Vendetta - leave it alone

     "But what a picture!" said Dr. Carmichael. "You know? Cutting the dress, ripping it open, placing the photograph over the heart, and then using the knife. I mean - it's so - so farfetched. Why?"

    "As farfetched as a vengeful killing in a Jacobean play," Alleyn said and then: "Yes. A vengeful killing."

    "Are you - are we," Carmichael asked, "not going to withdraw the weapon?"

    "I'm afraid not. I've blown my top often enough when some well-meaning fool had interfered with the  body. In this case I'd be the well-meaning fool."

(from Photo Finish, by Dame Ngaio Marsh)

How they carry on!

     "If you ask me," Troy said, "it needs only another outrage like this and she'll break down completely. She was literally shaking all over as if she had a rigor. She can't go on like that. Don't you agree?"

    "Not really. Not necessarily. Have you ever watched two Italians having a discussion on the street? Furious gestures, shrieks, glaring eyes, faces close together. Any moment, you think, it'll be a free-for-all, and then without warning they burst out laughing and hit each other's shoulders in comradely accord. I'd say she was of the purest Italian - perhaps Sicilian - peasant stock and utterly uninhibited. Add to that the propensity of all public performers to cut up rough and throw temperaments left and right when they think they've been slighted, and you've got la Sommita. You'll see."

(from Photo Finish, by Dame Ngaio Marsh)

Moonlit view

     And, sure enough, when he reached their room he found her in bed and fast asleep. Before joining her he went to the heavy window curtains, parted them, and saw the Lake in moonlight close beneath him, stretching away like a silver plain into the mountains. Incongruous, he thought, and impertinent, for this little knot of noisy, self-important people with their self-imposed luxury and seriocomic concerns to be set down at the heart of such an immense serenity.

(from Photo Finish, by Dame Ngaio Marsh)

Who is he?

 He was shortish and dark and had run a little to what is sometmes called expense-account fat. His eyes were large, and his face closed: a face that it would be easy to forget since it seemed to say nothing.

(from Photo Finish, by Dame Ngaio Marsh)

Smells good

 "The air up there was wonderfully fresh and smelled aromatically of manuka scrub patching warm, tussocky earth." (from Photo Finish, by Dame Ngaio Marsh)

Manuka scrub, sometimes called tea tree, is a flowering plant in the myrtle family native to New Zealand and southeast Australia. Tussock grasses or bunch grasses are a group of grass species clumps, tufts, hummocks, or bunches, rather than forming a lawn.

With emphasis!

 It was handwritten and all that might be expected. Points of exclamation proliferated. Underscorings doubled and trebled to an extent that would have made Queen Victoria's correspondence appear by contrast a model of stony reticence. The subject matter lurched into incoherence, but the general idea was to the effect that if the "Head of Scotland Yard" didn't do something pretty smartly he would have only himself to blame when the writer's career came to a catastrophic halt. On her knees she remained distractedly and again in enormous calligraphy, sincerely, Isabella Sommita.

(from Photo Finish, by Dame Ngaio Marsh)

Sheep-farmed?

 "He pointed out mountains that had been sheep-farmed by the first landholders." (from Photo Finish, by Dame Ngaio Marsh)

That is an interesting verb - "sheep-farmed." I had an English teacher friend once who observed that when we invent a verb, we generally do so in its regular form. For example, if we had trimmed our yard yesterday, most people would say that we "Weed-eated" or "Weed-eatered," instead of "Weed-ate."

What is that?!

    There is a belief held by people of the theatre that nobody over the age of twenty-five should allow themselves to be photographed from below. Here, the camera had evidently been half-a-flight beneath the diva, who therefore appeared to be richly endowed with chins and more than slightly en bon point. The Governer-General, by some momentary accident, seemed to regard her with incredulity and loathing.

(from Photo Finish, by Dame Ngaio Marsh)

In a test tube

    Fifteen minutes later his Assistant Commissioner received him in the manner to which he had become accustomed: rather as if he was some sort of specimen produced in a bad light to be peered at, doubtfully. The A. C. was as well furnished with mannerisms as he was with brains, and that would be underestimating them.

(from Photo Finish, by Dame Ngaio Marsh)

One gulp

     "She wants you," said the woman. "Also the music."

    "All right, Maria," said Mr. Ruby, and to the young man, "Maria is Madame's dresser. You'd better go."

    So Rupert, whose surname was Bartholomew, clutching his opera, walked into La Sommita's bedroom like a fly, if he'd only known it, into a one-way web.

    "She'll eat that kid," Mr. Ruby said dispassioinarely, "in one meal."

    "Halfway down her throat already," her protector agreed.

(from Photo Finish, by Dame Ngaio Marsh)

Speak right up!

     "Well?" she said. "I hope you're convinced about Lugg now."

    To her astonishment Mr. Campion linked her arm through his.

    "You are now, my dear madam, about to become my Doctor Watson," he said. "You will ask the inane questions, and I shall answer them with all that scintillating and superior wisdom which makes me such a favourite at all my clubs. They used to laugh when I got up to speak. Now they gag me. But do I care? No, I speak my mind. I like a plain man, a straightforward man, a man who calls a spade a pail."

    "Stop showing off," said Penny placidly, as they emerged into the garden. "What are you going to do?"

(from The Gyrth Chalice Mystery, by Margery Allingham)

Do it yourself

     Mr. Campion rose to his feet. "Look here, Stanislaus," he said, "you know as well as I do that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the police are the only people in the world to protect a man and his property. But the hundredth time, when publicity is fatal, and the only way out is a drastic spot of eradication, then the private individual has to get busy on his own account."

(from The Gyrth Chalice Mystery, by Margery Allingham)

At least he tried

     Mr. Campion sat down again. "Come in," he said. "Shut the door carefully behind you. Stand up straight, and wipe the egg off your upper lip."

    The leer broadened. "I can grow a moustache if I like, can't I?" said Mr. Walker without malice.

(from The Gyrth Chalice Mystery, by Margery Allingham)

Trilby hat

In Margery Allingham's novel The Gyrth Chalice Mystery, in the Albert Campion series, she makes mention of a "Trilby hat." This is a hat with "a shorter brim which is angled down at the front and slightly turned up at the back." It derives its name from the stage adaptation of George du Maurier's 1894 novel Trilby.