From Vestal Fire by Compton Mackenzie:

***

Thirty years before this Don Luigi had sent in his bill to Christopher with a demand for immediate payment and a threat of legal proceedings. Whereupon Christopher had paid the bill and told Don Luigi that he would never enter his café again as long as the owner of it was alive. This vow nothing would induce him to break. Duncan Maxwell had begged Don Luigi to try the effect of peremptory bills on some of the other residents in the hope that they too would make solemn vows never to darken his doors again.

***

Scudamore’s humour was a mixture of American pawkiness and international pedantry. An elfin ponderousness is the paradox that describes it best.

[New restaurant concept: International House of Pedantry!]

***

He had a beard so long and so thick that he was never upset by the hoops of the little Sirenisi being driven between his legs, for it served as a sort of cow-catcher, and it was generally believed that he used it as a most efficacious mosquito-net. Scudamore had a theory that he had already been dead for some years and that it was only his beard and nails which were still alive, it being a well-known fact that the beard and nails continue to grow long after death.

***

Gigi had once read on a tinned tongue that it was hermetically sealed, and he had spent so much time trying to open that tin that thenceforward /ermeticamente/ became his adverb of extreme degree. For a thing to be hermetically impossible implied something beyond even the omnipotence of the Almighty.

From Bellringer Street, by Robert Richardson:

***

[This line is from a series of disjointed conversational snippets overheard at a crowded party. Most of them are humdrum utterances on political or domestic topics and the like, so this intriguingly emphatic comment stood out for me--as perhaps the author intended!]

"Don't talk to me about people offering to lay a garden path."

***

A man of alarming height, wearing a precariously balanced toupee as conspicuous as melted cheese poured over a cauliflower, stood up and began thanking everyone in sight.

From Four Days' Wonder, by A. A. Milne:

***

They were great theatre-goers, and had missed the last five minutes of the Third Act of every play worth seeing since 1922.

***

Sturge's book was coming out next month, and Fenton had not yet decided what he was going to say about it. It depended upon certain unknown quantities, one of them being, of course, the actual quality of the book.

***

From their very first meeting Derek had had an offensive way of looking at him, and as soon as the kid had had any eyebrows to raise, it had started raising them.

***

[Re. two fictional characters, each of whom preferred to sleep outdoors.]

It would have been convenient, this being so, if they had married each other, but unfortunately they were in different books.

***

"I don't want a paper, I don't want a paper, I don't want a paper," said Mr. Watterson fretfully.

 

[Cf. the Goons, "Six Charlies in Search of an Author":

 

Grytpype-Thynne:

Nonsense, nonsense, you'd fall down without them. You'd fall DOWN without them.

Ned:

You'd fall down without THEM.

Grytpype-Thynne:

YOU'D fall down without them.

(falling about)

Peter:

Take yer choice.

(Ned breaks up)]

 

***

His hair was very short at the back--not at all what you expect of a painter, but perhaps he wasn't a very good painter.

***

[Aunts dept.]

"She has all the virtues. She is a mother to those who want mothers, and an aunt to anybody who likes aunts."

***

Though in these last two years he had become an enthusiastic cricketer, he excelled as a bad player rather than as a good one, doing so with the air of one who preferred it this way, as being more in the literary tradition.

[Isn't there a Stephen Potter subsection about upmanship through playing badly and losing? (If there isn't, there should be.)]

***

Outside the open windows starlings imitated themselves and other birds untiringly.

***

[Douglas Adams Precursing--and One-Upping!--dept.]

"Have you got two towels?"

"One," said Jenny, looking at the towel-horse.

"I'll have another ready for you. I've told Mrs. Bassett over and over again that the secret of a contented life is two towels."

***

Whenever Leslie Brand let fall an epigram, and he seemed unable to let fall anything else, she either trilled or else bubbled with happy laughter.

***

He looked at himself in the Queen Anne mirror, and found that once again it had no alternative to offer him.

***

[Which Is Pithier? dept.]

"But he's absolutely innocent. As innocent as a--"

"New-born babe," prompted Nancy.

"As innocent as a well, as a matter of fact I was going to say a 'babe unborn.' I don't know that there's much in it."

"Babe unborn," said Nancy. "Much better. Sorry."

From After the Exhibition, by Dolores Gordon-Smith:

***

[This genericized name has so many components, the hyphenation just gives up midway through!]

"The cleaner, Mrs. whatever-it-is the woman's called, from the village."

