Stickler for the truth

     Patrick grinned and said lightly, "I suspect Goldberg takes anything he does very seriously. A mere patrolman who corrects you for addressing him as a sergeant is bound to be a very honest man."

(from The Pink Umbrella, by Frances Crane)

Pork pie hat

     In her novel, The Pink Umbrella, Frances Crane makes reference to a "porkpie hat." I was not familiar with that style, so I looked it up. According to Wikipedia: The first hat to be called a pork pie was a hat worn primarily by British and American women from around 1830 through to about 1865. It consisted of a small round hat with a narrow curled-up brim, a low flat or slightly domed crown with a crease running around the inside top edge, and usually with a ribbon or hatband fastened around the shoulder where the crown joined the brim. It was often worn with a small feather or two attached to a bow on one side of the hat. Such hats might be made of any number of materials (straw, felt, cotton canvas covered in silk, etc.). What caused them to be called "pork pies" was the shape and crease of the crown and the narrowness of the brim (sometimes called a "stingy brim" in reference to its brevity).

Spring in the city

 "The air was warmish, tender, faintly vailed with thin haze, and full of the somewhat depraved smells which in the cities pass as springlike." (from The Pink Umbrella, by Frances Crane)

I thought that was an interesting description of springtime in New York by the author of the Pat and Jean Abbott series of mysteries.

If only revenge!

     The mists cleared away, and he saw Dolly. Her face was wearing the smug expression of a female juvenile delinquent who has just played a successful practical joke on another member of her age group, and her sunny smile, which Soapy admired so much, seemed to gash him like a knife. Not for the first time he was wishing that, if it could be done without incurring any unpleasant after-effects for himself, he could introduce a pinch of some little-known Asiatic poison into this woman's morning cup of coffee or stab her in several vital spots with a dagger of Oriental design. A vision rose before his eyes of Mrs. Thomas G. Molloy sinking for the third time in some lake or mere and himself, with a sneer, throwing her an anvil.

(from Ice In the Bedroom, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Better to stay away from coppers

     His departure left Dolly a prey to mixed emotions. As a man she liked George and found him an entertaining companion, but she could not forget that for all his suavity and the sparkle of his conversation he represented the awful majesty of the Law and, were he to learn of her activities in the Prosser home, would have no hesitation in piling on the back of her neck and whistling for stern-faced colleagues to come and fasten the gyves to her wrists. Better, then, that they should part. His going had deprived her of the pleasure of listening to his views on this and that and wondering how he could talk the way he did without having a potato in his mouth, but she had also lost the unpleasant feeling that centipedes were crawling up and down her spine which always affected her when hobnobbing with the gendarmerie.

(from Ice In the Bedroom, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Here's a hair tonic for you!

 "Scalpo, the lotion that lends a lustre"

(from Ice In the Bedroom, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

The kind of publisher I need

     "Pure slush, but it was taken by Popgood and Grooly, and didn't do too badly, and they sent the sheets over to Singleton Brothers in New York, who turn out books like sausages and don't care how bad they are, so long as they run to eighty thousand words."

(from Ice In the Bedroom, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Conversing with geese

     "Did I ever tell you about my married life, Sally?"

    "No, never. I knew you had been married, of course."

    "You'd have liked Joe. Everybody did. I loved him. His trouble was, he was so weak. Just a rabbit who couldn't say 'Boo' to a goose."

    Sally knew that the number of rabbits capable of saying "Boo" to geese was very limited, but she did not point this out.

(from Ice In the Bedroom, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Sort of unsettling, what?

     Soapy marshalled his thoughts. He had finished that second martini now, and was feeling calmer. The knowledge that seven miles separated him from Leila York had done much to restore his composure. And he was reminding himself, as Dolly had reminded him yesterday, that you can't win 'em all. It was a comforting reflection. He was not entirely his old hearty self as he began his story, but he had shaken off that dizzy feeling which comes to the man who pays a social call and suddenly finds his hostess jabbing a shot-gun into his diaphragm.

(from Ice In the  Bedroom, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

A difficult simile

     "Is he still running that private-eye racet of his?" The question surprised Mr. Molloy.

    "Why, of course he is, sweetie. Why wouldn't he be? It's only a month since you've been away."

    "Well, a month seems a long time for Chimp Twist to stay out of the coop. How's he doing?"

    "He didn't say, but I guess he doesn't bother much about clients. The J. Sheringham Adair private Investigation Agency's just a front."

    Dolly laughed bitterly.

    "J. Sheringham Adair! What a name to call himself."

    "Had to call himself something."

    "Well, why not Heels Incorporated or Doublecrossers Limited or sump'n? I tell you, Soapy, whever I think of that undersized boll weevil, I go hot all over, clear down to the soles of my shoes."

    "Oh, Chimp's not so bad."

    "Not so bad as what?"

    Mr. Molloy, though trying to be tolerant, found this question difficult to answer. He changed the subject.

(from Ice In the Bedroom, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

What a dish!

     Dolly Molloy unquestionably took the eye. She was a spectacular blonde of the type that is always getting murdered in its step-ins in mystery stories. Her hair was golden, her eyes hazel, her lips and cheeks aflame with colour, and she carried herself with a challenging jautiness. Wolf-whistling is of course prohibited in the lobby of Barribault's Hotel, but quite a few of the visiting maharajahs looked as if they would have liked to, and it was plain that only by the exercise of the most iron self-restraint that the Texas millionaires were holding themselves in. You could see their lips puckering.

(from Ice In the Bedroom, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

How lawyers have fun

     "Oh, he was a regular devil in those days. And look at him now. All dried up like a kippered herring and wouldn't kiss Helen of Troy if you brought her to him asleep in a chair with a spring of mistletoe suspended over her. That's what comes of being a solicitor, it saps the vital juices. Johnny doesn't even embezzle his clients' money, which I should have thought was about the only fun a solicitor can get out of life."

(from Ice In the Bedroom, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Colorful description of a broken heart

     She knew that she had done the sensible thing, but that did not prevent her feeling that her heart was being torn in small pieces by a platoon of muscular wild cats, than which few experiences are less agreeable.

(from Ice In the Bedroom, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Got a date

     "You got any idea what this is all about?" Arnold snapped. "This isn't just a toy, you know."

    "We're submerging," Jim said cheerfully. "We're going down around five hundred feet. Then we'll find a passage and get out of it into Todahe Bay. There we'll find the Copenhagen loaded with Submarines, and we'll shoot her one in the pants - I hope."

    "You hope!" Arnold said sarcastically. "You mean, I hope! And if something happens and you're wrong?"

    "We'll wash out," Jim said simply and shrugged.

    "Yeah?" William said. "That's oay for you, but I've got a date with a girl in Makassar."

(from "Well of the Unholy Light," by Louis L'Amour)