Well, I phrased it badly, but what I was thinking was that part of the conclusion has to be: "We have a royal body with umpteen stab wounds, who takes the fall?" I assume everyone shrugging publicly and the conclusion being "We have no idea, moving on," is not a good idea. If only because it keeps people wondering and investigating and pointing fingers!
So who takes the fall?
Mind you, I'm reminded of this one line from Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys:
Major F.E. Garrett...took over the government...and ruled the country with a rod of iron until his unfortunate death from falling out of bed several years later. He fell out of bed hard enough to break a number of bones, despite the presence in his bedroom of an entire squad of soldiers, who testified that they had all tried, but failed, to break Major Garrett's fall, and despite their best efforts he was dead by the time that he arrived in the island's sole hospital.
FW's death could be like that if we leaned toward crackier and less political.
I always thought of the Gaiman passage as surrealist humor until I read Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and ever since then I've been like, "Oh, yeah, the Praetorian Guard would totally have done that." (I realize that Gibbon's scholarship is out of date and not all things attributed by him to the Praetorian Guard are still attributed to them, but still. I could see this happening to a Roman emperor.)
cahn, Gibbon is an 18th century scholar who did groundbreaking work in terms of extensive footnotes citing his sources. He's also snarky and eminently readable, as long as you can handle several volumes of 18th century English (which I can now, but could not when I first tried to read him as a teenager).
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timeasmymeasure
Re: FW Whodunit
Date: 2021-03-24 01:22 pm (UTC)Well, I phrased it badly, but what I was thinking was that part of the conclusion has to be: "We have a royal body with umpteen stab wounds, who takes the fall?" I assume everyone shrugging publicly and the conclusion being "We have no idea, moving on," is not a good idea. If only because it keeps people wondering and investigating and pointing fingers!
So who takes the fall?
Mind you, I'm reminded of this one line from Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys:
Major F.E. Garrett...took over the government...and ruled the country with a rod of iron until his unfortunate death from falling out of bed several years later. He fell out of bed hard enough to break a number of bones, despite the presence in his bedroom of an entire squad of soldiers, who testified that they had all tried, but failed, to break Major Garrett's fall, and despite their best efforts he was dead by the time that he arrived in the island's sole hospital.
FW's death could be like that if we leaned toward crackier and less political.
I always thought of the Gaiman passage as surrealist humor until I read Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and ever since then I've been like, "Oh, yeah, the Praetorian Guard would totally have done that." (I realize that Gibbon's scholarship is out of date and not all things attributed by him to the Praetorian Guard are still attributed to them, but still. I could see this happening to a Roman emperor.)