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unearths some literary gems.
From Aaron Elkins:
Jacques wouldn't know 'devious' if it walked up to him and said bonjour.
***
He was wearing a shapeless, colorless canvas fisherman's hat, a decrepit old windbreaker, worn cotton jeans, and old tennis shoes. His stubby, metal-stemmed pipe, unlit, was clenched in his teeth, the bowl upside down. He was, Gideon thought, working at looking like an archaeologist. What he looked like was Monsieur Hulot.
***
"There's an old story.... Skolnick borrows a kettle from Mandlebaum, and when he brings it back, Mandlebaum says, 'Look, there's a big hole in this kettle; how am I supposed to use it anymore? You got to give me another one.' Skolnick says no he won't, so they argue about it, and finally they agree to go in front of the rabbi to settle it. You know this story?"
"Does a horse in a bathtub come into it?"
"No, that's a different story."
***
From Marion Boyd Havighurst:
Only the silence of printed words fell about my ears.
***
A novel by Carolyn Wells opens with this oath:
"Well, by the Great Catamaran!"
***
From Anthony Berkeley:
"He's absolutely genuine, nearly always says just what he thinks, and is the only man I've ever met called Philip who isn't a prig."
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unearths some literary gems.
Catriona McPherson tidbits:
"And it's marvellous of darling Hugh to embrace his horizons expanding into such lightness and ..." Here Pearl lost hold of the metaphor and let it float away.
***
“All we need is the right French mistress and we shall be fine. Absolutely fine.” But she did not sound absolutely fine, or even one good French mistress short of it. [Btw, "French mistress" here is to be taken, not in the ooh-la-la sense, but in the schoolteaching sense.]
***
"The plot doesn't exactly thicken but it far from dilutes, wouldn't you say?"
"It curdles," I said.
***
"But I like things not to make sense, Alec dear, as you know. For then there is something to catch hold of and straighten out about them." We smoked in silence for a while, each hoping to catch hold of a loose end immediately, each failing to do so.
***
"Elf-f-f-f is the rather silly nickname of Edward Lionel Frederick Forrester-Franklin." [I note that he has somehow ended up with a surplus "f."]
***
"Marigold did some Lady Bracknelling about, seeing what she thought of Fleur as a daughter-in-law."
***
There was a short silence, whose source and whose journey I could not fathom.
***
“Well there’s the Haunted Ram, of course.”
“A public house?” I asked.
“A ram,” she corrected. “Haunted.”
[...]
Fifteen minutes later, I came reeling out into the uncertain sunshine with my wee map in my hand and my head swirling with phantasms too many to number; Moffat most certainly was a place where the dead seemed to go about their business unimpeded by their change of state and with no thoughts of lying down quietly and mouldering.
[...]
Bruce and Wallace and even Malcolm had paused at Moffat on their travels . . . imbuing the hills and fields with the sort of vanquished hopes and tragic disappointment which inevitably end up as grey ladies and headless pipers.
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unearths some literary gems.
Tidbits from No Man's Street, by Beverley Nichols:
***
"I have Retired, with a capital R. And I have said Farewell. With a capital F."
***
She laughed on an ascending scale; it was a coloratura laugh, but there was real gaiety in it.
***
"I've had Dr. Liversedge round here this morning..."
"The Liversedge?"
"You and your 'the's.' Yes. The Liversedge. A walking encyclopaedia of music."
***
[Blank Map dept.]
It should be called Number Nothing, No Man's Street, Nowhere.
***
Only one feature surprised him--the exceptional length of the doctor's arms. When he let them fall to his side, they seemed to stretch nearly to his knees. They disturbed Mr. Green; there was something almost--what was the word?--almost simian about them. He had a momentary vision of the doctor in a jungle, swinging through dark branches in search of forbidden fruit. No sooner had the fancy entered his mind than he dismissed it. It was pleasanter, and possibly more sensible, to imagine that the arms had grown with the music, stretching year by year as they reached out for greater beauty.
***
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unearths some literary gems.
***
"I can hardly believe that you came down to this place merely to take off a bit of weight."
"Quite."
"You and your 'quites'! I always think that 'quite' is the most aggravating word in the language."
"Quite."
***
The joke was that ever since the business of the "Z" Waller had found himself using Z's all over the place. "Wizard"... "Puzzled"... "Maze."
***
It would have been pleasing to produce an epigram about the vital relevance of irrelevancy, but he resisted the temptation.
***
If Mr. Green had not had his filet steak, our story might have slowed down, might even have meandered to an inconclusive semicolon.
***
Moral problems, he decided, were best tackled out of doors.
***
"I have a certain proprietary affection for my mind, such as it is."
***
[I've encountered this before, in a Leo Bruce novel--the treatment of four-letter words as, instead, one-letter words.]
"I've heard some language in my life, seeing as I've served behind the bar in the old days, and what I don't know about the B's and the F's isn't worth knowing."
***
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unearths some literary gems.
