Even murders can be copied

 "Now, let us consider the Odell murder. You and Heath are agreed that it is a commonplace, brutal, sordid, unimaginative crime. But, unlike you two bloodhounds on the trail, I have ignored its mere appearances and have analyzed its various factors - I have looked at it psychologically, so to speak. And I have discovered that it is not a genuine and sincere crime - that is to say, an original - but only a sophisticated, self-conscious and clever imitation, done by a skillful copyist. I grant you it is correct and typical in every detail. But just there is where it fails, don't y' know. Its technic is too good, is not convincing - it lacks elan. Aesthetically speaking, it has all the earmarks of a tour de force. Vulgarly speaking, it's a fake."

(from The "Canary" Murder Case, by S. S. Van Dine)

After the press gets through with it

 "Have you seen the afternoon papers? They're all clamoring for the murderer. You'd think I had him up my sleeve."

"You forget, my dear chap," grinned Vance, "that we are living under the benign and upliftin' reign of Democritus, which confers upon every ignoramus the privilege of promiscuously criticising his betters."

Markham snorted, "I don't complain about criticism; it's the lurid imagination of these bright young reporters that galls me. They're trying to turn this sordid crime into a spectacular Borgia melodrama, with passion running rampant, and mysterious influences at work, and all the pomp and trappings of a medieval romance."

(from The "Canary" Murder Case, by S. S. Van Dine)

Nothing that food won't cure

 "So - voila l'affaire. plenty of information, but - my word! - what to do with it?"

"I give it up," acknowledged Markham hopelessly.

"I know; it's a sad, sad world," Vance commiserated him. "But you must face the olla podrida with a bright eye. It's time for lunch, and a filet of sole Marguery will cheer you no end."

(from The "Canary" Murder Case, by S. S. Van Dine)

+++

Reading a Philo Vance mystery increases one's vocabulary. Olla podrida is a traditional latino stew that is made of meat and vegetables and slowly simmered. File of sole Marguery is a dish that originated in the late 1800s and was especially associated with the restaurant Marguery in Paris.

Driving him crazy

 "From what I could gather, you seem to think it possible that Skeel witnessed the murder. That couldn't by any stretch of the imagination, be your precious theory?"

"That's part of it, anyway."

"My dear Vance, you do astonish me!" Markham laughed outright. "Skeel, then, according to you, is innocent; but he keeps his knowledge to himself, invents an alibi, and doesn't even tattle until he's arrested. . . . It won't hold water."

"I know," sighed Vance. It's a veritable sieve. And yet, the notion haunts me - it rides me like a hag - it eats into my vitals."

"Do you realize that this mad theory of yours presupposes that, when Spotswoode and Miss Odell returned from the theater, there were two men hidden in the apartment - two men unknown to each other - namely Skeel and your hypothetical murderer?"

"Of course I realize it; and the thought of it is breaking down my reason."

(from The "Canary" Murder Case, by S. S. Van Dine)

Boys will be boys

 The case was discussed for another half hour, then Spottswoode excused himself and left us.

"Funny thing," ruminated Markham, "how a man of his upbringing could be so attracted by the empty-headed, butterfly, type."

"I'd say it was quite natural," returned Vance. . . . "You're such an incorrigible moralist, Markham."

(from The "Canary" Murder Case, by S. S. Van Dine)

Vance to the rescue!

 "What do you mean by forcing yourself in here with your contemptible insinuations?" he shouted. His face, now livid and mottled, was hideously contorted; his hands made spasmodic movements; and his whole body shook as with a tremor. "Get out of here - you and your two myrmidons! Get out, before I have you thrown out!"

Markham, himself enraged now, was about to reply, when Vance took him by the arm. "The doctor is gently hinting that we go," he said. And with amazing swiftness he spun Markham round and led him firmly out of the room.

When we were again in the taxicab on our way back to the club, Vance snig- gered gaily. "A sweet specimen, that! Paranoia. Or, more likely, manic-depressive insanity the jolie circulaire type: recurring periods of maniacal excitement alternating with periods of clearest sanity, don't y' know. Anyway, the doctor's disorder belongs in the category of psychoses - associated with the maturation or waning of the sexual instinct. He's just the right age, too. Neurotic degenerate - that's what this oily Hippocrates is. In another minute he would have attacked you. My word! It's a good thing I came to the rescue. Such chaps are about as safe as rattlesnakes.

