From Murder Underground, by Mavis Doriel Hay

***

Mr. Slocomb's mouth was drawn into the lines of inverted V, and his eyebrows tended to repeat the same figure.

***

[Pathetic Fallacy ostentatiously avoided!]

The telephone bell rang; not with any significant note as it does in the best regulated murder mysteries, but with its usual ear-splitting insistent din.

[But there is a nod to telephone anthropomorphization later in the book.]

The telephone shrilly demanded the inspector's attention.

***

"I'm sure Peter's quite capable of painting a smile [on my portrait], if a smile is asked for, even if it isn't there"....

"But it might be someone else's smile, and that wouldn't be at all the same thing."

***

He was constantly devising new systems of classification for his cuttings, and as he never completed one before abandoning it in favour of another, the precious strips of paper were grouped in a disorderly medley of systems.

***

"But why should Phemia keep making wills in that undisciplined way?" enquired Mr. Pongleton severely.

***

Mrs. Daymer presented her card, which Mrs. Birtle read carefully and then turned over, as if she expected to find something really interesting on the back.

***

"The rain was torrentential!"

[Spoken by a chronic malapropper. Then, later in the conversation...]

"Did I tell you what a day it was?"

"Yes; torrentential rain!" put in Gerry quickly, longing to try the word.

***

"But just why was it so important?" asked Mr. Grange, who was one of those people who always manage to know less than others, although constantly asking questions.

***

"I should not have thought Bob Thurlow's experience in the underground would give him much knowledge of gardening," Mrs. Daymer remarked coldly.

"Most gardeners know a sight too much," Cissie assured her. "They're always telling you you're wrong. It'd be a jolly good thing to have one who didn't know."

***

[Bonus newspaper names: The Daily Chat, the Evening Snatch, and the Sunday Smatter.]

[There are ads for mysterious and presumably fake products called Smarmi and Bullo behind the train on the cover. (The artwork comes from an actual vintage poster, and as far as I can see in the thumbnail of that on the back cover, the fake ads were part of that as well.)]