Murder Most Steampunk or The Case of the Calamari Conundrum

By Valerie Estelle Frankel

Miss Eustacia Louisa Stout is most distressed to find a headless corpse on her doorstep, without so much as a calling card! She flies to the terribly decorated flat of the painfully inept detective Hemlock Scones, and volunteers to accompany him on his equally inept inquiries. Along with Presto the Magician, Bongo the Clown, a mongoose with an elaborate backstory, Dashing Man (who always seems conveniently absent), and their troop of semi-competent Victorian superheroes, they begin cleaning up London’s streets. Will the nefarious schemes of Doctor Cephalopod prove too much for them? Will aethyric London fall? Or at least not turn into a raging automaton? Forget all you know about steampunk superhero detective parodies and prepare for the silliness!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Valerie Estelle Frankel
• Release date: Mar 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463105627

Valerie Estelle Frankel

Valerie Estelle Frankel has won a Dream Realm Award, an Indie Excellence Award, and a USA Book News National Best Book Award for her Henry Potty parodies. She's the author of 75 books on pop culture, including Doctor Who - The What, Where, and How, History, Sherlock: Every Canon Reference You May Have Missed in BBC's Series 1-3, Homages and the Highlands: An Outlander Guide, and How Game of Thrones Will End. Many of her books focus on women's roles in fiction, from her heroine's journey guides From Girl to Goddess and Buffy and the Heroine's Journey to books like Women in Game of Thrones and The Many Faces of Katniss Everdeen. Once a lecturer at San Jose State University, she's a frequent speaker at conferences. Come explore her research at www.vefrankel.com.

Book preview

Murder Most Steampunk

or

The Case of the Calamari Conundrum

Valerie Estelle Frankel

Other Works by Valerie Estelle Frankel

Henry Potty and the Pet Rock: A Harry Potter Parody

Henry Potty and the Deathly Paper Shortage: A Harry Potter Parody

Buffy and the Heroine’s Journey

From Girl to Goddess: The Heroine’s Journey in Myth and Legend

Katniss the Cattail: The Unauthorized Guide to Name and Symbols

The Many Faces of Katniss Everdeen: The Heroine of The Hunger Games

Harry Potter, Still Recruiting: A Look at Harry Potter Fandom

Teaching with Harry Potter

An Unexpected Parody: The Spoof of The Hobbit Movie

Teaching with Harry Potter

Myths and Motifs in The Mortal Instruments

Winning the Game of Thrones: The Host of Characters & their Agendas

Winter is Coming: Symbols, Portents, and Hidden Meanings in A Game of Thrones

The Girl’s Guide to the Heroine’s Journey

Choosing to be Insurgent or Allegiant: Symbols, Themes & Analysis of the Divergent Trilogy

Doctor Who and the Hero’s Journey: The Doctor and Companions as Chosen Ones

Doctor Who: The What Where and How

Sherlock: Every Canon Reference You May Have Missed in BBC’s Series

Symbols in Game of Thrones

How Game of Thrones Will End

Joss Whedon’s Names

Pop Culture in the Whedonverse

Women in Game of Thrones: Power, Conformity, and Resistance

History, Homages and the Highlands: An Outlander Guide

The Catch-Up Guide to Doctor Who

Remember All Their Faces: A Deeper Look at Character, Gender and the Prison World of Orange Is The New Black

Everything I Learned in Life I Know from Joss Whedon

Empowered: The Symbolism, Feminism, & Superheroism of Wonder Woman

The Avengers Face their Dark Sides

The Comics of Joss Whedon: Critical Essays

Mythology in Game of Thrones

A Rey of Hope: Feminism, Symbolism and Hidden Gems in Star Wars: The Force Awakens

The Marvelous Metafiction: Investigating the Literary in Lemony Snicket’s Series of Unfortunate Events

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2019 Valerie Estelle Frankel

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 9781798504864

LitCrit Press

To my dad, Steve Frankel, who dragged me to so many Steampunk conventions that he established the need for this book’s existence. He and his finery also made the cover.

With particular thanks to G. David Nordley for his Secret Passage Detector and accompanying illustration, and to the rest of the Whensday group for their helpful critiques on Victorian mores, technology, and why I’m not always as funny as I think.

Contents

Chapter 1: A Most Problematic Visitor

Chapter 2: The Clown, the Magician, and the Mongoose

Chapter 3: The Queen and the Toffee Apple Eater

Chapter 4: Difficulties with Spinach Pyramids

Chapter 5: London Constabulary

Chapter 6: The Carstairs Club, with Difficulty

Chapter 7: Decidedly Not an Assignation

Chapter 8: Return to the Carstairs Club

Chapter 9: Doctor Cephalopod’s Scheme

Prologue the First

Deep in the fog of a London night, a tentacle twitched. The stars were right, or at least forming half a lopsided pentacle if one squinted hard. The horrible conclusion was foregone, predestined, and set in stone, or at least some sort of rubber mousse-sculpting mold. Soon all of England would be in the Monster’s grotesque thrall. All of London lay poised on the precipice of an awful madness too terrible to name. In short, it was definitely not the Aether Bunny.