[Later on, a different character refers to yet another character as "Mrs. Whatever-she-was-called." And note the discrepancies in capitalization and hyphenation: clearly these two Mrs. Whatevers are no relation to each other. (:v>]

[By the way, I was recently reminded that there was a Boston-area 1980s band called Someone and the Somebodies.]

***

[In case it's not clear from the (lack of) context, the line below has the same intent as the one I recently shared from a Clason novel, "The first thing I knew was when that West broke into my room to ask some idiotic question about a bathing suit. I'll bathing suit him!"]

"Motion pictures, indeed! I'd like to give them motion pictures!"

***

The sofa and armchairs had seen better days. Lots of better days.

From Corpse Diplomatique, by Delano Ames:

***

He was wearing a beret I'd forgotten he had. A copy of a French Communist newspaper was folded beside his saucer and he had bought a packet of Gauloises cigarettes. He gesticulated in a very Latin way as he asked the waiter to bring me a Dubbonet. He looked essentially, unmistakably English. I'd never noticed it before.

***

Mrs Andrioli... bustled in with a kind of well-that's-that air about her.

***

[I love the wealth of meaning and intensity of feeling that the phrase "I mean to say" can have in the mouth of a Brit (and how--Incomplexpletives Dept.--it's not even necessary to specify what one means to say).]

"Not that one's superstitious or any rot of that sort, but... I mean to say!"

***

As the question was not only cryptic but also rhetorical I smiled back vaguely and said nothing.

***

Midday cocktail parties usually take me like this at about five-thirty in the afternoon, especially when I have missed tea. I glanced through a footnote in Hugo's Simplified Grammar and learned that the imperfect of the subjunctive is almost never used in contemporary French conversation; but even this did not cheer me greatly.

***

Dagobert ordered a bottle of Veuve Cliquot, though he does not normally like champagne, and attacked the Anglo-Saxon heresy that champagne ought to be very dry. Like all silly things it should be slightly sweet and, as it is not supposed to chill, it should not be too cold. It ought to go off with a resounding pop, the cork preferably bouncing from the ceiling on to someone else's head. It ought to have a reckless label designed by, say, Raoul Dufy, and the neck of the bottle should be festooned with plenty of gold and silver tinfoil.

***

"It is pointless celebrating when there's something to celebrate. You need to celebrate when there's nothing in particular to get excited about."

From Hanging Around Until, by David Hadley:

***

‘Not that way.’ I pointed in the opposite direction. ‘That way.’

‘Why the fuck didn't you say so?’

‘You seemed so happy going that way. We didn't want to disturb you,’ I replied pleasantly. ‘Besides, it's a much nicer walk that way. Don't you think so, Guy?’

‘Oh yes, very nice. I think you get a much better view of the... er... the road... pavement... houses that way.’

‘In fact, if I ever feel the need to go in the exact opposite direction to the one I originally intended, that would be, in fact, the way I would most definitely go.’ I said.

***

I have a vivid recollection of that look on Guy's face. A frown so tight, it seemed as though he was trying to push his eyes around to look inside his brain to find the elusive memory.

***

‘I always mean what I say,’ I said. ‘Even if I can't always say exactly what I mean.’

***

I picked listlessly at the knee of my jeans. My knee poked like a bald head out of the hole; strands of wispy denim material flapped uselessly from the tear. I arranged the strands like a man covering up his bald patch with his remaining hair.

***

‘All right, I'm going. Thanks for the complete lack of help.’

‘Any time,’ Ron said. ‘Whenever you've got a problem, don't hesitate to not come to me.’

***

‘Sometimes it all feels so absurd though,’ I said. ‘I'm too old for teenage angst and too young for a mid-life crisis.’

From Nick Hornby's Funny Girl:

***

She liked the leading man, a French pop singer named Johnny Solo, presumably by his manager rather than by Monsieur and Madame Solo.

***

"Where have I been? Nowhere. You, meanwhile, have been lounging around in your underwear in Wales, while Johnny Foreigner ogles."

"You could have ogled, if you'd come to Wales."

"Who goes all the way to Wales for an ogle? Especially a secondhand ogle."

She didn't want to have a conversation about second-hand ogling, and she certainly didn't want a conversation about Johnny Foreigner.

"What did you do instead, then?"

"Oh, you know," he said airily. "Thinking. Reading. Taking stock."

She wished he'd chosen any three other activities--space exploration, say, and needlework and coal mining. He wasn't a thinker or a reader or a stock-taker.

[....]

"I was actually phoning to ask you out to dinner," he said eventually.

[....]

She shrugged down the phone, but he couldn't see her, so in the end she had to say yes.

From Magic Mirror, by Mickey Friedman:

***

Jack had decided to make much of my being Southern, and I had been "Honeychiled" almost to death.

