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unearths some literary gems.
From A Voyage of Consolation:
***
There was a delay, during which I listened attentively, with one eye closed--I believe it is the sign of an unbalanced intellect to shut one eye when you use the telephone, but I needn't go into that--and presently I got New York.
***
I heard a whistle, which I cannot express in italics.
***
We stayed over two or three trains in London, however, just long enough to get in a background, as it were, for our Continental experiences. The weather was typical, and the background, from an artistic point of view, was perfect. While not precisely opaque, you couldn't see through it anywhere.
***
"Did I get the four tickets--or two of them--or one? No, sir, I got a letter in the third person singular saying it wasn't a public entertainment!"
***
[Precursor to Judy calling Howard "Steve" in What's Up, Doc?]
"Don't you think we might be silent for a time, Alexander," she said.
Momma does call him Alexander sometimes. I didn't like to mention it before, but it can't be concealed for ever. She says it's because Joshua always costs her an effort, and every woman ought to have the right to name her own husband.
***
"When Emmeline leaves us," said her father, "I always have a kind of abandoned feeling, like a top that's got to the end of its spin."
***
There was something very unexpected about Miss Callis; momma complained of it. Her remarks were never polished by reflection. She called herself a child of nature, but she really resided in Brooklyn.
***
As we stood looking at the Eiffel Tower, poppa said he thought if he were in my place he wouldn't describe it. "It's old news," he said, "and there's nothing the general public dislike so much as that. Every hotel-porter in Chicago knows that it's three hundred metres high, and that you can see through it all the way up. There it is, and I feel as if I'd passed my boyhood in its shadow. That way I must say it's a disappointment. I was expecting it to be more unexpected, if you understand."
Momma and I quite agreed. It had the familiarity of a demonstration of Euclid, and to the non-engineering mind was about as interesting. The Senator felt so well acquainted with it that he hesitated about buying a descriptive pamphlet. "They want to sell a stranger too much information in this country," he said. "The meanest American intelligence is equal to stepping into an elevator and stepping out again." But he bought one nevertheless, and was particularly pleased with it, not only because it was the cheapest thing in Paris at five cents, but because, as he said himself, it contained an amount of enthusiasm not usually available at any price.
***
We saw our first Italian shrug. It is more prolonged, more sentimental than French ones.
***
"It takes the breath. What splendid revenue must be from that!"
The Senator merely smiled, and played with his watch chain. "I should hate to brag," he said, but anyone could see from the absence of a diamond ring on his little finger that he was a person of weight in his community.
***
Presently uprose a great and crumbling arch and a difference, and as we passed it the sound of the life of the city died indistinctly away and a silence grew up, with the smell of the sun upon grasses and weeds, and we stopped and looked down into Cæsar's world, which lay below us, empty. We gazed in silence for a moment, and then Emmeline remarked that she could make as good a Forum with a box of blocks.
***
"You so often remind me of Punch, Mr. Mafferton."
I shouldn't have liked anyone to say that to me, but it seemed to have quite a mollifying effect upon Mr. Mafferton. He smiled and pulled his moustache in the way Englishmen always do, when endeavouring to absorb a compliment.
***
"One question at a time," said Mr. Mafferton, and I think he smiled.
"Now you remind me of Sandford and Merton," I said, "and a place for everything and everything in its place. And punctuality is the thief of time. And many others."
"You haven't got it quite right," said Mr. Mafferton with incipient animation. "May I correct you? 'Procrastination,' not 'punctuality.'"
***
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unearths some literary gems.
From The Uninvited Countess, by Michael Kilian:
["And I Don't Even Have a..." dept.]
"You know, Bedford, I'm spending a hell of a lot of time here on a case that's not in our jurisdiction." [...]
"So am I," said Bedford, "and I don't even have a jurisdiction."
***
From Dead Man Riding, by Gillian Linscott:
Talking to Dulcie was like hitting tennis balls into a feather bed. She absorbed what you said but nothing came back to you.
***
[From Wodehouse's Something New]
Mr. Beach was too well-bred to be inquisitive, but his eyebrows were not.
"Ah!" he said. "?" cried his eyebrows. "?--?--?"
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unearths some literary gems.
[Here's a nice oxymoron from an Inspector Appleby short story]:
Nothing was visible that did not almost ostentatiously blend with the whole.