Meanwhile, lugubrious, swirling thoughts lugubriously swirled in the vast and labyrinthine recess beneath the Thames. A creeping instinctual urge swelled, one to devour and kill. And perhaps, first, a cup of tea with those little iced shortbread biscuits. The loathsome creature settled down in its stygian depths to wait. After all, it had completely run out of calling cards.

Chapter 1: A Most Problematic Visitor

Miss Eustacia Louisa Stout had expected a normal morning, before she discovered the caller had no head. First, breakfast—tea and toast. (Then because such was only considered a complete breakfast on the Continent, a small supplement of bacon, sausage, baked beans, tomatoes, mushrooms, eggs and black pudding, all fried together in a gloriously greasy conglomeration.) Then came an hour of fastening her into her corset, by way of a six-foot shoehorn (ideally after a few minutes of digestion). Doing her hair. Pausing for an exhausted nap, ideally without mussing said hair or undoing said corset. Then Elevenses—tea and crumpets. An hour or so of explaining to her old-fashioned mother why a modern girl of the 1870s, hurtling bravely forward into the future, did not intend to marry Lord Lamesworth. Lunch—tea and watercress, and then a snack of tea and teacakes before, of course, high tea. The dead body, discovered after the toast but before the corset, drastically cut into her schedule.

Pigglesworth, the butler (who had been hired despite his unfortunate napkin-folding and equally unfortunate name), had answered the bell to find the man crumpled there on the step—no card, no hat (shocking for a gentleman!) and no head of any sort. The neck had been cauterized, burned neatly across in a way that suggested at least Pigglesworth (assuming the scullery maid was tied up cleaning for her mother’s dinner party, as she had been lately) wouldn’t have to scrub blood off the steps where any neighbors might see him doing menial labor. Or so Eustacia cynically reflected while crouching behind a potted plant. A pair sat in the entryway to match the pair by the back door, both sets graceful, sweeping, and quite large enough to hide behind when one wore green or brown, Eustacia’s favorite colors. These shades reflected a warm desire to connect with nature, one completely free of artifice, or so the lady reflected as she ordered frocks to these specifications. Besides, as her beloved sensational stories in magazines had revealed, when one is dangling off a precipice shrieking for aid or bound to train tracks awaiting a handsome stranger’s rescue, the lady always is found in eye-searing pink or bright blue. Eustacia, whose sympathies lay more with the detective than damsel, was having none of that.

When Pigglesworth had gone to consult with Mrs. Stout on the gentleman caller vis-à-vis his absent head and any note of address, Eustacia sneaked out onto the front porch. Patting her pockets, she produced a magnifying glass, handy pair of tweezers, notebook and pencil and bundle of petit-fours wrapped in a handkerchief. These last she nibbled absently as she examined the body.

Miss Stout could not officially name herself a detective by any means, or at least, not one formally inducted into the society of Sleuths, Socialites and Surgeons that wandered through London independently consulting on crimes with varying degrees of success. But she was ambitious! Not for her a society marriage and a lifetime of tea, scones, and discussing the weather in decorated drawing rooms. She had committed to save England from the evilest of criminals, pistol in hand and lace gloves on her fingers. As long as she didn’t have to touch anything too icky.

With all this in mind, she began her examination. Item: one body. It was dressed neatly in a dark suit and purple silk cravat, like a gentleman. He appeared to favor the elegant full Windsor knot over more fly-by-night fashions. Suspicious footmarks: none. Dropped handkerchief, glove, or note of confession: none. Scent: undeniably present. In fact, the air reeked of a thick, tarry odor. Pockets: empty, save for a single card. It read, If found, please return to the Carstairs Club. This gave Eustacia a moment’s pause: what was to be returned? The card? The body? Something else? The Carstairs Club she’d heard of, as one of the most select in London. Eustacia was busily noting down all her findings when a screech split the air. Eu-Lou!

Eustacia flinched. Eu-Lou was without doubt the most embarrassing, painful nickname to be invented in all of history. Unfortunately, her mother could not be persuaded of that fact. "Coming, Mère!"

This was her subtle revenge, as her mother equally hated the name Mère as much as Eustacia hated Eu-Lou. Mare, her mother had remarked on several occasions, was a female horse, though she couldn’t well argue with Eustacia’s innocent sounding protest that she was just practicing her French as her mother was always requesting. French, Eustacia found, was not terribly difficult, as long as one stuffed the words up one’s nose and slurred the last few letters.

As she hurried upstairs, she