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)

Not a literary giant

 "I kissed William, shook him by the hand, tied a wet towel around his head, gave him pencil and paper and locked him up in the morning-room with lots of hot coffee. When I asked him just now how he was making out, he said that he had had no inspiration so far but would keep on swinging. His voice sounded very hollow. I can picture the poor darling's agony. The only thing he has ever written before in his life was a stiff letter to the Greens Committee beefing about the new bunker on the fifth, and that took him four days and left him as limp as a rag."

(from "Rodney Has a Relapse," by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

The world's rudest kid

 "Why, of course!" she cried, clasping her hands in a sort of ecstasy. "I ought to have thought of it myself. People may say what they like about my sweet Braid, but they can't deny that he is the rudest child this side of the Atlantic Ocean. I'll send him to you the moment he clocks in."

    Braid Bates at that time was a young plug-ugly of some nine summers, in appearance a miniature edition of William and in soul and temperament a combination of Dead End Kid and army mule; a freckled, hard-boiled character with a sardonic eye and a mouth which, when not occupied in eating, had a cynical twist to it. He spoke little as a general thing, but when he did speak seldom failed to find a chink in the armour. The impact of such a personality on little Timothy must, I felt, be tremendous, and I was confident that we could not have placed the child in better hands.

(from "Rodney Has a Relapse," by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Not the right sort of woman

        A girl who has loved, even if mistakenly, can never be indifferent to the fortunes of the man whom she once regarded as the lode star of her life. She kept wondering how he was making out, and hoped that his vacation was not spoiled by a broken heart.

    The first time she saw him, accordingly, she should have been relieved and pleased. He was escorting Cora McGuffy Spottsworth along the boardwalk, and it was abundantly obvious even from a casual glance that if his heart had ever been broken, there had been some adroit work done in the repair shop. Clark Gable could have improved his technique by watching the way he bent over Cora McGuffey Spottsworth and stroked her slender arm. He also, while bending and stroking, whispered into her shell-like ear, and you could see that what he was saying was good stuff. His whole attitude was that of a man who, recognizing that he was on a good thing, was determined to push it along.

    But Agnes Flack was not relieved and pleased; she was disturbed and concerned. She was perhaps a hard judge, but Cora McGuffy Spottsworth looked to her like the sort of woman who goes about stealing the plans of forts - or, at the best, leaning back negligently on a settee and saying, "Prince, my fan." The impression Agnes formed was of something that might be all right stepping out of a pie at a bachelor party, but not the type you could take home to meet mother.

(from "Feet of Clay," by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Close, but lacking a few qualifications

     "Naturally, she compares you to your disadvantage with such a man as 'Mgoopi 'Mgwumpi."

    Ernest Plinlimmon's eyes widened and his mouth fell open, causing him to look exactly like a fish I once caught off Brighton pier.

    "Such a man as - what was that name again?"

    "'Mgoopi 'Mgwumpi. He was the chief, if I remember rightly, of the Lesser 'Mgowpi. I gather that his personality made a deep impression upon Miss Fitch, and that, but for the fact that he was as black as the ace of spades and aready had twenty-seven wives and a hundred pares, something might have come of it. At any rate, she as good as told me the other day that what she was looking for someone who, while possessing the engaging spiritual qualities of this chief, was rather blonder and a bachelor."

(from "There's Always Golf," by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Golf by brute force

     Poskitt, the d'Artagnan of the links, was a man who brought to the tee the tactics which in his youth had won him such fame as a hammer thrower. His plan was to clench his teeth, shut his eyes, whirl the club around his head and bring it down with sickening violence in the general direction of the sphere. Usually, the only result would be a ball topped along the ground or - as had been known to happen when he used his niblick - cut in half. But there would come times when by some mysterious dispensation of Providence he managed to connect, in which event the gallery would be stunned by the spectacle of a three-hundred-yarder down the middle. The whole thing, as he himself recognized, was a clean, sporting venture. He just let go and hoped for the best.

(from "The Letter of the Law," by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Not a woman to mess around with

 Mark you, if ever men had an excuse for being ill at ease in the presence of the opposite sex, these two had. They were both eighteen-handicap men, and Agnes was exuberantly and dynamically scratch. Her physique was an asset to her, especially in the long game. She stood about five feet ten in her stockings, and had shoulders and forearms which would have excited the envious admiration of one of those muscular women on the music-halls, who good-naturedly allow six brothers, three sisters, and a cousin by marriage to pile themselves on her collarbone while the orchestra plays a long-drawn chord and the audience hurries out to the bar. Her eye resembled the eye of one of the more imperious queens of history; and when she laughed, strong men clutched at their temples to keep the tops of their heads from breaking loose.

(from "Those In Peril on the Tee," by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Happy ending

     William brooded for a while. He was not a quick thinker.

    "Well, look here," he said at length, "this is the point. This is the nub of the thing. This is where I want you to follow me very closely. Have you asked Anastatia to marry you?"

