From Cork in Bottle, by Macdonald Hastings:

***

[Pathetic Fallacy with Telephones dept.]

As he reflected, one of the telephones on the desk gave a fretful tinkle.

From "The Diary of Death," by Marten Cumberland:

***

"Time turns our most outlandish paradoxes into truisms." [I guess that's sort of like Hegel's dialectic?]

***

Lady Goombridge's resolute voice boomed out, and dispersed the [other voices] as a motor-horn scatters a flock of roadside chickens.

***

"The night is such a wonderful time to dream [said Silk], but one should never sleep whilst one dreams. How we waste those wonderful hours of silence and moonlight in vulgar sleep!"

Adam Steele laughed loudly.

"Silk wants a 'Moonlight Saving Bill,'" he suggested.

From Strange Embrace, by Lawrence Block:

***

There were two doors at the far end of the living room. He walked to one, knocked carefully, and finally eased it open. He saw a small closet, containing an overcoat and a pair of galoshes. He wondered why he had knocked and thought how strange it would have been if the galoshes had answered him.

***

"If you know as much about them as you know about the James girl, they could all be orangutans and you wouldn't know the difference."

***

It was absolutely incredible how obvious everything became once it was obvious.

***

To be perfectly accurate, Johnny thought, you could only say that Haig turned purple. Literally. His face was the color of grape juice.

***

[But getting back to anthropomorphized telephones... We have two in this book!]

He dialed the girl's number again, listened to the phone ring its brains out, and replaced the receiver.

The telephone on the bedside table was ringing industriously and unpleasantly.

***

From Kill Now, Pay Later by Robert Terrall:

***

[Anthropomorphized Mustaches dept.]

He was thin and dapper, with an ebbing hair-line and a narrow, nervous mustache which seemed to have landed on his upper lip by accident.

***

I followed her through an open arch and sat on a couch facing the blank eye of a television set.

***

From The D.A. Takes a Chance, by Erle Stanley Gardner:

***

"His tongue is hinged in the middle and clacks at both ends."

[Apparently, a tongue with a metaphorical hinge more often than not implies a two-faced nature; but some use it to mean simply somebody who talks too much. ESG clearly means it in the latter sense, and he takes it to the next level by making both ends of the tongue free to move! Incidentally, I note that this runs the hinge left to right, rather than front to back, as the "talking out both sides of the mouth" hinge would run.]

***

"Fit as a fiddle. And why do you suppose people say that? What's fit about a fiddle? When you take one out of its case you have to putter around with it, tinkering and tuning. Why should people think it's fit?"

From "The Cleverest Clue," by Laurence W. Mynell:

***

"We'll step down the road to the 'Ship,' unless you've joined one of these anti-everything leagues lately?"

***

He was a professor and had all the letters after his name that you could think of.... He always spoke just so, like a dictionary.

***

When he talked, he talked like a dictionary; when he didn't want to talk, he could be as dumb as a doughnut.

From Cork on the Water, by Macdonald Hastings:

***

Colonel Johnson had applied himself to salmon-fishing with such single-minded purpose for so long that, with advancing years, he had acquired a noticeable resemblance to a salmon himself.

***

Montague Cork's was a name to magic with. [My first experience of "magic" as a verb (unless there's simply a word missing from the sentence).]

***

On a hook on the wall hung a tu-tu, a stiff white ballet skirt with two leg holes, like spectacles, in the underpart.

***

[in a hotel register]

somebody called something hyphen Smith

***

From The Count of Nine, by A. A. Fair:

***

Bertha Cool twisted her face into a fatuous smile; a sweetly synthetic grin that was as foreign to her as a postage stamp on a dollar bill.

***

"Try hanging around him," I told her, "and you'll learn about the facts of life."

"I know the facts of life," Bertha said.

"You'll learn ramifications, variations."

"I've been ramified, verified, and mutated," she said.

***

Bertha kept blinking her eyes at me as though she was biting the information off in chunks with her eyelids so as to help her brain digest it. [I think this may be a more elaborate version of a similar bit that we saw ESG (aka Fair) use in the Perry Mason oeuvre.]

From The Knife Slipped, by A. A. Fair:

[From Erle Stanley Gardner's pseudonymously penned "Cool and Lam" series.]

***

She...habitually kept her lips clamped in a tight line as though afraid a word might inadvertently spill out when it wasn't absolutely necessary.

***

"This Bertha Cool is a card all right."

"Card, hell," I told him, "she's the whole deck."

