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unearths some literary gems.
***"What!" cried her father, like a character in a book.***"What a passion you have for hats," she said. "Yet I never see you wear one.""Because one is never to be found," said Chandler W. Moment. "They hide themselves at my approach. It's a case of the perversity of inanimate objects." [THINGS!]***"Great Jonathan!" exclaimed the chief of police.[Aw, shucks, folks, it was nothing. (A quick trip to Google Books suggests no larger currency for "Great Jonathan!" as an oath.)]***Dawson was a funny skate, anyway.[Not sure whether this is an allusion to an ice skate, a roller skate, or a fish. (The "miser" sense of "skate" doesn't seem to fit the character.) Google Books brings up exactly two funny skates from its entire database: the one in this book, and one in a pulp "sleaze" work from 1949.]***[Who Needs Context? dept.]the almost immoral similarity of safety pins***"I want you to clarify your earlier inference. Do you believe it possible that it may--the paper, not your inference--have been dropped upon the floor...?"***In the Moment living room* a singing silence had succeeded the words of greeting and the early small talk of arrival.[*Now that's what I call "living in the moment"!]***[So, yes, Starrett likes his colorful character names! In addition to Professor Chandler W. Moment and his daughter Holly Moment, we have a Mr. Ridinghood and a Dr. Rainfall (SPOILER: he was originally named Gregory Tempest). A journalist mostly referred to as Dawson is revealed, two thirds of the way through the novel, as signing his byline Ernest Crackanthorpe Dawson: "He signed up three abreast, as bold as Ella Wheeler Wilcox, upon whose literary laurel wreath he had designs." You may recall that Starrett also gave us, in the last book, names such as Rev. Saddletire (and the third book in the series is called The End of Mr. Garment).[But Starrett is not a first-rate writer, imho, and he's a little too self-congratulatory about his fanciful names. He's always drawing attention to them, *remarking* on them as strange names. Here we have an Amos Bluefield, for instance: "Who ever heard of a blue field?" (RQA: Kentuckians.) So he kind of spoils it a bit, alas.]***[Bonus: A bleeped transcript renders a phrase such as, we infer, "the goddamned bastard" or the like as "the adjective noun."]***
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