***
[From The Penciled Frown, by James Gray: some excessive-consonant words and a flukey patron saint]:
***
He was repeating the names of those to whom he was being presented.
"Mr. Hirmmmmkenmmmm."
"Mrs. Barrtinddmmm."
"Miss Kinggytbbb."
***
Timothy brightened. "You believe in the gospel according to Saint Fluke."
***
[Some maledicta business from Wodehouse, in Pigs Have Wings]:
"To speak expleasantly, sir," he said, "I think the old ---- means to do the dirty on us."
It would perhaps have been more fitting had Sir Gregory at this point said "Come, come, my man, be more careful with your language," but the noun ---- expressed so exactly what he himself was thinking of the Hon. Galahad Threepwood that he could not bring himself to chide and rebuke. As a matter of fact, though ---- is admittedly strong stuff, he had gone even further than his companion, labelling Gally in his mind as a ****** and a !!!!!!.
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unearths some literary gems.
In his novel Cocktail Time, I discovered the Wodehouse version of the "pull up a chair" gag:
"Take a chair."
"I have."
"Take another," said Mr. Saxby hospitably.
***
[Also from Cocktail Time]
“Egad!” he said.
“M’lord?” said Rupert Morrison.
“Nothing, my dear fellow,” said Lord Ickenham. “Just egad.”
As the saloon bar was open for saying egad in at that hour, Mr. Morrison made no further comment.
***
[Elsewhere from Wodehouse]
"I was afraid you might have other engagements."
"My dear Clarence! As if any engagement, however other, could keep me from answering a cry for succor like yours."
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unearths some literary gems.
From Absent Friends, by Gillian Linscott:
[with an emphasis on lack of context]
***
It arrived quite out of the blue--or out of the mauve perhaps, since that was the colour of the stationery.
***
"Just as well your legal friends couldn't hear you putting leading questions to a piano."
[Context hint: seance.]
***
I fell asleep at last wondering if it were some fault in me that I could never imagine wanting to call anybody Tumtum.
***
From Bland Beginning, by Julian Symons:
"You know the kind of thing—how Henry James patted him on the head when he was five and said, 'I hope, my dear young friend, that you will always retain your present fine awareness of simple, and in fact incommunicable, emotion which it is the endeavour of a lucky few, quite simply, to communicate.'"
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unearths some literary gems.
From John Dickson Carr:
He never sat down in a chair without first turning it the wrong way round. He always said 'Ho, my lads!' when he came into a room, and he never went out of it without leaving the door open so that he could come back in again.
***
From Christianna Brand:
Inspector Cockrill is known to pick up any hat that happens to be at hand, to the considerable inconvenience of the true owner. Anything that does not actually deafen and blind him is acceptable.
***
From Nicholas Blake's "The Long Shot":
Eccentricity, as I see it, is nothing more than the visible track of the libido taking a short cut to the desired object.
***
From James Miles:
He had... a full moustache that threatened to encircle his head.
***
From Anthony Berkeley:
I had a picture postcard from him this morning. An incredibly blue Lake Como in the foreground and an impossibly white mountain at the back, with Cadenabbia sandwiched microscopically in between. Actually, though, he's in Bellagio for a few days.
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unearths some literary gems.
From Death Mask, by Jane Dentinger:
***
She was a perfect type, just like an E. F. Benson character but with sex.
***
From The Moonflower Murder, by Beverley Nichols:
***
She looked like a sharp, modern full-stop on a page of illuminated parchment.
***
[Rhetorical Questions Answered dept.]
"How dare you speak to me so insolently?"
"Because I do not care to have Krishna insulted."
***
[Metaphorical Typography That Is Not Reflected in the Actual Type dept.]
"Mrs. Kenneth Faversham?" echoed Waller, in block capitals.
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unearths some literary gems.
From The Immaterial Murder Case, by Julian Symons:
***
This poem is reproduced by permission of the magazine Yes and No in which it first appeared.
***
In person Mrs P. is tall and angular with lots of flapping, jingling things about her.
***
“I asked if he would like to combine with me on my translations from the Chinese, and he was quite rude. And it’s difficult for me to do them alone, because I don’t really know any Chinese.”
***
“You do drink whisky, don’t you?”
