From The Case of the Famished Parson, by George Bellairs:

***

The clock on the Jubliee Tower... struck midnight. At this signal the grandfather clocks in the public rooms and hall began to chime all at once in appalling discord....

Then, in mockery of the ponderous timepieces, a clock somewhere else cuckooed a dozen times. The under-manager, who had a sense of humour, kept it in his office, set to operate just after the heavy ones.

[Isn't that a handsomely effective description, in prose, of something that would make a perfect movie gag?]

***

He was fond of long words, but knew hardly any. So he made them up as he went along for the sheer pleasure of mouthing them.

"Brognostication is the thief of time," he said to himself by way of excusing his early appearance on the links."

[I would say he doesn't so much make up long words as produce slightly adulterated versions of actual words and phrases, employing them with a low degree of discrimination.]

"Obsequious portentatiousness," said Harry Keast expressing to himself his awe at the sight.

***

[Bandbox dept. Btw, I didn't even know that word until I read the novel of that title recently. This despite the fact that I own a bandbox (i.e., my hat box).]

[The police surgeon] was serious, casual and a bit patronising, and immaculate. He looked to have come out of a bandbox instead of the morgue.