unearths some literary gems.
From Death from a Top Hat, by Clayton Rawson:
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I awoke to see the alarm clock scowling at me reproachfully, the corners of its mouth turned down and indicating 5:40.
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Quotation marks at the corners of his straight mouth indicated a capacity for humor that softened the hard, angular set of his jaw.
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A gnome-like man with abnormally rounded shoulders entered, following a huge cigar. [File with characters being led around by their mustaches?]
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Another flash bulb flared brilliantly, putting a bright exclamation point on Tarot's sentence.
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"Here's a particularly choice collection of the English pamphlet literature. I don't know how they ever sold any of the things. Their authors had an odd journalistic habit of telling almost the whole story on the title page." [Precursing, of course, my "Two-Fold Title" gag, by some 75 years--though granted it's an obvious target for comedy.]
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The whole damned business, in his opinion, was blithering, four-starred, purple-hued nonsense. [!]
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"He put her in a trunk that a committee from the audience locked, roped, and sealed. Then, when he clapped his hands she appeared at the back of the theater and ran down the aisle with a revolver, firing blanks and shouting, 'Here I am!' They were playing Detroit one day when Judy got a little mixed and came dashing down the aisle of a theater next door where an audience of Guild subscribers were viewing O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra!"
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Gavigan, who had been in a brown study with the door closed, came out of it.
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"Every time I draw a breath this case does a lightning change act and turns up wearing a set of false whiskers and a putty nose."
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Grimm echoed somewhat less emphatically, like a second carbon, "And so do I."
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Grimm mumbled in what would have been his beard if he had had one.
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"And did you find what you were looking for, Merlini?"
"No....But what's worse, I didn't find something I wasn't looking for."
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I typed for another half hour until the phone interrupted, ringing with a nervous uneasy jangle. [The pathetic fallacy with phone rings seems to be adding up to quite a mini-theme among the authors I read!]
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The Colonel threw him a look that needed its face washed.
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