demon rather than a whale."

ampersand said...

Lady Chatterley's Liver and other Tales. Illustrated

edutcher said...

Amp shows a digital take on an old theme.

And Melville did, in fact, write the book about whales and whaling. Many people have described Moby as Everything You Never Wanted To Know About Whaling And Were Glad You Never Asked.