Should have stuck to art

     I sighed "I can't believe it. Michael was so nice."

    "Nice? Clever, you mean. Gifted. Ruthless. Sly. He took such pains to make people like him, simply because he understood you all so well. Better than you did yourselves sometimes. He flattered Mona Brandon, was candid with you, cool and businesslike with me. He should have done something constructive with such a talent. He certainly was a better artist than criminal, though. He walked right into our traps."

    "So you did work on the case?"

    "Oh, no. Just helped the sheriff out a bit."

    "You're modest."

    "Me? You ought to ee me strutting around on a case of my own!"

(from The Turquoise Shop, by Frances Crane)

A bad place to be a private eye

    "Pat," I said, and my voice sounded small, "do you think he did it?"

    

    "What?"

    

    "Murdered Arkwright and took that money?"

    

    Patrick slanted a glance at me. "I had rather gathered that you thought Mona had Luis Martinez do it."

    "That's really more like it, Pat. Gilbert honestly couldn't do such things."

    "I don't wonder you're all mixed up. I feel sorry for any investigator, no matter what the crime, in a place like this. What with people wanting to cover up for their friends or worrying about what will happen to their business if they antagonize Mona Brandon and with everybody knowing what everybody else will do before they do it, well - "

(from The Turquoise Shop, by Frances Crane)

Try a little kindness

 "How did you get the knife, Gilbert?" I asked.

"I went out there. Found it at the scene of the crime."

"Keeping it makes you an accessory after the fact."

"You're telling me?" he said, irritably.

"Of course I know you'll do what is wise, Gilbert," I purred. Gilbert flowered under this treatment. I wondered why I had never thought of it before.

(from The Turquoise Shop, by Frances Crane)

A community by and for crazy folks

     I stood with my back to the fire, hearing it crackle, feeling the gay warmth and smelling the piney smell. Through the wide window I noticed how the stormy sky made a backdrop for the haphazard-looking row of buildings across the plaza. Each side had its assortment of stores, shops and offices. Some were adobe, some brick, some wood, some had portals, some none, some lined up with each other, some didn't. All Santa Maria was like that. The streets ran any old way and the houses were all shapes and sizes and made no effort to align with their neighbors or the streets.

    Julia Price said that Santa Maria looked like a community style asylum built by the inmates. In which case, Daisy Payne said, Gilbert Mason would be inmate number one, though not because he did any building, and Gilbert retorted that the honor was ipso facto Daisy's. Their feud never had a lull.

(from The Turquoise Shop, by Frances Crane)

Not one cough?!

 Up to that point, life had been relatively easy for Frances. Her husband, Ned Crane, was a well-paid advertising executive with the J. Walter Thompson agency, whose dubious claim to immortality was the Old Gold cigarette slogan, "Not a cough in a carload."

[From the preface to The Turquoise Shop, by Frances Crane. Crane was a mystery writer and the creator of the Pat and Jean Abbott team and their 26 novels, and this book was the first in that series. The pair went on to be the subject of a radio series. And can you imagine someone being bald-faced enough to claim that smoking a carload of cigarettes would not cause a single cough?]

Look deep into my eyes!

     "Listen," said Cyril, and his voice shook like a jelly in a high wind. "Does it count if you ask a girl to marry you when you're hypnotized?"

    "You are speaking of Miss Flack?"

    "Yes, I proposed to her on the practice green, carried away by the super-excellence of her chip shots, and I can't stand the sight of her. And, what's more, in about three weeks I'm supposed to be marrying someone else. You remember Patricia Binstead, the girl who showed you into my office?"

    "Very vividly."

    "She holds the copyright. What am I to do? You couldn't go and hypnotize Agnes Flack and instil her, as you call it, with the idea that I'm the world's leading louse, could you?"

    "My dear fellow, nothing easier."

    "Then do it without an instant's delay," said Cyril. "Tell her I'm scratch and pretended to have a twenty-four handicap in order to win the medal. Tell her I'm sober only at the rarest intervals. Tell her I'm a Communist spy and my name's really Groolinsky. Tell her I've two wives already. But you'll know what to say."

(from "Sleepy Time," by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

What sort of girl is she?

     "The whole thing," he said, "is one of those unfortunate misunderstandings. When they made me scratch, my first move was to thank Miss Flack warmly for all she had done for me."

    "Naturally."

    "I let myself go rather."

    "You would, of course."

    "Then, feeling that after all the trouble she had taken to raise me to the heights she was entitled to be let in on the inside story, I told her my reason for being so anxious to get down to scratch was that I loved a scratch girl and wanted to be worthy of her. Upon which, chuckling like a train going through a tunnel, she gave me a slap on the back which nearly drove my spine through the front of my pullover and said she had guessed it from the very start, from the moment when she first saw me dogging her footsteps with that look of dumb devotion in my eyes. You could have knocked me down with a putter."

    "She then said she would marry you?"

    "Yes, and what could I do? A girl," said Harold Pickering fretfully, "who can't distinguish between the way a man looks when he's admiring a chip shot thirty feet from the green and the way he looks when he's in love ought not to be allowed at large."

    There seemed nothing to say. The idea of suggesting that he should break off the engagement presented itself to me, but I dismissed it. Women are divided broadly into two classes - those who, when jilted, merely drop a silent tear and those who take a niblick from their bag and chase the faithless swain across the country with it.

(from "Scratch Man," by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)