A brief lesson in how to develop a story

I had a fun time writing this little short story, which was, very obviously, inspired by the board game, Clue, which my family and I used to play all the time. Hope you enjoy it!

Writing 101

by Barbara Lipkin

Professor Plum killed Mr. Boddy in the Library with the candlestick. Journalism.

Professor Plum killed Mr. Boddy by hitting him over the head with a candlestick, while Mr. Boddy was looking up a word in his Webster’s New World Dictionary, because Professor Plum didn’t want Mr. Boddy to be able to tell everyone else what Professor Plum had meant when he called the group pusillanimous psychopaths. Short story synopsis.

Professor Plum was a troubled soul. As he looked around campus, all he could see was his contemporaries walking around with their noses pointed to the sky, pretending that they were really something special, when everyone with eyes could see that they were merely pusillanimous psychopaths devoting their lives to perpetuating their own kind. Novel, chapter one, paragraph one.

Mr. Boddy was an anonymous sort of person. He was a male of no particular age, with sparse hair of no particular color strewn haphazardly across the top of a sort of roundish head. He wore a collared knit shirt in a shade of beige, with a pair of khaki colored slacks that fit rather loosely around his waste and dragged a bit at the bottoms. His expression was habitually neutral, neither smiling nor frowning, neither engaged or bored but just vaguely pleasant without actually conveying any sort of feeling or emotion. He hadn’t been known to associate with any of the other students or faculty members, but he did routinely show up at the back of Professor Plum’s class on nineteenth century Romantic poets. He wasn’t an enrolled student at the university. No, he was merely interested in broadening his mind. But he didn’t have to worry about that anymore. Or anything else, for that matter. He was dead now.

Professor Plum hadn’t actually meant to kill Mr. Boddy. He wasn’t ordinarily that sort of person. But he was really irritated with his students that morning. In fact, he was really irritated with just about everything and everyone. He didn’t even know why he bothered wasting his life trying to instill an appreciation of the great poets into the little minds of a group of spoiled, entitled undergrads who were there only because Plum’s was a required course for the completion of a liberal arts degree that would absolutely useless to any of them in the real world of the twenty first century, which was at the beginning of a new world order in which the old values were forgotten and ignored. Perhaps calling them pusillanimous psychopaths was a bit harsh, although very nicely alliterative. Probably some of them would go lodge a complaint with the Dean of the College. If they even knew what the word meant. Which Mr. Boddy did not, which is the reason he’d gone to the library to look it up.

Even so, killing him was probably something of an overreaction on Professor Plum’s part. Still, the man was leaning over the dictionary, tracing his finger down the line of ‘p’ words, and the elaborate silver candlestick was just standing there, on the table beside him, and one thing led to another and so Professor Plum picked up the candlestick, hefted in his hand, and swung it against the back of Mr. Boddy’s head. He hadn’t really thought about doing it. It had just sort of automatically happened. Oh, well.

Best thing would be to just quietly leave the building and not say anything else about it. Doubtless, someone would come along soon enough and discover Mr. Boddy slumped over the library table, his head on the dictionary. There wasn’t much blood, actually. Probably a concussion, then. So Professor Plum suited thought to action, put the candlestick down on the table, after wiping it carefully with his handkerchief, turned and left the room. He told himself to just forget the whole thing and that would be the end of the matter. Noone would miss Mr. Boddy, anyway. Whereas he, Professor Phineas Plum, was a respected and valuable member of the University community.

Mrs. Marjorie Peacock loved her job at the library. She got to spend her life in the company of books and students. What could be better than that? In late afternoon, she walked into the reference room of the university library, just to make sure all the books had been put back in place before the library closed for the day. The first thing she noticed was a spill of books tumbled every-which-way onto the floor. Aghast, she rushed over, hoping nothing had been damaged. But as she moved closer, she saw Mr. Boddy’s Boddy loosely draped over the table, on top of the dictionary, with other books balancing precariously on the edge of the table, except, of course, for the ones which had already fallen to the floor.

Mrs. Peacock was a very practical woman. She was definitely not the kind to scream or wave her hands helplessly. No, she immediately identified that Mr. Boddy was deceased, took out her phone, and pushed the number for the campus police. Then she closed the reference room door and positioned herself in front of it to wait for what would come next.

Mrs. Peacock didn’t know Mr. Boddy, although she recalled seeing him around from time to time. Unfortunately, however, she didn’t know his name or anything else about him. And she wasn’t about to search his pockets for ID. She stood calmly in front of the door, but no one else came near, so there was no need to say anything—not yet. Nevertheless, she definitely felt relief when she spotted Colonel Mustard approach. Her solitary vigil was at an end.

