It takes more than money

 She backed from the room. Patrick Abbott remained standing beside the chair she had assigned him, because he was a stranger and it was her best. I gave the room a onceover. It had the articles in it deemed necessary for the modern living room. They were not of specially inferior quality, but the room looked poor and barren. It was its mistress's poverty of taste and imagination which made it so. I've lived too long among artists to think it takes money to make an attractive home.

(from The Golden Box, by Frances Crane)

Circassian walnut

 In her novel, The Golden Box, author Frances Crane refers to furniture that was "American walnut much carved and inlaid with the Circassian walnut." Even though I worked for a year in the furniture industry and we sold pieces of furniture with walnut laminate and stain on them, I do not recall the term "Circassian." The internet tells me that it is "a highly prized, slow-growing walnut species from the Caucasus region, renowned for its dense, fine-grained, and visually striking wood."

Crime has a color

 "I'd hate to touch anything in here," I said. Patrrick was putting on a pair of soft cotton gloves. "If I were you I'd be one of those detectives that does everything by psychology," I said. Patrick said nothing. He was already starting a swift methodical search of everything in the room, beginning with the bed, lifting its covers and sheets, running gloved fingers over the pillows and the ancient mattress, eyeing the rusty springs, then put it together again so that it looked just as it did in the first place. I stood off, and each second hated the whole business more. "I'll do the psychology part," I said. "See that watermelon pink comb on the dresser? If vice has a color, it's watermelon pink. She done it."

(from The Golden Box, by Frances Crane)

Catercornered

 "Our table was a long one in the corner catercornered from the bar." (from The Golden Box, by Frances Crane)

I was surprised when I came across Crane's usage of this word, because it was totally unfamiliar to me. Here in South Logan County we would say "cattycornered."

On the Grammarist website, I found two more options: kittycornered and caddycornered. Which of these you use is entirely a matter of regional preference. However:

"The term was originally catty-corner, which comes from the French word quatre, meaning four. When English speakers got their paws on quatre, it became cater, used to showcase the four spots on a die or the four legs of a beast. Or, in this case, the corners of four city blocks meeting. Eventually, cater-cornered became a term for something positioned diagonally from something else, like the opposite corners on a square die. Then, cater-cornered got clipped to catty-corner, kitty-corner and caddy-corner."

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)

His kind of woman

     He said, "Still she's hardly my ideal woman."

    "But really!" I said. With sarcasm.

    "I never have cared much for women who screech and yelp if they don't get everything they want when they want it. Other peoples' husbands, for instance. But I do like women who are easy to look at."

    "So I've noticed!" I snapped.

    "Still, I'm not partial to blondes. I like them slim, with white skin, black hair, amber eyes, long lashes, competent hands, minds of their own even though cockeyed, sympathetic even when it's not quite bright to be so, with a shop in which you love to sit around and prattle, lots of friends - "

    "You seem to have someone in mind."

    "I have. Definitely," Patrick Abbott said.

    I could feel my color coming up like a sunrise. I looked at him again. He was watching me. With an eyebrow up I must admit that he was putting me in a state of great mental confusion. But it was very agreeable.

(from The Turquoise Shop, by Frances Crane)

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)