***

"What did that fan dancer have that I haven't got?"

"A fan."

***

From "The Room in the Tower," by J. Jefferson Farjeon:

***

I arrived one gloomy evening at the ridiculous Rhine castle I had never quite believed. I had caught a preliminary glimpse of it, when it had still been three miles away...and I had thought, "Oh, nonsense!" Now here the nonsense was.

***

I usually write in a small room, my imagination functioning best through walls that are close. Of course, that was the trouble--this room was too large! Instead of remaining near at hand my imagination was wandering all over the place, and refused to come back when it was wanted.

From "Dead Men's Letters," by Erle Stanley Gardner:

***

That girl could have written a complete set of fifty volumes on the weather and it would all have strung together in perfect continuity and then when a fellow had read everything that was in the fifty volumes he'd still have to stick his head out of the window to see whether it was raining.

From Brief Lives, by Alan Vanneman:

***

I hate rosewood. It's so rosy.

***

When he was done with all four columns he started on the wainscoting. Now that was a pleasant word. Where would we be without wainscoting? I've got to fuck Dennis, he has the most fabulous wainscoting.

***

Dennis, Dennis, Dennis! It's so fucking Toledo. Why not Andre Agassi, for Christ's sake? How could you not win Wimbledon when your name is Andre Agassi?

***

"If you've got to ask..."

"You can't afford it. That's the law of the sea."

***

She had this little spidery writing, like she could hardly bear to touch the pen to the paper.

***

From "Death in December," by Victor Gunn:

***

He met both the Chartons--Gerry, cheery, frank and likeable; and Ronnie, supercilious and full of psycho-this and psycho-that.

***

"He's got no more sense of humour than a carrot."

[When I shared this quote with HC-E, she opined that carrots had a better sense of humor than some vegetables, and I had to agree. We both felt, for instance, that carrots had a better sense of humor than turnips (but not so strong a sense of humor as broccoli).]

***

He went loping down the big staircase not unlike a great shaggy bear...with his hair pointing to all points of the compass.

***

[A twist on the Wodehousian "phonus balonus."]

"If you'll cease talking hokus bolonus...."

***

From "The Man with the Sack," by Margery Allingham:

***

A bewildered-looking bronze lady, clad in a pink marble nightgown, was seated upon a gilt ormolu log, one end of which had been replaced by a blue and white enamel clock face.

From "Mr. Cork's Secret," by MacDonald Hastings:

[I believe we've had something like this before, from another author.]

***

The dance floor was crowded with sad-looking people in tinsel hats. Clouds of balloons floated down from the ceiling, and the diners who were left behind at their tables solemnly amused themselves blowing out paper tubes with feathers on the end and making shrill blasts with wooden whistles. The English, in their way, were having a Gala Night.

From "The Return of Lord Kingwood," by Ivans (trans. Josh Pachter):

***

Mr. Monk then ferreted a number of newspaper clippings and other papers out from an assortment of nooks and crannies.... How the little man managed to locate them so quickly, after they had spent years tucked away and forgotten, was impossible to explain. But it was generally acknowledged that there were certain secret passages through the wilderness of documents strewn both within and without the office's many cabinets, passages that were known only to Mr. Monk, passages that invariably led him directly to whatever information he sought.

From "Murder in the Movies," by Karl Detzer:

***

I'm telling it now, just the way it happened, so that there needn't be any more pictures surrounded by question marks.

***

[I like the "intersport" imagery in this sentence.]

Gatski was a little man, about forty years old, with a bay window like a basketball and a voice like a baseball umpire's.

***

"Turn 'em," Sam said in a peculiar tone, like a sound track that's picked up an echo.

***

From The President's Mystery Plot [a round robin novel]; chapter by Anthony Abbot:

***

[And illustration by Arnold Roth.]

The two partners, Messrs. Noble and Scarp, stood side by side in their little office over a bank and looked solemnly at Jim. They couldn't look at him other than solemnly for they were a very solemn pair.

[...]

They had been partners for so long that they looked like brothers. And both talked in the same hushed and defeated tone; if Jim closed his eyes, it was hard to tell which one was speaking. And whatever Scarp said, Noble repeated in slightly different words.

[Note: Some quick research tells me that Dupond et Dupont debuted a couple of years before Abbot wrote this ca. 1935; but since Tintin wasn't translated into English until two decades later, and the man who wrote as Anthony Abbot had no obvious connection to French-language culture, my guess would be that he came up with the gag independently.]