(from The "Canary" Murder Case, by S. S. Van Dine)

Couch sitting

 Now that we are solidly into our reclining years, my wife of 52 years and I enjoy just sitting together on the couch. We rarely do anything together as we sit - other than sitting - but we do sit together. She generally sits so that her left leg is up on the couch so that I can rub her foot and ankle, which activity has contributed largely to keeping me out of trouble over the years - a small price to pay for a large benefit.

Quiet togetherness has tremendous benefits. I highly recommend it.

His eyes don't match his tongue

 "You wangled that viscid old sport rather cleverly, don't y' know," remarked Vance, when Cleaver had gone. "But there's something deuced queer about him. The transition from his gambler's glassy stare to his garrulous confidences was too sudden - suspiciously sudden, in fact. I may be evil-minded, but he didn't impress me as a luminous pillar of truth. Maybe it's because I don't like those odd, boiled eyes of his - somehow they didn't harmonize with his gushing imitation of openhearted frankness."

(from The "Canary" Murder Case, by S. S. Van Dine)

When lawyers tangle

"I'm afraid I can't accommodate you," he said at length.

"Your attitude is not quite what might be expected in one whose conscience is entirely clear," returned Markham, with a show of resentment. The man turned a mildly inquisitive gaze upon the district attorney.

"What has my knowing the girl to do with her being murdered? She didn't confide in me who her murderer was to be. She didn't even tell me that she knew anyone who intended to strangle her. If she'd known, she most likely could have avoided being murdered."

Vance was sitting close to me, a little removed from the others, and, leaning over, murmured in my ear sotto voce: "Markham's up against another lawyer - poor dear! A crumplin' situation."

But however inauspiciously this interlocutory skirmish may have begun, it soon developed into a grim combat which ended in Cleaver's complete surrender. Markham, despite his suavity and graciousness, was an unrelenting and resourceful antagonist: and it was not long before he had forced from Cleaver some highly significant information.

(from The "Canary" Murder Case, by S. S. Van Dine)

How to convict a spirit

 "It's uncanny," pronounced Markham gloomily.

"It's positively spiritualistic," amended Vance. "It has the caressin' odor of a seance. Really, y' know, I'm beginning to suspect that some medium was hovering in the vicinage last night doing some rather tip-top materializations. I say, Markham, could you get an indictment against an ectoplasmic emanation?"

"That wasn't no spook that made those fingerprints," growled Heath, with surly truculence.

(from The "Canary" Murder Case, by S. S. Van Dine)

I think he really did!

 Heath paused and finally lighted the cigar on which he had been chewing at intervals during the past hour. "Now, tell me about that side door," he went on, with undiminished aggressiveness. "You told me you lock it every night before you leave - is that right?"

"Ja - that's right." The man nodded his head affirmatively several times. "Only I don't lock it - I bolt it."

"All right, you bolt it, then." As Heath talked his cigar bobbed up and down between his lips; smoke and words came simultaneously from his mouth. "And last night you bolted it as usual about six o'clock?"

"Maybe a quarter past," the janitor amended, with Germanic precision.

"You're sure you bolted it last night?" The question was almost ferocious.

"Ja, ja. Sure, I am. I do it every night. I never miss."

The man's earnestness left no doubt that the door in question had indeed been bolted on the inside at about six o'clock of the previous evening. Heath, however, belabored the point for several minutes, only to be reassured doggedly that the door had been bolted. At last the janitor was dismissed.

"Really, y' know, Sergeant," remarked Vance with an amused smile, "that honest Rheinlander bolted the door."

(from The "Canary" Murder Case, by S. S. Van Dine)

Say a lot to say nothing

     "What is it you suspect?" demanded Markham sharply.

    "Not a thing, old dear," blandly declared Vance. "I'm wandering about in a mental murk as empty of signposts as interplanetary space. The jaws of darkness do devour me up; I'm in the dead vast and middle of night. My mental darkness is Egyptian, Stygian, Cimmerian - I'm in a perfect Erebus of tenebrosity."

    Markham's jaw tightened in exasperation; he was familiar with this evasive loquacity of Vance's.

