Oldest Tricks in the Book

While I was fiddling with my woolly hat, giving, though I say so myself, a very cunning simulation of clumsiness and muddle, I simply slipped the salt cellar down my sleeve.  . . . It’s the oldest trick in the world, in fact . . . but nevertheless takes a great deal of skill and deftness.
—Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency (1987)

The oldest trick in the world is to attach oneself to some promising movement or other by simply putting on the uniform and leaving the gun at home.
—Douglas Wilson, Case for Classical Christian Education (2003)

Oldest trick in the book.  You don’t need surgery, and yet here are two masked surgeons in dirty robes in your room.
—M.C. Beaton, Death of a Bore (2005)

You buy me a drink, I gotta buy you two back.  Oldest trick in the book.
—Peter E. Price, Lifetime Members (2000)

“How did you come up with the Trojan horse?”
“The oldest trick in the world.”
—John Darnton, Neanderthal (1997)

“I think someone pulled the classic tombstone-fake-ID trick.”
    “That being?”
    “You got to a graveyard and find the tombstone of a dead child,” Myron said.  “Someone who would be about your age if he’d lived.  Then you write and request his birth certificate and paperwork and voil, you’ve set up the perfect fake ID.  Oldest trick in the book.”
—Harlan Coben, Darkest Fear (2000)

The oldest trick in the book.  Waldrip had entered the creek and walked upstream or downstream to throw them off.
—Ben Rehder, Flat Crazy (2004)

Descartes “proves God,” as Samuel Beckett puts it, “by exhaustion.”  As metaphysics goes, it’s the oldest trick in the book: first you take something away, then you complain that it isn’t there, and then you invent a theory grounded in—and compensating for—its very absence.  Deleuze and Guattari call it the Theology of Lack.  A seductive ruse, to be sure: once you accept the premises, you’ve already been suckered into the conclusions.
—Steven Shaviro, Doom Patrols (1996)

—Carl Safina, Song For the Blue Ocean (1999)

The old “Separated for 15 years, and back from the dead” ruse.
The oldest trick in the book.
—Ricky Lax, The Black Wizard with the White Thumb Tip (2002)

—David Stukas, Someone Killed His Boyfriend (2001)

This time-honored delay tactic has been cited as one of the oldest tricks in the book by Wikipedia (2006).

Tension and release.  The oldest trick in the book for generating a great performance, drawing us up tight with emotion, filling our hearts with pain and pleasure, then torching the pressure with ritual until we are cleansed, and can continue afresh—lighter, transformed, absolved.
—Holly Kreuter, Drama in the Desert (2002)

—John Nunn, The Mammoth Book of Chess (1997)

Speaking of Chess, some people apparently play it on the sand dunes of the beach, with giant pieces.  For example, here's a black queen (controlled by a bathing beauty) that just took a red knight.

Others combine the games of Jenga and Chess, to build ornate towers (see photo).

Here are the nuts and bolts of Chess.

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Foo writes:

Just for the fun, I don't know if you are aware that your "bathing beauty" is actually the Female Chess World Champion.

Tears were the oldest trick in the book used by women, yet somehow his usual immunity wasn’t working.
—Francis Ray, Only Hers (2000)

“This trick was first chronicled in cuneiform by the Ancient Sumerians,” according to Wikipedia (2006).

—Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (1957)

The suitcase with no bottom was the oldest trick in the world.
—Paul Franson, “Valley Residents Relate Vacation Tales of Fear and Loathing,” Napa News (2001)

The snare will hit hard, and the whole band will suddenly drop back to piano; it’s very dramatic—and the oldest trick in the book.
—Ed Friedland, Bass Grooves (2004)

PL always star-six-sevens before he dials.  Oldest trick in the book.  
—Laurie Faria Stolarz, Blue is for Nightmares (2003)