“Does a cat swim?”
I couldn’t remember.
***
I’d come to the conclusion already that Woode was a damned bad detective, but one thing I must say for him, he has the queerest way of popping out by your side, almost from under your elbow or out of your pocket, when you don’t expect it.
***
Knew-it-all-the-time was now mixed with If-you’d-only-told-me-before in Woode’s expression.
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unearths some literary gems.
An author's note by Dorothy L. Sayers:
"Every person, incident, institution, college, firm or whatnot in this book is purely imaginary and is not intended to refer to any actual person, incident, institution, college, firm or whatnot whatsoever."
***
From Smallbone Deceased, by Michael Gilbert:
After she had gone he sat for some time, then resummoned Mrs. Porter from the typists' room and dictated a vigorous letter to Lady Buntingford's laundry. [I eventually realized this means the laundry-service business that Lady B. patronizes--but it was fun while it lasted!]
***
Hazelrigg leaned back again, and treated himself to another bout of swiveling. It was a lovely chair.
***
Good God, people would be coupling their names with--and--next.
[Though the typography is a bit strange--everything from the "with" through the "next," including the dashes, is all run together just as I've typed it, with no spaces--I think from the context that this is a blank map to the name of a law firm, i.e., [ ] & [ ].]
***
"Then he could pay the interest by check--to--"
"To whom?" said Mr. Birley and Mr. Craine in a grammatical dead heat.
***
"I see," said the Assistant Commissioner.
He drew a truculent rabbit on the scribbling pad in front of him: thought for a few minutes, then took out a four-color propelling pencil from his inside pocket and dressed it in a Harlequin tie.
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unearths some literary gems.
From Sister Beneath the Sheet, by Gillian Linscott:
He was in his early forties, brown hair just flecked with grey, a square, lined forehead and a jutting chin ending in a sharp ledge of a beard, like a cow-catcher on the front of an American railway engine.
***
“I, Jules Estevan, do solemnly swear that I spent the hours between seven o’clock and midnight last Wednesday insulting a friend about his poetry and drinking too much absinthe.”
“That’s a very long insult, Mr Estevan.”
“They were very bad poems, Miss Bray.”
***
I have achieved nothing so far towards ensuring the smooth transition to us of Topaz Brown's legacy, but I have acquired a pendant with a large opal, a set of underwear with ribbon and net trims and a kilo of cooked fish, since disposed of. This afternoon I visited the circus. It is now midnight and I am sitting in a magnolia tree. Hoping this finds you as it leaves me.
Yours,
Nell Bray
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unearths some literary gems.
From Audition for Murder, by Susan Sussman:
***
[Crackling static in an intercom brings us a couple of all-consonant words.]
"The dpthrrst of Msskkffll Lnnnnaas."
***
If you can't star at your own funeral, why bother going?
***
I regale him with witty, charming, pithy stories. He is more amused than ardent. I pith harder.
***
[I love it when a character in a book does exactly what *I* would have done.]
"I would love just once," Murray says, "to sit above the salt."
[...]
"Here." Beth puts a saltshaker under Murray's chair.
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unearths some literary gems.
Here, in a mystery story by Ernest Bramah, is a delightful twist on the "loquacious witness" trope: instead of giving her rambling testimony verbatim, he characterizes it from a scholarly distance!
"Mrs. Jones’s testimony, given on the frequently expressed understanding that she was quite prepared to be struck dead at any point of it if she deviated from the strictest line of truth, did not disclose any new feature, while its frequent references to the lives and opinions of friends not concerned in the progress of the drama threatened now and then to stifle the narrative with a surfeit of pronouns."
***
From a "To the Reader" note in The Surprising Adventures of the Magical Monarch of Mo and His People, by L. Frank Baum. Note also that this inclusive "we" is quite distinct from the authorial "I" appearing in the same sentence.
"These questions I realize should be answered before we (that "we" means you and the book) can settle down together for a comfortable reading of all the wonders and astonishing adventures I shall endeavor faithfully to relate."
***
Here's a grandfather clock that's anthropomorphized more than in name only, from Dorothy Sayers:
"The grandfather on the stairs was promptly eliminated [as the source of the chime being investigated]; his voice was thin and high and quavering, like the voice of the very old gentleman that he was."