***

[Incidentally, the "magic mirror" of the title is an art objet that is said to have once belonged to Nostradamus.]

***

From Blood from a Stone, by Dolores Gordon-Smith:

***

"Here we are, Aunt Constance," said Terence Napier. "One doctor, as prescribed, to be taken regularly before lunch."

***

It wasn't, he thought, necessary to pump Mrs. Mountford. She wasn't a pump so much as a tap.

***

"Yes, Mrs. Paxton's sapphires. A big picture it was, with Mrs. Whoever it is--the lady who's got them now, I mean--all dressed up, with them on."

***

[Time-Space Continuum dept.]

The dinner gong wouldn't sound till eight and she had acres of time on her hands.

***

[During a séance]

"You'll have to be rather more precise with your instructions," said Mary Hawker, addressing the spirit of Barita as briskly as if it were on a committee.

***

"Please say you'll forgive me."

"Of course," said Jack, with a reassuring gesture of his beef muffin.

From The Case of the Curious Client, by Christopher Bush:

***

"He said a lot about being knocked down with a feather," Galley said.

***

[Irrelevant Quotations dept.]

"An honest man's the noblest work of God," he quoted, and heaven knows why.

***

"Something about that girl always gets me. Damned if I know why."

I said nothing. To him she might have been a lump in the throat; to me she'd been a pain in the neck.

***

[Fictitious Naughty Stage Comedies dept.!]

He'd first met her when she was in the chorus of Now You're Getting It.... Previous to that she'd been on the road with a company touring in How's Your Father?....

 

[Of course, How's Your Father? was too appealing to stay fictitious forever, and I see that several decades after this novel was written, it became the title of a TV show.]

***

[Both Sides of the Family dept.]

It looked to me as if we were in for the father and mother of all fogs.

From various J. K. Bangs works:

***

From Alice in Blunderland:

***

"The Station?" cried Alice. "What Station?"

But before the Hatter could answer, Alice, glancing through the window, caught sight of a very beautiful train standing before the veranda, and in a moment she found herself stepping on board with her friends, while a soft-spoken guard at the door was handing her an engraved card upon a silver salver "Respectfully Inviting Miss Alice to Step Lively There."

***

From Jack and the Check-Book:

***

"H'm!" said the squeaky little voice. "It is rather less than I had thought. However, we can fix that without much trouble. Zeros are cheap. Just add six of them to that balance."

"Do you mean add or affix?" asked Jack.

"Affix is what I should have said," replied the squeaky little voice.

***

From Half-hours with Jimmieboy:

***

So wide awake was he, indeed, that the small bed in which he had passed the night was not broad enough by some ten or twelve feet to accommodate the breadth of his wakefulness

***

From The Worsted Man:

***

[following one of the songs in the piece]

"But what is your scheme, Impatience? You cannot charm us with a song, you know, even if we have joined in the chorus."

***

From A Rebellious Heroine:

***

“I’m not an idiot, my dear Dorothy.”

“You are a heroine, love,” returned Mrs. Willard.

“Perhaps—but I am the kind of heroine who would stop a play five minutes after the curtain had risen on the first act if the remaining four acts depended on her failing to see something that was plain to the veriest dolt in the audience,” Marguerite replied, with spirit.

***

“Miss Andrews,” said Willard, “may I have the pleasure of presenting Count Bonetti?”

The Count’s head nearly collided with his toes in the bow that he made.

“Mr. Willard,” returned Miss Andrews, coldly, ignoring the Count, “feeling as I do that Count Bonetti is merely a bogus Count with acquisitive instincts, brought here, like myself, for literary purposes of which I cannot approve, I must reply to your question that you may not have that pleasure.”

With which remark... Miss Marguerite Andrews swept proudly from the room, ordered her carriage, and went home, thereby utterly ruining the second story of her life that I had undertaken to write.

***

“I am perfectly well aware, Mr. Parker, what we are down for, and I suppose I cannot blame you for your persistence.  Perhaps you don’t know any better; perhaps you do know better, but are willing to give yourself over unreservedly into the hands of another; perhaps you are being forced and cannot help yourself.  It is just possible that you are a professional hero, and feel under obligations to your employer to follow out his wishes to the letter.  However it may be, you have twice essayed to come to the point, and I have twice tried to turn you aside.  Now it is time to speak truthfully.  I admire and like you very much, but I have a will of my own, am nobody’s puppet, and if Stuart Harley [the author of the book within the book] never writes another book in his life, he shall not marry me to a man I do not love; and, frankly, I do not love you.  I do not know if you are aware of the fact, but it is true nevertheless that you are the third fiancé he has tried to thrust upon me since July 3d.”

