Anyway, It was a Dark and Stormy Night When I Wrote Them

Extracts from the novels of Edward Bulwer-Lytton. No, not really but you'll get the idea.

Anyway, it was a dark and stormy night when I wrote them

CASINO ROCHDALE

Acting Sub-Lieutenant Lily Pond lit her fiftieth Consulate (cool as a mountain stream) of the day with her Bic lighter and took a long pull at her bottle of Bacardi Breezer. She narrowed her eyes at the dark-haired and sun-tanned croupier as he expertly flicked another card from the shoe. It was the ace of diamonds. Pond pondered for an instant then moved with silky grace to upturn a card of her own onto the exposed ace. Like lightning she struck down her palm upon the cards and exclaimed triumphantly, “Snap!”

THE BIG CREAK

As Braithwaite took out his weapon and muscled open the door, it creaked mightily on its hinges. ‘Well, where did you expect it to creak,’ he thought to himself with a short laugh. He was long on short laughs was Braithwaite and this was just one of the many eccentricities that he cultivated in the wee small hours of his loveless, lonely life. Well, not loveless or lonely exactly, more despised really because he was an unmitigated shit and a 24 carat bore, as people took a delight in informing him at every opportunity, and this was why he was muscling open doors that led to nowhere in his spare time.

SINS AND SENSUALITY

Perspiration ran down Colonel Brandon’s neck as he excitedly surveyed the gorgeously soft, peachy mounds of Marianne’s heaving bosom which he had admired from afar for a full se’ennights ever since he caught that fleeting glimpse of her naughty nubbins being ladled into her bodice by the dusky-faced slave-boys that she was wont to have about her wherever she went, to do her bidding.
He twirled his moustaches and gave a cruel laugh as he lasciviously pondered the fate worse than death that he had in store for her. “After all,” he thought as he swirled his long, black cape before her swooning eyes, “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a married man in possession of a bad nature, must be in want of a victim.”

A TALE OF TWO TITTIES

Sydney never dressed before breakfast if he could help it so when he speared a piece of German sausage with his fork he was wearing only a pair of pants and a soiled singlet through which showed the unmistakable outline of a pair of man-boobs that Mae West herself would have killed for. It was the vest of times, it was the wurst of times.

AND THEN THERE WERE NONE

“Nothing lasts forever,” Slade said to himself. Even the Nothingness at the beginning of Creation only lasted till the Big Bang or until God created the heaven and the earth; that is if you were naïve enough to believe any of those kinds of impossible things. Slade himself believed in nothing. Or so he thought, but as he believed that nothing lasts forever, the paradox he’d generated showed its displeasure by causing him to disappear immediately with a loud and (possibly) terminal pop.

THROUGH THE COCKTAIL-GLASS

Once upon a time they lived happily ever after, although that may just have been due to the alcoholic haze in which they conducted their day-to-day existence. But in these cruel days, happiness had become a state of mind that was all but extinct and time a concept that was entirely relative. On the whole, Alice blamed Einstein though she thought that the white kitten may also have had something to do with it.

OMELETTE, PRINCE OF DARKNESS

“To bleed or not to bleed, that is the question,” mused the hapless prince. As usual, he’d been left with egg on his face after sinking his teeth into his girlfriend’s neck, sucking her dry and leaving her to float in a pool where her homicidal brother was sure to find her and come looking for him even though all he had was a bare bodkin to defend himself with. And all that after he’d just accidentally skewered her idiot father in the Aris too.

LOVE IN A DAMP CLIMATE

A brutal and persistent rain fell in torrents on the lake, hissing and splashing its way into the very bones of those poor unfortunates cowering under inadequate umbrellas and awaiting the arrival of the next ferry, which was likely to founder anyway in such a deluge that even Noah knew not of. Esmerelda sighed at the sight and bent her head again to the escritoire. She nibbled fretfully for a moment at the end of her gold fountain pen, the one that Algernon himself had gifted her, that she treasured dearly for that very reason, and that she was using because she was sufficiently old-fashioned and romantically inclined enough to deem that as the right and proper thing to do when composing a letter to him, the love of her life. She placed the final full stop and recited to herself aloud the loving words she had consigned to the page. “GR8 wether!!! LOL ;-). Wish U was heer. CU soon. Luv E.”