And another bit from Sayers:
"Over a pair of very sharp gray eyes, heavy gray eyebrows hung like a pent-house."
***
Here's a Poirotism I like:
"My friend Hastings is, as you say in England, all at the seaside."
I also like Poirot's duodecimal-friendly self-criticism, when he says he is thirty-six times an imbecile. (I also like the more involved mathematics taking place on this particular occasion: "I have been not a triple imbecile, but thirty-six times one.")
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unearths some literary gems.
From Rex Stout:
"Am I too circumstantial?"
"No," Fred said. Whether he knew what "circumstantial" meant or not, he thought Wolfe couldn't be too anything.
***
"A genius can't be bothered with just plain work like having someone tailed. He has to do stunts. He has to take a short cut. Anybody can get a rabbit out of a hat, so he has to get a hat out of a rabbit."
***
"Why don't you ask me what I want?" [she says]
"I'm putting it off because I may not have it."
"That's nice. I like that. That's a good line, only you threw it away. There should be a pause after 'off.' 'I'm putting it off ... because I may not have it.' Try it again."
***
"You see, Falstaff? Didn't I tell you?"
She had told him absolutely nothing.
***
To watch him consider I had to make an effort to forget his shiny dome and concentrate on his features. It would have been simpler if his eyes and nose and mouth had been on top of his head.
***
Next to Wolfe . . . was . . . a tall skinny guy with . . . a thin tight mouth that was just a hyphen between his bony jaws.
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unearths some literary gems.
From Lawrence Block:
By then they were in the office and the great man was on the telephone. I couldn’t tell who was on the other end of the line or what they were talking about, because all Haig said was “Yes” and “No” and “Indeed” and, at last, “Satisfactory.” For all I could tell he had called the weather bureau and was talking back to the recording.
***
From Rex Stout:
"What I thought, maybe you're not eccentric any more."
"Certainly I'm eccentric. Who isn't?"
***
From Case with Four Clowns by Leo Bruce:
His fair fluffy hair stood out around a prematurely bald spot. It looked like a halo which had been put on like a bowler-hat instead of being worn serenely untethered.
***
From Archie Goodwin:
Wolfe wiggled a finger. That was regression--I just looked it up. He had quit finger-wiggling a couple of years back.
***
From Death and the Dutiful Daughter, by Anne Morice:
The protest which had sprung to my lips had to spring backwards again because there was an interruption.
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unearths some literary gems.
From Leo Bruce:
"We've always called her Bonny. Short for Bon Mot, you see."
***
[A little later, "Bonny" chides her relative for using] "that old nickname.... Nobody has used it for a century. My Bonny's gone over the ocean, in fact."
***
"Mumble, Gray and Mumford of Booty Street, Bloomsbury."
***
Mr. Lofting just now was busy with a youngish man wearing one of those silly little caps which looked as though it had been made for H. G. Wells to wear for cycling as a young man.
***
"And he shouted himself out of the building."
***
From Leo Bruce's A Case for Sergeant Beef:
"Boys," he said. "Would you like to help me catch a murderer?"
He pronounced the word as though he were a comedian giving an imitation of an old-fashioned melodrama, dragging out the first syllable through a series of vowels.
***
Chatto made that interesting sound usually reproduced by novelists as "Pshaw!"
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unearths some literary gems.
From a Sgt. Beef mystery:
***
She was, she now explained, glued to the spot. Her heart was going in a manner which she described as “fit to burst,” while at the same time, and rather confusingly, she didn’t know whether she was standing on her head or her heels. A feather, she assured us, would have been sufficient to send her prostrate. But it was fortunate that these metaphors, however mixed, had come into play, for they kept her there to see something else.
***
“It’s time,” announced Beef, “that we interviewed a parson.”
“A parson?” I repeated, with the air of surprise that is expected of me. “Why a parson?”
“Comic relief,” said Beef; “must have a parson. Wouldn’t be a case without a parson.”
“But you can’t just go off like that and interview a parson.”
“I don’t see why not,” said Beef. “I’ve noticed you enjoy writing about them.”
***
We drove to some offices in a street off High Holborn and saw the name Starling and Nicholson on the plate at the door. I was relieved to see that I should not have to produce that onerous form of humour at the expense of solicitors firms’ names, and that this one was content with a curt partnership instead of any form of repetition.
