NEW STORY: Death of 'Death of Jezebel'
The original hand-written draft of Christianna Brand’s iconic Death of Jezebel is found.
Its discoverer, the illusive Mr. Black, is eager to auction it off. He invites three potential buyers to his castle, along with a detective to help him guard the manuscript. The buyers are given only one chance to make their bid – privately, without knowing the bids of the other buyers. Whoever makes the highest one between the three, wins.
It’s a game.
One that goes terribly wrong. After announcing the winner of the auction, Mr. Black vanishes. The manuscript, kept locked in a tower and under constant watch, bursts into flames. The suspect, a black knight, is seen fleeing from the scene… flying from the tower window, into the sky.
Note: Reading ‘Death of Jezebel’ is not required, but might make the reading more enjoyable. A one-paragraph ‘pitch’ of the story is given, but there should be no actual spoilers.
Below is an afterword. Although it has no direct spoilers, I suggest reading this only after finishing the story.
I’ve had the idea for a story in which a book is ‘murdered’ for a while now. For some reason, I’d also decided early on to make that book be Brand’s Death of Jezebel. I don’t really know why – it’s not like I dislike the book (even if I definitely don’t like it as much as everyone else might). Originally, I think the intention was to have the book’s ‘murder’ vaguely resemble the murder in the actual book. Kind of like a mitate murder, in which the work being emulated was also the work that gets ‘killed’.
It didn’t get much further than that, though. At the time, I didn’t have a particular trick in mind, and a pastiche for the sake of making a pastiche felt pretty uninspired.
It wasn’t until I read this post that the idea re-emerged, and I decided to have some fun. While I’m generally not a fan of categorizations in art, I think the definition isn’t unreasonable… but it did feel exploitable.
Hence, this story was born. Obviously, no ill will towards the blog’s author or anything. There is no real joke on their expense – the blog post is more of a spring board for the story than anything.
That said, some of the discussion around this post on the Honkaku Discord did make me realize there was an important aspect in which I view mystery fiction differently from… probably most people? It’s definitely something I’ll probably discuss separately.
Anyhow, I hope you like(d) the story!