Just leave those dishes alone!

 Ernest Fabian, infallibly punctilious, went around to the front door. And Patrick Abbgott, who you'd think would have been detecting on all cylinders just then, said, "While you hold the villain at bay, Jeanie, I'll start doing the dishes."

I threw him one of my most meaningful looks. In the first place I don't like men who voluntarily do dishes. I can only say in his favor that though he started them at once he did so untidily. Like Peg, I do want to be fair.

(from The Golden Box, by Frances Crane)

I never tried to hang myself

     I said, "Why wouldn't she tie the rope itself directly around her neck?"

    "Don't ask me," Bill said.

    Patrick himself, mind you, answered it from where he sat, while he kept his eyes on the glass which he was moving slowly over the rope. "Suicides by hanging for some reason often try to make the ordeal easier by tying a soft scarf or handkerchief around the throat."

    "But why?"

    "Apparently they think it will make it hurt less."

    "Does it?"

    "I don't know," Patrick said impatiently. "I never tried it."

(from The Golden Box, by Frances Crane)

You men do your jobs!

 "I don't this is suicide at all. I am quite sure that Earnest Fabian found out that Ida was gossiping about Mrs. Lake'a death and so got scared and murdered her. Even if it were suicide it makes me furious," she declared. "I mean, if Fearheiley had found Mrs. Lake hanging by her neck I don't doubt that he would have called it throat trouble and certified it as due to natural causes, but since Ida's a harmless little colored girl, just to protect themselves they drag in that idiotic Norman Dawes and go through the motions of an inquest, with everything cut and dried in advance. I mean, nobody wants to bother seriously because it's only Ida Raymond. Now, don't you let them get away with it, Bill. You, either, Pat."

(from The Golden Box, by Frances Crane)

How to be popular

 He arrived in twenty minutes, looking very satisfactory in gray herringbone, a white shirt, and a blue tie. He fitted right in. Said just the right things in the right way, and not too many of them. Turned on the charm. People who say charm is a sign of a weak character don't know Patrick Abhott. I suppose if you want to enchant people the thing to do is to do nothing casually. Or do something as though it were nothing - such as sitting in late on a poker game and promptly magnetizing the chips. That hooked the man. The girls tumbled because he was lean, tall, looked western and hard to get.

(from The Golden Box, by Frances Crane)

The trouble with funerals

     "Lucky you took along Toby, the celebrated feline flatfoot. Love, Pat," he wired back three days later, by which time Mrs. Claribel Fabian Lake had been stowed in the Fabian vault in the Elm Hill cemetery.

    For a while the body had made news. There had been a private funeral, for one thing, the first ever held in Elm Hill. And before that people talked because the body had been taken to St. Louis for embalming, and when it was brought back the coffin stood in the parlor under a blanket of orchids and gardenias, and, so far as anyone heard, was not opened. Ernest went to some trouble to explain to people that his cousin had a horror of being looked at after death. Which was all right, except that she had done plenty of looking herself, having been a great one to go to funerals, and people didn't like it. Funerals are rather communal in Elm Hill. To be told not to send flowers and that the funeral would be private made us feel snubbed.

(from The Golden Box, by Frances Crane)

By women for women

 "She had on a powder-blue jersey shirt and brown jersey slacks."

This is a sentence taken from Frances Crane's novel, The Golden Box, published in 1942. 

It is interesting to me when writers reveal bald-facedly that they are willingly sacrificing half their market. This story is a murder mystery, and IF the sentence above had imbedded within it some sort of clue that would lead us down the path of discovering who done it, then I (speaking as a male) could see some purpose to it. But you will have to take my word for it that it does not. It is like the descriptions of wedding gowns that used to be published in the newspapers. Did any man EVER read those? Highly unlikely. Nor do any men who might read this novel care what Peg was wearing as she came into the room carrying a glass of orange juice. There is nothing wrong with it, it is just not something that would interest the typical male reader.

So, since this is a mystery, and we are murder mystery fans, what do we deduce from the sentence at the top of this page? It tells us that this was a story written by a woman for women. It is actually a fairly good yarn and the detective who solves the mystery is a man. But the person telling the story is a woman, and she tells us things that could only interest a woman. So, either the author was pointing this story strictly at a female market, or she was woefully ignorant of the differences between the sexes, which I doubt. OR she was making the teller of the tail realistic by having her focus on things that would interest a woman, which I suspect is the truth.

The parallel on the male side of the equation would be a Louis L'Amour novel in which the hero shoots three bad guys on the first page. He is not writing that book for women. Oh, sure, a good many women may read it, but he reveals his market by how he writes the book.

It's the nose that does it

Peg and I were the same age. Twenty-six. I hoped I was as well preserved as she was. We were said to look alike, and we both do have the yellow Holly eyes with black brows and lashes, but Peg was extra lucky in getting tawny hair and a perky nose to go with them. Nothing lightens a girl's path like a nose that invites a tweak, especially when it is backed by strong character like my cousin Peg's. My hair is black, my nose, alas, is quite conventional, and my character is definitely wavery.

(from The Golden Box, by Frances Crane)