Colonel Mustard was a big man, not particularly tall but rather wide. His complexion was ruddy and topped with a mess of blondish hair, complemented by a matching flamboyant mustache. His stride was confident and heavy, a man who knew he was in charge and perfectly comfortable with that responsibility. He wasn’t a colonel in the army these days. In fact, he was wearing a standard issue police uniform, and his title was simply officer, not colonel. But he’d served twenty years in the army before retiring to join the police force, and he brought his old title with him. Everyone called him colonel.

“What have we got?” he asked Mrs. Peacock.

She was considerably smaller than Colonel Mustard, a thin woman with dark hair pulled tightly back into a bun, wearing a loose flower-printed dress, belted at the waist. Thick glasses framed blue eyes, watery and pale. “I found a man in the library,” she explained. “I think—actually, I’m pretty sure—he’s dead.”

“Guess I better have a look. Where is this body?”

Mrs. Peacock opened the reference room door and stood aside for Colonel Mustard to enter. She remained in the corridor, having no desire to see Mr. Boddy’s corpse again.

Colonel Mustard observed Mr. Boddy sprawled across the dictionary and agreed with Mrs. Peacock’s assessment of the situation. He might have called an ambulance. Indeed, he certainly planned to do just that, but obviously, there was no hurry. So he looked around the room curiously before reaching into his shirt pocket for a phone. He concluded that Mr. Boddy’s demise had most certainly been caused by having been hit over the head with the candlestick that stood conveniently on the table. Colonel Mustard withdrew a plastic bag from his right pants pocket and bagged the candlestick, realizing, as he did so, that the perpetrator would have doubtless had enough sense to wipe his or her fingerprints off the object before leaving it to be found.

Miss Scarlet was the first of the Emergency Medical Team into the room. She was tall and thin, but quite strong and muscular, as she worked out at the gym daily, lifting weights and such. She had served as a paramedic in the Marines for a number of years, but decided to leave the service when her most recent enlistment was up, since she wanted to settle down into one location. Serving in the Marines required frequent relocations, and that had become tiresome. But she loved the excitement of speeding around in an ambulance with the sirens blaring, and liked the feeling that she was contributing in a positive manner to her community, so working as an EMT suited her very well.

Like Colonel Mustard, Miss Scarlet regarded Mr. Boddy’s posture across the table and concluded that he was deceased. Nevertheless, she dutifully felt for the man’s carotid artery in his neck, and determined that there was no pulse, nor could she observe his chest rise and fall. She summoned her assistant, who was just wheeling a gurney into the room, to help her lift the body on to it, and remove him. Colonel Mustard had already photographed the scene with his phone, so the policeman had no objection to the corpse’s removal.

As the two EMTs were wheeling the gurney with Mr. Boddy’s body on it out of the room, a young man happened to pass by. Mr. Green was quite young but he was an avid student of literature, and was hoping to spend his future career both teaching others to appreciate great literature and contributing to the oeuvre himself. He was rather nicely dressed for a student – no torn jeans and sloppy t-shirt for him. No, he was clad in a pale celery collared shirt and a pair of navy blue chinos, freshly ironed. His reddish hair was neatly brushed back from his forehead, and he carried an armload of books, which he had only just checked out from the library. Curiously, he noted that the body on the stretcher belonged to his erstwhile classmate, Mr. Boddy.

“I see that old Plum got his revenge, then,” Mr. Green noted to Miss Scarlett.

Colonel Mustard overheard this remark, and immediately drew Mr. Green aside to question him further. Mr. Green related the incident that had occurred in Professor Plum’s classroom earlier that day, when Mr. Boddy had taken the opportunity to complain that the Nobel Prize winning novel being studied was overly convoluted and long. “Professor Plum took exception to this opinion, and had said something about pusillanimous psychopaths in response. His face turned purple, he was so angry,” Mr. Green explained to Colonel Mustard.

“So you think that Professor Plum killed Mr. Boddy because of this incident?” Colonel Mustard pursued.

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Mr. Green replied.

An examination of the candlestick revealed that Professor Plum hadn’t been quite as careful wiping off his fingerprints as he thought he had. The forensics team had discovered a match with a print remaining on it, and that was all the evidence Colonel Mustard needed to arrest Professor Plum, who, realizing that the game was up, confessed his deed.

Flash Fiction.