Catriona McPherson tidbits:
"Alec Osborne is a dear friend who can speak nonsense like a drunken parrot." [from McPherson's A Deadly Measure of Brimstone]
***
It is more usually the case that Alec’s thoughts and mine march in step, or at least stagger along in a three-legged race together.
***
“Alec, I’m more sure than I’ve ever been about anything that . . . Well, actually I’m not sure what I’m sure of but I am sure.”
***
[And now we know what the opposite of losing one's marbles is, as the narrator verifies that a character has not, as feared, lost hers.]
Mary Aitken looked to me like a woman who had all her marbles organised in order of size and weight, cross-referenced for colour, and spinning in time as she juggled them one-handed and kept the other hand free.
***
"Debunked? Where do you get these words? Do you have to pay a subscription?"
"You'll find," I said, trying to sound withering, "that debunking comes from Oscar Wilde. When they find out that Algy's dying friend isn't dying."
"That would be de-Bunburying," said Alec.
***
The Scott Monument—erected in honour of Sir Walter specifically and not, as I had long believed, to the general and misspelled glory of the Scots race—was a kind of airy turret in High Victorian Gothic style, not attached to anything but just rising up out of the grass as though some ecclesiastical architect had lavished all of his attention on the decorative touches but forgotten to build the cathedral itself.
***
[The narrator also describes some of the jewelry she inherited from her grandmother as "wilfully ugly."]
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unearths some literary gems.
The man grinned, and, as Roz watched, the grin widened to resemble a Moebius strip or an infinity sign.
—Susan Kenney
***
I was rather baffled by the business about prophecies: I couldn’t see why the ghosts of the dead should know any more about the future than anyone else—rather less, I would have thought.
—Sarah Caudwell
***
Corfu has the charm of a place which reminds one of other places--which and for what reason one is not altogether certain.... [Some features] remind one chiefly of Venice, especially of those things in Venice which remind one of Istanbul.
—Sarah Caudwell
***
"Yeeees," she said, drawing out the "yes" as though stretching a balloon.
[...]
"Yes." And here she ballooned out the "yes" as far as seemed possible without it actually popping and deflating and turning into a "no."
—Ian Sansom, The Case of the Missing Books
***
If a forensic anthropologist did this, I'll eat my hat. My fur-lined hat with earflaps, the one I wear when it snows.
—Aaron Elkins
***
From Wodehouse:
You get the Earl of Thingummy, for instance. Right. So far, so good. But his heir is Lord Whoosis, and if his union has been still further blessed, the result will be anything from the Hon. Algernon Whatisit to the Hon. Lionel Umph.
"He made a noise."
"What sort of noise?"
[....]
He rather rashly tried to imitate it and found his companion eying him with open incredulity.
"It couldn't have sounded like that," said Lionel. "There isn't such a noise."
"I'd like to put all the women I've fallen in love with at first sight end to end--"
"Well, you mustn't."
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unearths some literary gems.
From Ellery Queen stories:
***
"[You couldn't expect someone to believe] that a man dead one hundred and thirty-seven years could push aside his tombstone, step out of his grave, yawn, and then sing three verses of /Mademoiselle from Armentières/."
[Nor, indeed, has this happened, even in the story. It is simply Ellery's idea of a hypothetical example!]
***
"We'll find her where the cummerbunds are thickest."
***
"Paula, your Hollywood is driving me c-double-o-ditto!"
***
"Now what kind of clean-up... was this monkey figuring on?" asked Inspector Moley quietly. "And if that's not something, Mr. Queen, I'm the monkey's uncle!"
[This may be the most specific monkey I've ever seen benuncled--I mean, usually one is just "a" monkey's uncle, right? By the way, Inspector Moley also, on one occasion, says not simply "Nuts!" but "Nuts and bolts!" to more comprehensively vent his frustration.]
***
[One from Ellerys' own mouth.]
"You're nursing a viper to your collective bosoms, Miss Godfrey. And that's not as funny as it sounds."
***
[And I certainly wasn't expecting an oblique reference to an old Wilde anecdote! (Rest assured that no one in the book is actually called Oscar.)]
"Then she'll be looking--"
"She has, Oscar, she has," said Ellery mildly.
***
He found Paula finishing an apple and looking lovely, serene, and reproachful.
***
From a novel by "Barnaby Ross," which is an alternate pseudonym for "Ellery Queen":
Dromio, whose pride of profession approached the sublime, drove Mr. Lane's glittering limousine with the finesse of a Philadelphia lawyer and the facility of a première danseuse.
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unearths some literary gems.
From Parting Breath, by Catherine Aird:
John Smith was an undergraduate so daunted by his undistinguished name and so determined to make his mark that he had sought individuality the previous academic year by affecting to live by the Julian Calendar.
[However, Smith has arrived for the new term 13 days early...]
There was a general shaking of heads. Eccentric students, they agreed, weren't what they used to be: Smith ought to have had the courage of his convictions and come up late.
From The Winter Ground, by Catriona McPherson:
"Well, I never," said Hugh, folding the newspaper down to look at me, and so I asked him to tell me--for Well I Nevers were usually points of titillated interested where Good Lords could be anything at all.