(from The "Canary" Murder Case, by S. S. Van Dine)

A specialist

 Deputy Inspector Conrad Brenner was one of that small army of obscure, but highly capable, experts who are connected with the New York Police Department, and who are constantly being consulted on abstruse technical problems, but whose names and achievements rarely get into the public prints. His specialty was locks and burglars' tools; and I doubt if, even among those exhaustively painstaking criminologists of the University of Lausanne, there was a more accurate reader of the evidential signs left by the implements of housebreakers. In appearance and bearing he was like a withered little college professor. (It is an interesting fact that for the nineteen years he had been connected with the New York Police Department, he had been referred to, by his superiors and subordinates alike, as "the Professor.") His black, unpressed suit was old-fashioned in cut; and he wore a very high stiff collar, lie a fin-de-siecle clergyman, with a narrow black string tie. His gold-rimmed spectacles were so thick-lensed that the pupils of his eyes gave the impression of acute belladonna poisoning.

(from The "Canary" Murder Case, by S. S. Van Dine)

A professional job

     Heath had been eyeing Vance with narrowed lids as the latter bent over the dressing table. "What's in your mind, Mr. Vance?" he, in turn, asked.

    "Oh, more than you could ever guess," Vance answered lightly. "But just at the moment I was toying with the idea that this steel case was never torn open by that wholly inadequate iron poker, what?"

    Heath nodded his head approvingly. "So you, too, noticed that, did you? And you're dead right. That poker might've twisted the box a little, but it never snapped that lock."

      He turned to Inspector Moran. "That's the puzzler I've sent for 'Prof' Brenner to clean up - if he can. The jimmying of that jewel case looks to me like a high-class professional job. No Sunday school superintendent did it."

(from The "Canary" Murder Case, by S. S. Van Dine)

Smart doctor

 "Where's the medical examiner?" asked Markham.

"He's coming," Heath told him. "You can't get Doc Doremus to go anywheres without his breakfast."

(from The "Canary" Murder Case, by S. S. Van Dine)

Off with their heads!

 "A court of law listens solemnly to the testimony, and renders a decision not on the facts but according to a complicated set of rules. The result d' ye see, is that a court often acquits a prisoner, realizing full well that he is guilty. Many a judge has said, in effect, to a culprit, 'I know, and the jury knows, that you committed the crime, but in view of the legally admissible evidence, I declare you innocent. Go and sin again.'"

Markham grunted. "I'd hardly endear myself to the people of this country if I answered the current strictures against me by recommending law courses for the police department."

"Permit me, then, to suggest the alternative of Shakespeare's butcher: "'Let's kill all the lawyers.'"

(from The "Canary" Murder Case, by S. S. Van Dine)

Don't bother us with evidence

 Vance looked up with a slow smile and regarded him quizzically.

"The difficulty would seem to be," he returned, with an indolent drawl, "that the police, being unversed in the exquisite abracadabra of legal procedure, labor under the notion that evidence which would convince a man of ordin'ry intelligence, would also convince a court of law. A silly notion, don't y' know. Lawyers don't really want evidence; they want erudite technicalities. And the average policeman's brain is too forthright to cope with the pedantic demands of jurisprudence."

(from The "Canary" Murder Case, by S. S. Van Dine)

Ah, the corruption of accumulated wealth

     An hour after dusk that night a native sought out one of the caballeros with the intelligence that a gentleman wished to speak to him immediately, and that this gentleman was evidently wealthy since he had given the native a coin for carrying the message, when he might just as well have given nothing more than a cuff alongside the head; also that the mysterious gentleman would be waiting along the path that ran toward the San Gabriel trail, and to be sure that the caballero would come he had bade the native say that there was a fox in the neighborhood.

    "A fox, Zorro - fox!" the caballero thought, and then ruined the native forever by giving him another coin.

(from The Mark of Zorro, by Johnston McCulley)

Get with it!

     "She is yours, if you play the game!" Don Alejandro said. "You are a Vega, and therefore the best catch in the country. Be but half a lover and the senorita is yours. What sort of blood is in your veins? I have half a mind to slit one of them and see."

    "Cannot we allow this marriage business to drop for the time being?" Don Diego asked.

