Blotter Littéraire
I wax boring about it but never cease to be amazed at the conciseness and turns of phrase to be found in our own BI Review's Police Blotter.
If it's hits we're after, the two sections to have online are the lively Letters section and the deadpan Blotter.
If it's some writer manqué cop, he's wasted behind the donut and taser. On the other hand, if it *is* a scribbling bobby, how come that other paper doesn't run such gems?If it's a chore assigned to some menial BI staffer, watch your back Mr Editor, is all I can sayMy bet is that it's the Review Ed himself.Whoever, I have this theory that the Blotter is a nice little backwater in which this wordsmith has a lot of fun as well as being able to pump a little stylistic iron. Certainly, there are some tongue in cheek phrases that would raise eyebrows if they were to suddenly appear in more visible sections of the paper.
To pluck just 2 editions at random - March 30 and April 2 - how about these for deftness:
"He was properly clothed and fed and said he was not abused ... agreed to go home and abide by his father's rules" ... relay emergency information about their childrenOK, so it wasn't coined by our local fuzz, but I still love the phrase about "drug paraphernalia" "The call proved to be unfounded; the diver came up as scheduled and then went down again, and the watcher had misunderstood." Observe,
Watson - all life is there. Really, you could set that as a short story competition and your doormat would be piled with the Hemingway parodiesAnd yo! Might the Nokia cell phone reported stolen 1324 hrs, March 25, be the same found outside the police station itself, 0706 hrs, March 27?"Several ferry riders became embroiled in a dispute ... all parties sent on their way ... ". I heard from some of the embroilees: quite a party, that sounded, and methinks a certain jolly jack tar spent some time in the brig." ... the primary aggressor could not be determined." Now where was that phrase when *I* was mediating disputes between my brood?"The vehicle had no noticeable damage, but did have an abundance of deer fur on the front end." Oh la la - totally wasted here. If I walked into Eagle Harbor book salon and saw displayed some hotshot potboiler called "An Abundance of Deer Fur", it'd be twenty bucks down and no sleep til the last page.
