False pretences are the bane of modern life or so I’m told. Although Lewis Carroll seems to have composed here an entire poem devolving entirely from the concept of false pretences and all the semiotic and logical heartache they can inflict upon the tender-hearted and tender-brained, in our more louche age the concept of false pretences has inspired instead a steady diet of policiers, bodice-ripping Mills & Boons and true-life confessional serial-killer-self-help-vademeca.
Very well, let the masses have their sensationalist Lewis Carroll, their police gazette Hunting of the Snark! If it’s murder and false pretences they want, let ‘em have it!
The heart of the problem, as I saw it, was to produce a drawing with a maximum of false pretensions and a minimum of actual labor. My eyes fell upon samples of certain competitors of mine, artists blessed with an abundance of spare time and a minimum of talent which they had parlayed into a critically-acclaimed career of coprophiliac jokes, professional amateurism and an uncanny penchant for receiving 99% of a book's fee while doing 1% of the work.
Gosh! Throwing caution to the winds, I brushed aside my idly gyrating Assamese nautch girl, recklessly purchased an entire sheet of second-grade-fresh Denril and pushed another quarter into the meter of my steam-driven pencil! Working without respite, I laboured to flesh out the Baker’s criminal pretence, multiplying his crypto-Carrollian visage seven-fold!
Huzzah for the critics! In a world of false pretences, who is the menaced assassin and who is the menacing victim now? Look out, New York art-wallahs, here comes a real maverick!
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