    "You are twenty-five. I was quite old when you were born. Soon I shall go the way of my fathers. You are the only son, the heir, and you must have a wife and offspring. Is the Vega family to die out because your blood is water? Win you a wife within the quarter year, young sir, and a wife I can accept into the family, or I leave my wealth to the Franciscans when I pass away!"

(from The Mark of Zorro, by Johnston McCulley)

A strange way of cursing

 The Johnston McCulley's novel, The Mark of Zorro, one of the main characters is Sergeant Gonzalez (one of the bad guys). One of the Sergeant's favorite expressions is, "Meal mush and goat's milk!" Why that particular phrase should be the essence of a curse I do not understand, but there it is. Evidently McCulley thought that military men of the period said that when they became frustrated.

And kicked him out!

     Captain Ramon said it. And then Senor Zorro grasped him by the nek and lifted him, and propelled him to the door, and hurled him into the darkness. And had his boots not been soft, Captain Ramon would have been injured more deeply, both in feelings and anatomy.

(from The Mark of Zorro, by Johnston McCulley)

Lazy Latin lover

"I am weary, and the hacienda is an excellent place to rest," he said. "I knew it to be the siesta hour, also, and thought everyone would be asleep. It were a shame to awaken you, senorita, but I felt that I must speak. Your beauty would hinge a man's tongue in its middle so that both ends might be free to sing your praises."

Senorita Lolita had the grace to blush. "I would that my beauty affected other men so," she said.

"And does it not? Is it possible that the Senorita Lolita lacks suitors? But that cannot be possible?"

"It is, nevertheless, senor. There are few bold enough to seek to ally themselves with the family of Pulido, since it is out of favor with the powers. There is one - suitor," she went on. "But he does not seem to put much life into his wooing."

"Ha! A laggard at love - and in your presence? What ails the man? Is he ill?"

"He is so wealthy that I suppose h thinks he has but to request it and a maiden will agree to wed him."

"What an imbecile! 'Tis the wooing gives the spice to romance!"

(from The Mark of Zorro, by Johnston McCalley)

Cocking snooks

"Bertie had been very pressing, and Frank had been cocking snooks when he's had one over the odds, and hinting at what he could say if Bertie pushed him too far." (from The Case is Closed, by Patricia Wentworth)

British slang is sometimes difficult for us Americans to understand. Bertie had been pressing Frank to pay the money he owed him, and Frank had been "thumbing his nose" at him, and when he would have too much to drink, he would hint at what he would do if Bertie didn't back off.

Odd names

 "Yes," she said, "I put a small advertisement in the paper. It is so fortunate that Mrs. Mercer should have had an uncommon name like Anketell. One could feel practically sure that there would not be more than one Louisa Kezia Anketell, or at least not more than one in the same generation. These peculiar names generally run in a family. My own second name is Hephzibah - most unsuitable with Maud, but there has been a Hephzibah in our family for at least two hundred years."

(from The Case is Closed, by Patricia Wentworth)

And stay away!

     "And the other nephew, Francis Everton - what about him?"

    "Bad hat," said Henry. Remittance man. Old Everton paid him to keep away. Glasgow was a safe distance - he could soak quietly in the cheaper brands of alcohol without any danger of getting into the London papers."

(This is from The Case is Closed, by Patricia Wentworth. Wikipedia says, "In Victorian British culture, a remittance man was usually the black sheep of an upper- or middle-class family who was sent away (from the United Kingdom to the rest of the British Empire), and paid to stay away. He was generally of dissolute or drunken character and may have been sent overseas after disgraces at home. Harry Grey, 8th Earl of Stamford, is an example; he was sent to South Africa before he inherited the titles and fortune of his third cousin.")

Just trust Miss Silver

     "Will you tell me what Mrs. Grey is afraid of?"

    "I don't see how I can."

    Miss Silver looked at her in a different way. She had the air of a kind aunt - of Aunt Emmeline when she was about to give you five pounds at Christmas. She said in a voice that was nice as well as prim, "I am a great admirer of Lord Tennyson. The mot juste - how often one comes across it in his writings. 'Oh, trust me all in all, or not at all.' I find that I often have to quite that to my clients. The most complete frankness is necessary."

(from The Case is Closed, by Patricia Wentworth)