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unearths some literary gems.
The one I just finished takes place among competitive ballroom dancers:
***
On the other side, looking straight out at us, clearly engaged in a tango . . . were “Miss Tweetie Bird and Mr Roland Wentworth” . . . . Caught in stasis by the camera, however, they looked as though they were trying to share a golf club during a tricky putt.
[And later]
Tweetie and Roly were cheek-to-cheek, or temple to jaw anyway given the disparity in their heights, and they prowled around with their joined hands stuck out in front of them like two people trying to reach the top note on the same trombone.
***
Another dancer is described as "an enormously tall fellow with a lot of knees and elbows, giving him the look of an umbrella outwitted by a high wind."
Also present is a high official (Mr Silvester) who represents a couple of dancing-related associations, which are abbreviated to strings of initials that the protagonists have trouble remembering correctly. Thus,
***
I explained to him that her solicitor fiancé was unaware of her connection to the Locarno and the Championship and would not sue Mr Silvester or any of his strings of initials if he simply showed her the door.
***
And I like the specificity of this image:
***
One could have bottled the electricity in the room and taken it camping to boil a kettle.
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unearths some literary gems.
He was a thin, methodical man with rimless glasses and a general rimless appearance.
—John Mortimer
Rachel knew he looked familiar, probably from a dust jacket rather than life. He had that dust-jackety look about him.
—Jon L. Breen
And a bonus from Breen:
"Don't do anything silly."
"Okay. I was planning to stand in front of the mirror doing my Bette Davis imitations, but I'll try to do something more productive."
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unearths some literary gems.
[From Sellar & Yeatman's Garden Rubbish]
This Thing (they learned to their horror) was called the Cornucopia, and appeared to be a form of twisted symbolical bedsock, or umbilical jelly-bag, the true purpose of which, as they realized at the first glance, would never (alas) be revealed to mankind.
However, being by temperament a jollicose and bellicund kind of people, they faced up to the Thing and began defiantly filling it with Plenty of fruit and cereals and so on and tried not to lose their tempers when the fruit, etc., kept falling out symbolically at the top; while the Greeks, whom they called in as usual to explain the tragedy, decided that the Thing was (on the one hand) an Eleusinian Mystery, since nobody was able to discover what was at the bottom of it.
***
[And other highlights of GR...]
***
Take it from us, it is utterly forbidden to be half-hearted about Gardening. You have got to LOVE your garden, whether you like it or not.
If you doubt this for a moment, how do you account for the fact that all the Gardening Encyclopaedias, Diaries, Manuals, Articles, Magazines, and even (alas) the Seedsmen's Catalogues are unanimously addressed to GARDEN LOVERS?
There is simply no literature, no help, and evidently no hope for people who merely like having a garden, or don't mind if they do, or, fatalistically, just have a garden.
***
"The remedy," says Captain Pontoon, "is to plug the gaps by planting high-voltage Gladiolus bulbs; and if the result is a complete black-out due to your having accidentally plugged-in an onion, thus fusing the whole garden, I can only suggest that you stare fixedly at the blinding show of Sweet William, Old Harry and Eschscholtzia Hore-Belitzia on page 10 of your seedsman's catalogue and then suddenly transfer the gaze to the nearest expanse of vacant soil. As a last resort you might try taking part of the garden and looking at it through my special rose-tinted spectacles."
***
[Do you have Lord Ancestor in YOUR family tree?]
The noblest way of acquiring a rich velvety greensward is to inherit one from a rich velvety ancestor. So if you think by any chance that you have been excluded by some legal trickery from the true ownership of, say, St. John's College, Oxford, or Hampton Court Palace, or all the best parts of the Wiltshire Downs, pop round and see your solicitors about it, remembering to bring some documents proving your legitimate descent from Cardinal Wolsey, The Abbot of Salisbury Plain, or, better still, the original Lord Ancestor.
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unearths some literary gems.
Jonathan shares:
About a week ago, I read this, in a book by Ira Wallach called Gutenberg's Folly, published in 1954:
"Some of that book," he said, "was written on the cylinder head of a ship ploughing through the Red Sea in the heat of an Arabian summer.[...] I'll never forget it," he said. "I proofread that cylinder head myself!"
Just a few days later, I read this, in a book by Frank Sullivan called The Life and Times of Martha Hepplethwaite, published in 1926:
Then I felt a strange impulse to write a poem. There was no paper handy. I acted upon the impulse of the moment and scribbled the verse upon the back of a taxicab I had been leaning against, waiting for traffic to pass. The taxi driver was very angry with me when he discovered what I had done, but when he read the poem he wept and said it was marvelous, and I must sell it to some magazine.
The poem was there on the taxicab, so we had to take the taxicab along, too, and we felt so foolish dragging that taxicab into magazine office after magazine office. Finally we sold the taxicab and the poem for $14, and you cannot know how delighted the taxicab chauffeur and I were with that first money earned from my poetry.
Thanks, Jonathan!
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Original Content Copyright © 2025 by Craig Conley. All rights reserved.
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