In some other universe, Agatha Christie’s Ariadne Oliver lived, and her crime novels were illustrated by Edward Gorey.
Materials: Pen, ink, and a crash diet of Gorey-covered Sarah Caudwell novels.
The title is, of course, from Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott”, which also provided the title for Christie’s novel The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side, and two previous Illustration Friday mock covers:
So I bought a fedora… If this picture rings a bell, it is because in June last year the topic was “drifting” and I did a mock cover for this poem based on an old Piper sailing manual. This one is inspired by the cover of a 1960 Corgi edition of Alan Hunter’s Gently Down the Stream. It does not appear to be online. I decided to do a silhouette of the DI Dulac instead of the tonal illustration of Gently on Hunter’s cover, and a close-up of the corpse instead of the view of boatsheds and boats with a small and mysteriously-suspender-belted corpse in the reeds (mysterious because as far as I recall, no women or suspender-belted men were murdered in the novel). I’ve extracted an agreement from my sister that, if she won’t pose for me, she will take photos while I pose, but she went out to a barbeque so I have been running around the living room in a trench coat and fedora, sweltering, and lying down on the floor and jumping up again and trying to arrange my hair in 12 seconds, and attaching the camera to backs of chairs… After that part of the process was done, the rest of this happened on the computer, not in a vector program although if I were to do this again (or clean it up further) I would. And please note how I cleverly avoided having to spell “Shalott” correctly. Edited to add a scan of the original cover:
Edited to add: This is now available as a print on Redbubble.
Kathleen Jennings 