rayaso

Amanda Sewell felt lucky to have a job, let alone one that let her carry a badge.  She had a graduate degree in library sciences, which usually was a ticket to permanent retail employment.  But she’d been one of the lucky ones.  The F.B.I. needed her special skills, and now she was the Bureau’s Quote Cop.

“Fact checking just isn’t in our wheelhouse,” Special Agent MacKenzie had told her on Amanda’s first day.  “We need someone to investigate quotations for mistakes.  Grammar’s been taken over by those damned internet vigilantes.  We can’t let that happen here.”

She had a desk, a computer, and best of all, autonomy.  Amanda got to pick her own cases.

Her first case made headlines.  Ernest Hemingway had always been cited as the author of a six-word short story: “For sale.  Baby shoes.  Never worn.”  He supposedly wrote it on a napkin in a bar to win a bet.  In fact, the story had been floating around in newspapers and magazines since Hemingway was ten years old.

Success followed success.  Arthur Conan Doyle never wrote “Elementary, dear Watson.”  Red Sanders, UCLA Bruins football coach, first said “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing,” not Vince Lombardi.  Oscar Wilde never wrote “Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”

Lately, however, Amanda had been having a dry spell, and she was getting pressure to justify her position.  “Who cares who said what,” the F.B.I.’s director had said.  “It’s all elitist fake news anyway.”

Amanda had been working on the case of her career and she just needed time.

“Please, boss,” she said, “just give me two more days.”

She got her time, but no more.  Solving the case depended on an obscure scientist with a passion for snails.

Amanda thought it was especially sad when a scientist’s words were mangled, misunderstood, or attributed to the wrong person.  Outside of Albert Einstein, who cared what they said?

Her latest case was Professor Roberta Albertson, a malacologist who had fought all her life for recognition, only to die frustrated, unknown, and unattributed.  “Make sure they know,” she had gasped as she lay dying, another victim of the deadly cone snail and a gruesome experiment gone horribly wrong.

Professor Albertson’s daughter, Rachel, had first brought the problem to Amanda, along with boxes of her mother’s research.  This was the coldest of cases – Prof. Albertson had been dead ten years, but the unfairness had always haunted her daughter.

A quick review of the material showed Amanda that this might be a case for the Quote Cop.

“It’s time to set the record straight,” thought Amanda, as she fingered her badge.

The suspect quote was “I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.”  Variations have been falsely attributed to Abraham Maslow, Abraham Kaplan, Mark Twain, and Bernard Baruch.  Even the Buddha has been identified as its author.  When asked if he had said it, the Buddha had simply smiled beatifically and said “Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth.”

According to her daughter, Prof. Albertson’s actual quote was “If all you have is a hammer, use it to smash snails.”

Amanda liked it.  It was short, to the point, and ended in the death of snails, which she hated.

Prof. Albertson had been the public voice for an extreme branch of science which advocated the death of all snails and slugs.  “They’re so creepy,” she had said during her famed “Extermination?  Why Not?” lecture.  “Have you ever seen anything so slimy and evil?”

According to her daughter, it was during this lecture that Prof. Albertson had first advocated using a hammer on snails.  “I don’t always have salt,” she had said, “but who doesn’t carry a hammer?  And who doesn’t like a gooey splat?”

Amanda understood.  When she was little, her older brother had pelted her with snails until she had run into the house, crying.  Her heart went out to this obscure scientist.

It was the Extermination Lecture which had really put Prof. Albertson on the map and boosted Stanford University’s Dept. of Aberrant Science to the forefront of crackpot thought, much to the embarrassment of Harvard, which had previously been ranked first in this exciting field.

Unfortunately, a detailed review of all of Prof. Albertson’s boxes did not reveal a single use of the contested words.

About to close the file with a “no case” finding, Amanda thought that sometimes what was important was not what was in a case, but what was missing.  A quick look showed that the notes for the Extermination Lecture were gone.  It was as if it had never been given.

As a librarian, Amanda had learned that nothing was ever gone, it was only misshelved.   “It has to be somewhere,” she thought.  “I need to go to Stanford’s libraries.”

The library for the Aberrant Science Department was understandably small and disorganized, but she found videotapes of Prof. Albertson’s classes, including the Extermination Lecture.  Prof. Albertson had liked to liven things up by dressing as a snail, complete with slime made from Jell-O.  For this lecture, she had been a brown garden snail, complete with moving eye stalks.  Amanda nearly threw up.

Halfway through, she heard Prof. Albertson say ““I don’t always have salt, but who doesn’t carry a hammer?”  This was all the proof Amanda needed.

She made a quick phone call to Prof. Albertson’s daughter, then bundled up the tape to take back to the office.

At the office, her first stop was her boss.

“I did it!” she said.  “I cracked the case.  Let’s notify Wikipedia.”

“Congratulations,” said Special Agent MacKenzie.  “Turn it over to a clerk.  You’ve got a new case.  One that will shake the foundations of poorly written fiction.”

“You don’t mean . . . .”

“Yes,” said Mackenzie.  “The Bulwer Lytton Prize for the worst opening sentence to a hypothetical bad novel.  He’s the genius who wrote “It was a dark and stormy night” to start his novel, ‘The Last Days of Pompeii.’  We’ve just received a tip – it may not be Bulwer Lytton after all.”

“I’ll get right on it,” said Amanda, “but I’m going to need more than a badge for this one.”

“We’ll get you a sidekick pronto,” said MacKenzie.

“You got it, Boss,” said Amanda.

A badge, a sidekick, and Bulwer Lytton in her cross-hairs.  Amanda never knew there could be so much excitement as a librarian.

“It’s amazing where the Dewey Decimal System will take you,” thought Amanda, as she headed out the door, ready to do battle with the guardians of all that was bad in writing.

*     *     *     *     *

Bulwer Lytton was not the first write "It was a dark and stormy night," but he put it to good (bad?) use:
"It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents — except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."