***

“And that hero—from the Brooklyn dry-goods shop?” I asked, with a smile.

“I’d like to see him so much as—tell her the price of anything,” cried Harley.  “A man like that has no business to live in the same hemisphere with a woman like Marguerite Andrews.  When I threatened her with him I was conversing through a large and elegant though wholly invisible hat.”

From Murder, Maestro, Please, by Delano Ames:

***

"Was our tandem a Speedster, a Roadster, or a Sportster? It has to go on a form, and since the form is in quintuplicate it's essential to get it right."

***

The mayor got on to the platform to express our gratitude in a few well-chosen words. While he was choosing them everyone filed out.

***

[Honest Answers to Cheeky Questions dept.]

I asked curiously: "Is it lots of fun, Mr Kitson, pretending to be an eccentric genius?"

He opened one bleary eye and studied me. "Yes," he said.

***

Dagobert... knew of a celebrated hostelry in the neighbourhood where the chef was an old pupil of Escoffier. His Perdreau aux morilles and Fricandeau de mousserons were famous, and Dagobert was interested in tasting such locally renowned wines as Clos Saint-Crescent and Château de Leverette. Though he was probably making up these names, he talked himself up to such a pitch of enthusiasm about them that he invited us all to dinner.

***

[By the way, this book--first published in 1952--features a fictional character whose surname is Gordon-Smith. Meanwhile, one of the novels waiting in my to-read stack is by a different author--not born until 1958-whose surname is Gordon-Smith. It does not appear to be a pseudonym and--though one cannot entirely rule out the possibility that a Gordon-Smith senior was a buddy of Delano Ames and the inspiration for his character's name--I have no particular reason to suspect anything other than sheer coincidence at work here.]

From The Iron Clew, by Alice Tilton:

***

"Mr. Witherall, in my candied opinion..."

[This character says "candied opinion" repeatedly, as does her niece (because there's always a niece! in fact, in this installment there are two nieces, of two separate families).]

***

[Lord Emsworth dept.]

His pince-nez, apparently sharing his astonishment, bounced from his nose.

***

[Hydbridized Jack Horner and Jack-in-the-Box dept.]

The figure of a woman appeared suddenly in the vicinity of his front door--rather, Leonidas thought, as if she'd sprung up through the lawn from some subterranean Jack Horner pie--and started hurrying down his flagstone path.

***

His cheeks and ears began to burn at the thought of what a clambake, fish fry and general field day his discovery would provide for the neighbors.

***

"Unless I'm so late that Inga's soufflé has fallen by the wayside, I shall have an excellent dinner."

***

At the drop of a hat, he had intoned to them a sententious poem whose pièce de résistance was a couplet about truth having no exceptions.

It was almost a relief to find himself wondering, parenthetically and quite irrelevantly, what in the world had rhymed with "exceptions." Or, for that matter, what had rhymed with "truth."

***

"Somehow I always thought of him as a pillar of--hm. I don't know that I ever went so far as to qualify the type of pillar, but I definitely placed him in the pillar group."

***

They hadn't seen him yet, but they would as soon as they finished brushing the snow from their shoulders. Yeoville and Emily [btw, their surname is Pushing] always saw everyone, everywhere. They made a point of it. Seeing people they knew was virtually their life work.

***

"You hadn't ought to leave any loopholes unturned at all!"

***

[Who Needs Context? dept.]

"You mean that you often drop into caddy houses at midnight after blizzards, just on the off chance of running into someone who's stolen your dinosaur's footprint?"

***

"There was Blinko [a magician], in installments, and sandwiched in between his acts was a group who sang songs in hoop-skirts, and then in wimples, and then in bathing suits--you know."

***

"I appreciate how irritating it must be for you to have all these loose ends--er--waving in the air like so many question marks."

***

[Who Needs Context? dept.]

"But look here, it was a dinosaur's footprint!" Liz said. "When did it get to be a bank report? When was it a dinosaur's footprint last?"

From The Hollow Chest, by Alice Tilton:

***

Leonidas had learned that the simplest method of quelling excessive curiosity was a full and tedious explanation. [And so have I (:v>! Because I think most people who pepper one with random nosey questions aren't actually interested in listening to answers--their kick comes from asking the questions.]

***

[Wodehousian Telegram Business dept.]

Instead of sending him thirty-odd identical messages, he thought, Mrs. Clemson Vandercook might well have presented him with one full and explicit telegram that contained a few enlightening details.

***

[Remember this, from Cold Steal?]

