Well, my entry has been posted, and the prize of books to the value of £10,000 will shortly be mine, or somebody else’s.
I asked for, and received, help with six questions. For those who want to try to answer the remaining questions, here they are:
Aliases
01. Which three novelists rang the changes on their literary identity by adopting the surname ‘Bell’?
02. Fascinated by doubles, Samuel Langhorne Clemens assumed which literary alter ego?
03. Which Irish writer was the indebted James Joyce addressing when he wrote ‘AEIOU’?
04. Which creator of politicised pigs took his pseudonym from a river in Suffolk, England?
05. She finally adopted the literary persona, Theophrastus Such. What was her more usual male pseudonym?
Unusual Deaths
06. In which novel does a man meet his death by dropping from a balloon’s mooring rope?
07. Which Dickensian rag-and-bone man dies by spontaneous combustion?
08. A medieval monk is poisoned by a book in which international bestseller?
09. In which literary gem is a housemaid with a deformed shoulder engulfed by quicksands?
10. Which Shakespearean duke dies from too much madeira?
Births
11. Which novel rewinds its hero’s life from his moment of death to the moment of his birth?
12. Which Dorset single mother gives birth to a child named Sorrow?
13. Whose birth, along with 1,000 other babies, coincides with the dawn of independent India?
14. Where does a courtier abandon a new-born baby, before exiting pursued by a bear?
15. Which crime writer dreamt up a nightmarish future in which no children have been born for 25 years?
Clothes
16. Who shocks his employer by turning up for work in yellow stockings?
17. Which novel’s opening chapter features boys in black cloaks marching across a scorching beach?
18. Which island-dweller togs himself out in goatskin garments?
Madness
19. Which character ends up unwillingly supplying a Dickensian talking-book service to a madman in the Brazilian Jungle?
20. Which character has a schizophrenic breakdown in a 1920’s Riviera bathroom, and in which novel?
21. Which senior citizen suffers from mental disturbance in wet and windy weather because of his dysfunctional family?
22. A royal lunatic with purple urine is at the centre of whose play?
Drink
23. Which novel confronts a whiskey priest with sobering reality in Mexico?
24. Same country, but this time mescal is the main character’s preferred poison. In which 20th century novel?
25. Chardonnay is the favourite tipple of which calorie-counting girl-about-town?
26. Which clergyman behaves improperly after drinking ‘Mr. Weston’s good wine’?
Drugs
27. Who keeps his tobacco in the toe end of a Persian slipper?
28. Princess Puffer’s opium den lurks in which author’s unfinished novel?
29. Whose mother’s ashes were mixed with cannabis, and in which book?
30. Which poetic narcotic addicts chill out ‘on beds of amaranth and moly’?
Animals
31. The destruction of the whaleship Essex was the inspiration for which novel?
32. ‘We had the old crow over at Hull recently, looking like a Christmas present from Easter Island’. To which of his poetic contemporaries was which poet referring?
33. Who told the tale of ‘a cok and hen’ and ‘a col-fox, ful of sly iniquitee’, and on the way to where?
34. Which old possum wrote about his feline friends?
Food
35. Who is almost eaten by a table-sized crab, millions of years after he narrowly escapes the jaws of albono carnivores in 802,701?
36. Which Christmas dinner of turkey, ham, sauce and celery is disrupted by a row about Charles Parnell?
37. Which character supplemented his preferred meat ration with fava beans and a nice Chianti?
38. Which French cakes inspired a 12-volume novel?
39. Which Shakespearean mother unknowingly dines on her sons baked in a pie?