    "Marry me?" Rodney gazed at him, shocked. "Have I asked her to marry me? I, who am not worthy to polish the blade of her niblick! I, who have not even a thirty handicap, ask a girl to marry me who was in the semi-final of last year's Ladis' Open! No, no, Bates, I may be a vers-libre poet, but I have some sense of what is fitting. I love her, yes. I love her with a fervour which causes me to frequently and for hours at a time lie tossing sleeplessly upon my pillow. But I would not dare to ask her to marry me."

    Anastatia burst into a peal of girlish laughter. "You poor chump!" she cried. "Is that what has been the matter all this time? I couldn't make out what the trouble was. Why, I'm crazy about you. I'll marry you any time you give the word."

    Rodney reeled. "What!"

    "Of course I will."

    "Anastatia!"

    "Rodney!" He folded her in his arms.

(from "The Purification of Rodney Spelvin," by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Nothing to be afraid of

     The studio was one of those dim, over-ornamented rooms which appeal to men like Rodney Spelvin. Heavy curtains hung in front o the windows. One corner was cut off by a high-backed Chesterfield. At the far end was an alcove, curtained like the windows. Once Jane had admired this studio, but now it made her shiver. It seemed to her one of those nests in which, as the sub-title of Tried in the Furnace had said, only eggs of evil were hatched. She paced the thick carpet restlessly, and suddenly there came to her the sound of footsteps on the stairs.

    Jane stopped, every muscle tense. The moment had arrived. She faced the door, tight-lipped. It comforted her a little in this crisis to reflect that Rodney was not one of those massive Ethel M. Dell libertines who might make things unpleasant for an intruder. He was only a welter-weight egg of evil; and, if he tried to start anything, a girl of her physique would have little or no difficulty in knocking the stuffing out of him.

(from "The Purification of Rodney Spelvin," by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

[Ethel M. Dell was a writer of popular British romance novels.]

Better to be prepared

 "Do not let us speak of it," he said, registering pain. It was quite easy for him to do this. All there was to it was tightening the lips and drawing up the left eyebrow. He had practiced it in front of his mirror, for a fellow never knew when it might not come in useful.

(from "Jane Gets Off the Fairway," by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

After all these years!

     "Rodney!" gasped Jane.

    It was a difficult moment for Rodney Spelvin. Five years had passed since he had last seen Jane, and in those five years so many delightful creatures had made a fuss of him that the memory of the girl to whom he had once been engaged for a few weeks had become a little blurred. In fact, not to put too fine a point on it, he had forgotten Jane altogether. The fact that she had addressed him by his first name seemed to argue that they must have met at some time somewhere; but, though he strained his brain, absolutely nothing stirred.

    The situation was one that might have embarrassed another man, but Rodney Spelvin was a quick thinker. He saw at a glance that Jane was an extremely pretty girl, and it was his guiding rule in life never to let anything like that get past him. So he clasped her hand warmly, allowed an expression of amazed delight to sweep over his face, and gazed tensely into her eyes.

    "You!" he murmured, playing it safe. "You, little one!"

    Jane stood five feet seven in her stockings and had a forearm like the village blacksmith's, but she liked being called "little one."

    "How strange that we should meet like this!" she said, blushing brightly.

    "After all these years," said Rodney Spelvin, taking a chance. It would be a nuisance if it turned out that they had met at a studio-party the day before yesterday, but something seemed to tell him that she dated back a goodish way. Besides, even if they had met the day before yesterday, he could get out of it by saying that the hours had seemed like years. For you cannot stymie these modern poets.

(from "Jane Gets Off the Fairway," by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Come on, Bill, get with it!

 And it did not appear likely that anything would weaken Jane's regard. They had much in common, for she was a calm, slow-moving person, too. They had a mutual devotion to golf, and played together every day; and the fact that their handicaps were practically level formed a strong bond. Most divorces, as you know, spring from the fact that the husband is too markedly superior to his wife at golf; this leading him, when she starts criticizing his relations, to say bitter and unforgivable things about her mashie-shots. Nothing of this kind could happen with William and Jane. They would build their life on a solid foundation of sympathy and understanding. The years would find them consoling and encouraging each other, happy married lovers. If, that is to say, William ever got round to proposing.

(from "Rodney Fails To Qualify," by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Love is but a tepid emotion

 His fingers picked feverishly at the arm of his chair. He had paled to the very lips. If the office was barred to him, on what pretext could he sneak away from home? And sneak he must for tomorrow and the day after the various qualifying sixteens were to play the match-rounds for the cups; and it was monstrous and impossible that he should not be there. He must be there. He had done ninety-six, and the next best medal score in his sixteen was a hundred and one. For the first time in his life he had before him the prospect of winning a cup; and, highly though the poets have spoken of love, that emotion is not to be compared with the frenzy which grips a twenty-four-handicap man who sees himself within reach of a cup.

(from "Keeping In with Vosper," by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)