I was thinking today of a piece of doggerel I wrote some years back about one of the most beloved tropes of adventure fiction, the Elaborate Death-Trap. So I thought I'd share.
Simplicity
"No, Mister Bond, I expect you to DIE!!!"
— A. Goldfinger
Perhaps sometime you chanced to read
Melodramatic narrative
Of villainy and dastard deed
As full of plot-holes as a sieve
The Hero's trapped in Evil's Lair;
The Villain vows to seal his doom.
He does not kill him then and there;
Instead he simply leaves the room!
What sort of overweening sap
By hubris blind or on a whim
Would make a complicated trap
Instead of simply shooting him?
It happens that long, long ago
There really was just such a man;
He sought to kill his direst foe
But used an over-cunning plan.
He learned life's sad and tragic quirk
Sometimes the death-trap does not work.
Nero, the Roman emperor,
Had a domineering mother.
Nagged him 'til his nerves were sore
And he wished his Mom to smother.
So Nero hired an artisan
To rig her ceiling to collapse
And crush her flat as marzipan
Next time she took one of her naps.
When that lethal architecture
Fell just like a cataclysm,
She was out, ('tis my conjecture)
Sitting on the euphemism.
Outside the bedroom she did lurk
And so the death-trap did not work.
The next plan that Nero approved,
Was to construct a special boat;
It had a plug, which when removed
Would cause the ship to cease to float.
And so with nothing else to lose
He placed his unsuspecting mater
Off upon this deadly cruise
In which the waves would inundate her.
He thought the plan out through and through;
He knew this trap just could not fail;
But he forgot to tell the crew
That they were not supposed to bail.
In vain they labored through the dark
Against the leak which would immerse
Them all — they could not save the barque
But did save all the passengers.
They worked the pumps and did not shirk;
And so the death-trap did not work.
The Mother paddled safe to shore,
Her toga drenched and draped with kelp.
She saw a guard there, armed for war
And asked him for a little help.
The man knew well the emp'ror's dream
To see no more his Mom alive,
And so the guard devised a scheme
To see to it she'd not survive.
He saw no need for all the fuss,
For subtle snares and gadgets dumb;
He simply drew his gladius
And punctured her duodenum.
He did the dame in with his dirk;
Because a death-trap would not work.
The Moral of this doggerel
Is clearly plain for all to see:
The plan that you think is really swell
May fail through it's complexity.
Then friends will laugh at you and smirk:
"I KNEW that death-trap would not work!"
— Kurt Wilcken, (c) 2004
"All the World's a Stage and Everyone's a Critic" — Mervyn Alquist