From Quick Curtain, by Alan Melville:

[This one is quite the "comical mystery"!]

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"Unfortunately she'd been rung up earlier in the morning by the Morning Herald, the Daily News, the Daily Observer, the Morning Courier, and practically everyone else except the Christian Herald and the Feathered World."

[I read the above just days after reading *this* in Milne's Happy Days: "There was I, sitting at home and sending out madly for all the papers, until my rooms were littered with copies of The Times, The Financial News, Answers, The Feathered World and Home Chat." (The joke in this case is that the protagonist is specifically looking for financial news, from any and every available source!) Btw, the Melville is from 1934, the Milne from no later than 1928 (i.e., the 1928 book collects essays previously published in Punch).]

***

"B. dies gracefully in the glare of three spotlights and to the accompaniment of an augmented orchestra, under the direction of M. René Whoever-it-was." [I didn't realize Whoever-it-was was a French name!]

***

"If you draw a little triangle--"

"Isosceles or eternal?" asked Derek, drawing several on the table-cloth with the prongs of his fork.

"Right-angled, as a matter of fact," said Mr. Wilson.

[And later on...]

"I'm beginning to think that Brandon Baker's sudden end was the result of something happening to that old geometrical figure the eternal triangle. Perhaps the square on the side opposite the hypotenuse got a bit fresh with the angle at the base of the triangle, and the sum of the other two angles didn't quite approve."

***

Brandon Baker's last performance [as the corpse at his real-life funeral] was much more brilliant than his unfortunate first London performance in the musical comedy Blue Music.

[This is part of an extended treatment of this theater-world funeral as a quasi-"show," which thus precurses Genuine Cousin of Pearl.]

***

"Surely to say that a man of over fifty was juvenile leading was--if I may so--definitely juvenile misleading?"

***

[(Presumably) Fictitious Theater Productions dept.]

"I saw him years ago at the Empire in Here's A Howdydoo!...."

[Later]

Mr. Watcyns couldn't see why Miss Sinclair should go on wasting her time and talents in a play like What Bloomers! when there was a gem of a part for her in his own Infernal Triangle.

***

"A Miss Davis, sir."

"What's she like?" asked Mr. Wilson, who always made a point of getting a pro-forma invoice where women were concerned.

***

[Art Deco style precurses the all-lowercase conventions of text-messaging.]

Mr. Wilson knew at once that [the flats] were very modern, for all the chromium-plated name-plates at the main entrance were devoid of capital letters.

***

Then the ultra-modern block of service flats was wrapped in ultra-silence.

***

While the first attack on the [door]bell had been a mere prod, this was a good, honest bit of work, reminiscent of Wagner at his most boisterous moments.

[...]

Derek rang again, this time in a musical-comedy strain....

***