With Respect to the Dead One, It's Beryl

Miss Marple has gone, Sherlock’s played his last song
And no more will Poirot wax moustaches
I miss the old sleuths who'd discern lies from truths
Despite the fake beards or eyelashes
Clues found from a thread on a victim now dead
Or cigar ash from some rare tobacco
The game was afoot when the damsel's kaput
Done in by a spy or some whacko

Unfazed by disguises or false alibises
They lived by the Code of Detectives:
With virtue unerring chase ev’ry red herring
But never use oaths or invectives.
Dame Agatha Christie’s plots complex and twisty
We look on with wistful nostalgia
Unlike modern cops who are pretty much flops
When it comes to a grasp of algebra

How Mickey Spillane could tame ev'ry wild dame
We read on with rapt adulation
As each femme fatale would tell Mickey fuck all
But could never resist fornication.
When intrigue ensnarls Nick and Nora Charles
All the suspects came up for a fine meal
By the rule of whodunits they'd solve whose gun it is
That snuffed the chorine in the first reel.

Though we couldn't care less ‘bout that dead heiress
We marvelled how Charlie Chan's mind worked
Ready to disturb with some Chinese proverb
To find where those with motives malign lurked
Not with some tricked-out car or a weapon of war
But armed with his power of deduction
Sorting rich guilty mothers and miffed jilted lovers
From the villains, their bribes, and seduction

On pantheon summits live the gods of whodunits
Righting wrongs with logic's precision
They foiled each vile plot and to swift justice brought
Every rogue plus his moll and his minions
What had first mystified was soon identified
And reckoned by whom to have been felled
T'was the poisoned Bordeaux, and now we all know
With respect to the dead one, it's Beryl.

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