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unearths some literary gems.
From Rex Stout:
***
"No." He meant every word of it.
***
[Arbitrary non-round-number percentages dept.]
At least 91.2 per cent of the district attorneys in the State of New York think they would make fine tenants of the governor's mansion in Albany.
***
"You're at liberty to tell me to go climb a tree if you find the question ticklish. I might add that I would be at liberty to climb a pole instead of a tree."
***
Archie has found some rocks that might yield evidence, but he's lecturing himself about how impractical it will be to home in on it...
***
Good for you, I thought, you've made one hell of a discovery and now you're a geologist. All you have to do now is put every damn rock under the glass, and along about Labor Day you'll be ready to report. Ignoring my sarcasm, I went on looking.
***
"If Wolfe had intercepted me to tell me to type for him a summary of the headway made during the week, it wouldn't have delayed me more than ten seconds. I could merely have stepped into the office for a blank sheet of paper and handed it to him--or, if he wanted it in triplicate, three sheets."
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unearths some literary gems.
From Edgar Box:
***
"Mrs. Veering had changed from calm rational matron to Niobe, weeping over her children, if that's the one who wept over her children."
***
From Too Many Clients, by Rex Stout:
***
"It went on for minutes, and all he said was 'No' nine times. When he hung up I said, 'Just a yes man.'"
***
From Close Quarters, by Michael Gilber:
***
"Mrs. Judd?" he suggested, without apparent reflection.
"I was coming to her," said the Dean reluctantly. Rather in the manner of one who dis-cupboards a tiresome skeleton.
***
The arrangement of the south side of the Close was particularly gratifying to an orderly mind. Big house, little house, big house, little house. Canon, minor canon, canon, minor canon. Like a huge ecclesiastical sandwich with alternate layers of jam and cream.
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unearths some literary gems.
From Leo Bruce:
He was on mutual boring terms with most of the town.
***
Young barmen were employed to assist her.... She called them all Fred, ignoring any hopes they might voice of keeping their own names. [This predates the Pythons and "Bruce," btw.]
***
"'Mr Raydell,' I said, 'you will please remove that beast at once and never bring it into my bar again. I'm surprised at you doing such a thing.' 'It's only an ocelet,' he said. 'Only an ocelot--that's quite enough, I should think,' I told him. 'If you don't take it away immediately I shall call the police. I won't have ocelets in my bar!' 'There's only one,' said Mr Raydell. 'I don't care if there is one or fifty,' I told him. 'It's the principle of the thing.'"
***
"What would you say to ocelot attacking you in a bar in England?" he asked stertorously.
"I shouldn't speak to it," said Carolus."
***
"That of course makes nonsense." [I didn't know you could make nonsense, the way you can make sense!]
***
"At a club called the Surly Tapster."
"The boisterous individual with the bald head and monstrous moustache who had greeted us so heartily on our arrival had become a sagging and weary man. Even the moustache looked lifeless."
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unearths some literary gems.
From Edgar Box:
***
I have a theory that I think best shortly after I wake up in the morning. Since no very remarkable idea has ever come to me at any time, to prove or disprove my theory, I can happily believe that this is so and my usual plodding seems almost inspired to me in these hours between waking and the clutter and confusion of lunchtime.
***
"An armed camp," I murmured to myself, in Bold Roman.
[More of his typographical whimsy--among other things--can be found in the attachments.]
***
[Someone Should Write a Book dept.]
I decided that it was time someone wrote a handbook for adulterers.
[Cf. the film Guide for the Married Man]
***
"First, Lee's death... then the will, that dreadful will." She shut her eyes a moment as though trying to forget a million dollars... since this is not easily done, she opened them again.
***
I told her that the next few days would have to be lived through, the sort of reassurance which irritates me but seems to do other people good, especially those who do not listen to what you say.
***
"'For who would fardels bear....'" boomed Miss Pruitt, recognizing my allusion to him whom they call "the bard" in political circles. She fardeled on for a moment or two; then, her soliloquy done, "It's possible you're right," she said.
***
After an hour of this, everyone shifted positions, as often happens with a group in civilized society: a spontaneous rearrangement of the elements to distribute the boredom more democratically.
***
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