Here are the solutions to last Wednesday's killing spree:
Most you found the body of Ms Ethel K Wildgust
In the water closet of a houseboat in Ely.
‘Asphyxiated with a rubber hose' several of you guessed,
A few others went for ‘drowned';
Well, I can put you out of your misery, the answer was in fact
‘Smothered with her late husband's overcoat'.
Well done to those of you who got that one.
Our ‘Exquisite Corpse' was a real stumper this week,
So congratulations to A H Tudor of Walton-on-the-Naze
Who correctly identified the chimera
Dumped near a lay-by on the A534
As a composite stitched together from parts of
Mr J Kilby of Tiverton
Miss T R Kilby of Hastings (no relation)
And Mr L Hernandez of Welwyn Garden City.
A H Tudor - not sure if that's a man or a woman -
Receives a thirty pound Waterstones book token.
Speaking of which,
They say the best place to hide a book
Is in a library,
But it seems the best place to hide a corpse
Is in a library;
None of you spotted
Mr N Jackson of Tewksbury
Propped in a chair by the magazine racks,
Stuck on page 132 of Sons And Lovers for six days now,
A heavy tweed hunting coat disguising
His fatal katana-wound.
Several of you wrote in, delighted
At having found the smashed cadaver
Of Robert Tomlinson
At the foot of the NCP multi-storey carpark
In Newport.
Sorry to disappoint you,
But it was self-inflicted
After an argument with his fiancée,
So no points there.
Some of you may have already guessed
The hidden theme linking this week's corpses -
It is, of course,
Early twentieth-century celebrities
Most commonly known by their first two initials:
The corpse in the water closet in meadowy Ely
Represents the wonderful entertainer W. C. Fields,
The first letters of the three lay-by victims' hometowns
Spell out T H W, or T. H. White,
Author of celebrated Arthurian quartet, The Once And Future King,
And our library corpse was reading Sons And Lovers,
By the late, great, D. H. Lawrence.
Tim Clare writes poems for breakfast. This poem is part of a 'Many of my...' series, which we're sure will all be equally exuberant and bonkers. His current baby, produced with Show + Tell, is the Poetry Takeaway, a touring burger-van which distributes personalised poems to lucky punters. He will be on tour with it throughout next year.