Scriptwriter

 

The sword is mightier than the pen in the case of scriptwriter A.B., found on the golf links his clavicle bisected by a rapier. Irony runs deep for his fans, familiar as they are with his popular thriller ‘Do Unto Others’ in which novelist C.D. comes to a sticky end after producing a spate of murder mysteries with unlikely weapons, illogical plot lines, and random executions. See in particular his ‘Dead Herrings’, a term that has seeped into the language. Some viewers feel A.B. had it coming, especially after the gratuitous removal of the charming barmaid E. F., main lead of the eternal earner ‘Accidents Happen’. E.F. gave as good as she got, spun a steady line in catachresis and hyperbole, and was always in by 10.30. She was life itself before getting a screwdriver to have a conversation with a fuse box, only to find it spoke back. Viewers wept Little Nell tears, even as A.B. explained the climactic mishap in terms of a contractual obligation on set. Viewers never forget. Indeed, the rapier is the tip of the iceberg for Detective Inspector G.H., who had to explain a number of alleged dispatches of scriptwriters in recent weeks to a packed press corps. “These people are just trying to make an honest living entertaining the prurient and gullible with stories real or imagined about serial killers. Our investigations are continuing. Obviously there is a pattern here. We have crime novelists who live in fear of writing more. Some of them have turned to poetry to escape detection. We need to keep this situation in perspective, but at the same time we are fast running out of crime writers, which can only be bad long term for the economy.” Critic I.J., in his weekly column ‘Creampuff’, was terse: “Something is wrong when the line is crossed between fiction and real life. In fiction we may suspend belief, as Coleridge says, so that a roomful of characters feel nothing when a murder is announced, each being a suspect until most of them are bumped off bridges, sample the wrong cocktail, the list goes on. It’s the writer’s prerogative.” Creampuff has not caught up with Season 2 of ‘The Scriptwriters’, each episode of which entails the misadventures of crime authors meeting similar ends to those they inflict with seeming indifference and a strange streak of sadism on their own characters. Ratings are through the roof for these tales of novelists and screenwriters who get their comeuppance, their time run out, in some deserted warehouse, university quad, or abject canal. As academic K.L. has written: “The death of the author takes on a new twist when readers and viewers decide the script has ruined their evening, removed their favourite star definitively by some smartarse manoeuvre, leaving them with no option but revenge to uphold what is decent and right and true to life. It’s nuanced. It’s a new genre.”