"East Dalton, West Dalton, North Dalton, South Dalton, Dalton Hills, Dalton Farms,  Dalton Centre,  Dalton Village,  Dalton Falls,  Dalton Upper Falls,  Dalton Lower Falls,  Daltondale, Daltonville,  Daltonham, Dalton Landing,  Daltonwood--"

[Well, there's another roster in the present book, which introduces Dalton Highlands and Dalton Greens!]

***

"Oh, so this is the right corner! I thought it was Eighth and Oak, but then almost anything seems right if you add it to Oak."

***

"I told her I was supposed to meet her there, after I asked if her name were George, and I suppose that she supposed I was a friend of her uncle's."

"It's too supposey," Lizzie said.

***

It must be Yerkes's niece. It had to be. She was the only niece available.

***

"Er--perhaps you refer to Section Four of the New Amended Code?"

"I suppose that's it. Yes...."

"Then, sir, may I venture to correct, or at least amend, your impression of that law?" Having made up the New Amended Code on the spur of the moment, Leonidas felt quite competent to amend and correct it any way he saw fit.

***

[Departments department]

"The Department," Leonidas murmured wearily, "of Complete and Utter Futility!"

***

[Just last week, I happened to recall the "six-day bicycle race" gag in ~1920s-1940s literature, and I was startled to realize I had yet to encounter it in the Tilton books. A couple of days later... Voilà!]

And the ensuing walk with the general had been as exhausting as any six-day bicycle race.

***

[As discussed, Leonidas frequently says "M'yes," But this was a new one on me...]

"M'yes, and no."

***

"Cripps has a high, thin voice, rather like a knitting needle."

From Cold Steal, by Alice Tilton:

***

But that habit of hovering was one of the things which Leonidas did not like about young Mr. Dow. He could find no fault with the actual quality of the hovering. It was deft and amiable and ingratiating. Mr. Dow was not a one to push. What troubled Leonidas was so much hovering.

***

"The Street Cleaning Department is mother's pet topic, next to what does she pay taxes for, anyway, she'd like to know, if."

***

"The House Moderne has gone to her head."

***

"When I was a puling infant, I remember seeing Swiss Chard scurrying in Medora's background, making lists and doing things up in brown paper packages. She's kept the brown paper industry booming."

***

The back-door chimes sounded, and at the same time... the front door.

"What do you do in a case like this?" Leonidas asked. "When you're alone, which do you answer first?"

"The nearest, unless the phone starts to ring, too, and then I ignore all of them."

***

[Spurious Quotations dept.]

He had held generations of boys at Meredith's in check by quoting just such hastily invented lines at them. There was something about a quotation from Shakespeare, even spur-of-the-minute Shakespeare, that seemed to stop people in their tracks.

***

[Bertie Wooster Couldn't Have Said It Better dept.]

"I am not," Leonidas continued swiftly, "experienced in the art of aunt-hunting, but I question your methods. If I had lost an aunt, and if I thought she might be in a given house, I should unhesitatingly ring doorbells and make polite and pointed inquiries. I should not lurk on snow-bound terraces, sneaking--"

"Who sneaked?" the girl demanded.

Leonidas took from his pocket the barber-pole lipstick....

"From this," Leonidas said, "I can only conclude that you have done considerable sneaking over a period of time."

***

"Tell me, how many varieties of Dalton are there?"

"Fifteen," Leonidas said.

"Seventeen," Cassie corrected him. "East Dalton, West Dalton, North Dalton, South Dalton, Dalton Hills,  Dalton Farms,  Dalton Centre [note the pretentious spelling!],  Dalton Village,  Dalton Falls,  Dalton Upper Falls,  Dalton [you guessed it] Lower Falls,  Daltondale, Daltonville,  Daltonham,  Dalton Landing,  Daltonwood--how many is that?"

"Enough," Leonidas said. "Do I gather that you got to the wrong Dalton, Miss Horn?"

"I got to more wrong  Daltons that [sic] I would have believed possible."

***

"Not, as my esteemed mother says, not on your tintype! No, sir!"

***

"The Blodgetts built it. He was a caterer, you know, and I always felt he let one of his pastry cooks design the house on his day off."

[...]

Cassie had erred on the side of restraint in describing Medora Winthrop's house. You could not attribute an edifice like that to one poor pastry cook. Flocks of pastry cooks must have made Blodgett's house their life work.

***

I've never felt so Columbus-and-the-eggy in my life," Cassie said.

***

"I've never in all my life been as utterly thwarted as I've been today, Cassie. Just one thwart, as you might say, after another."

***