THE TILLAMORE TALES 4? Just a loose idea I was playing with early on (could perhaps be the case William has to help the other detective with in "All he wrote"?), came across while going through some old letters and decided to translate just for the heck of it. One easy way of making a humorous game (or whatever) is to steal a plot and parody it. When I first wrote this I had just read a parody of "The Maltese falcon" (Yes, I've seen the original too) and for some stupid reason tried to make a twist on it. My version is called "The Jersey Sparrow". It seems that once upon a time the jersites (or whatever they're called) sent the English queen a small sparrow sculpture made of, accord- ing to the history books, "the most precious material they knew of". A lot of more or less shady characters are searching for this precious artifact, which of course turns up in our hero's possession at the end. But where the falcon in the movie turned out to be a fake, the Sparrow that William finds is the real McCoy. Just like the Falcon, the Sparrow is covered with some (relatively) cheap material to hide its true nature, and when in the end the disguise gets stripped off, it is found that the Sparrow is made of some kind of shiny white substance. Platinum, perhaps, or some kind of pre- cious stone? Well... not exactly! During a scuffle the statue falls into Wiliam's tea kettle - and dissolves! Turns out it was made of SALT - a sub- stance that once was worth its own weight in gold, but is now pretty worth- less. [New idea: Jersey - or any other island for that matter - is of course surrounded by sea water, and salt should be pretty cheap to produce, but maybe the Sparrow is made of a specially pure kind of rock salt or something. Or maybe it's hard to make a solid block of salt of that size...Something has to make it special anyway!] Anyway, when even the shouting is over, William must find a way to get rid of the salt sludge. It's so thick he's afraid it will clog the drains if he just pours it into the sink, so he takes the kettle downstairs to dump the contents in the garbage. There he meets Shirley who wants to know what he's got in the kettle, and he steals a line from Bogart...