You know what they say about the best-laid plans of mice and men...and bloggers. Well, my plans for this week's TNB post have gone awry. So...in honor of Valentine's Day, I give you tidbits on love and marriage that I have picked up from authors in the mystery field and their characters.
You know what we say about marriage. We say it’s like
the kitchen clock. If it goes better lying on its side or even standing
on its head, leave it alone. As long as it ticks and keeps time, keep
your hands out of the works.
Chief Inspector Luke
The Estate of the Beckoning Lady
—Margery Allingham
I envy those women who just love normally and nobly with
their bodies. Then they’re only engulfed by a sort of lovely high tragedy. The
hero persists. That’s at least decent. Once you cultivate your mind you lay
yourself open to low tragedy, the mingy, dirty little tragedy of making an ass
of yourself over an ordinary poor little bloke.
Valentine
The
Fashion in Shrouds
—
Allingham
Oh, Albert, my dear good ape, do try and understand.
You’re a sensible, reasonable, masculine soul. If you fell in love and
something went wrong you’d think it all out like a little gent and think it all
quietly away, taking the conventional view and the intelligent path and saving
yourself no end of bother because your head plus your training is much stronger
than all your emotions put together. You’re a civilised masculine
product.
Valentine
to Campion
The
Fashion in Shrouds
—
Allingham
Mr. Suzman had been a notable womanizer in his time, and his
time was not yet up.
A Hovering of Vultures
—Robert Barnard
Her glass was empty again, and it needed refilling, as did
her heart. She knew he could refill her glass, but in the matter of the
heart, his credentials were questionable.
The Bette Davis Murder Case
—George Baxt
“Men are so odd when they’re in love,” she reflected.
“They seem to think that the very act of being in love gives them certain
proprietary rights; certainly the right to be jealous. At least they
don’t actually think it, because they can’t think at all when they’re in that
state, poor dears.”
Jean Norwood
Trial and Error
—Anthony Berkley
He was the sort of person who makes you supremely
interesting to yourself—only a great man can do that, or your lover….
Georgia Cavendish
Thou Shell of Death
—Nicholas Blake
This woman has lived with Angus Campbell for forty
years. She knows him inside out. She sees through him with that
almost morbid clarity that our womenfolk exhibit in dealing with our vagaries
and our stupidities. It doesn’t take her long to understand where the
hanky-panky lies.
Dr. Gideon Fell
The Case of the Constant Suicides
—John Dickson Carr
…he realized that the very sight of this girl had made him
want to reach for a cocktail; some women have that effect. Such glamour
must have attended all the great sirens of the ages. In its absence there
are unfulfilled romances. If, when Dante met Beatrice that famous time on
what’s-its-name bridge, Beatrice had smiled at him and whispered, “Look here, I
could do with a slug of Chianti,” then the poor sap would have tried to find
out her address and telephone number instead of merely going home and grousing
about it in an epic.
The Eight of Swords
—Carr
Never confide in a woman. If she lo—likes you, she’ll never
give you away. But she’ll do some tomfool thing trying to help. Then you’re for
it.
Larry Hurst
The Nine Wrong Answers
—Carr
…it is one of the great consolations of nature that a man,
however unattractive, will find that he is attractive—even what appears to be
madly attractive—to some woman.
Hercule Poirot
Hallowe’en Party
—Agatha Christie
And after all, Edward had never told her that he loved
her. Affection, kindliness, he had never pretended to more than
that. She had accepted the limitation, and not until she had realized
what it would mean to live at close quarters with an Edward whose mind and
heart had Henrietta as a permanent quest, did she know that for her Edward’s
affection was not enough.
The Hollow
—Christie
Let Edward love Henrietta as an intangible and unpossessable
dream. It was warmth, permanence, stability that was his real need.
It was daily companionship and love and laughter at Ainswick.
She thought, “What Edward needs is someone to
light a fire on his hearth—and I am the person to do that.
Ibid.
I wonder if husbands know as much about their wives as they
think they do. If I had a husband, I should hate him to bring home
orphans without consulting me first.
The Man in the Brown Suit
--Christie
…men never understood how difficult it was to resist a
flirtation at times, especially with an old flame, although it meant absolutely
nothing at all.
Dancing with Death
—Joan Coggin
But, you know, quite a lot of people are happily married,
only you don’t hear so much about them as you do about the unhappy ones. They
don’t put it in the papers when people are happy together, only when they are
not.
Lady Lupin
—Coggin
Apart from anything else, a little enforced abstinence makes
the eventual impact much more violent and exciting…
The Headmaster
Love Lies Bleeding
—Edmund Crispin
H: As I said before, you must not make assignations with
young women.
JHW: No, sir.
H: Nor must you, on leaving this room, go round complaining
about obscurantist repression of wholesale desires….God forbid that you should
be permanently celibate. But the term lasts only twelve weeks, and if you
can’t abstain from the opposite sex for that length of time without suffering
psychological damage, then your brain is an altogether feebler instrument than
I’ve hitherto believed.
The Headmaster, J. H. Williams
—Crispin
“You’d like some beer,” she [Daphne
Savage] stated unarguably, and Fen at once conceived a high opinion of her
intelligence….
“There are few young women,” he
observed dreamily, “who know that one wants beer, and that one wants good
beer, and that one wants it in a pint glass. I envy the man who marries
you.”
—Crispin
PR: …I wish you felt the way I do about Peter.
MD [GF]: For the way you feel about him there’s a sound
biological reason from which I’m luckily exempt.
Penelope Rolt, Mr. Datcherly [Gervase Fen]
The Long Divorce
—Crispin
Thin and dark, with that certain indefinable air of
bookishness that she had always found appealing….
Dreaming of the Bones (146)
—Deborah Crombie
[about relationships]
Men aren’t very good at working things out for themselves,
you know. Sometimes you have to give them a prod.
Rosemary Kincaid
—Crombie (252)
…suddenly Kate felt a surge of love for him [Reed], his
honesty, his reasonableness: the fact that he cared rather than wanted to argue
about it.
An Imperfect Spy
—Amanda Cross
You want adventure. I want it too….But the truth is,
my dear Kate, marrying you and living with you was, or so it seemed to me, all
the adventure that I needed.
Reed
Ibid.
My dear, I don’t want to be taken care of, and I can’t say
that your angelic qualities are the ones which, above all others, have
overwhelmed me. Couldn’t we share a world and a certain amount of time?
Reed Amhearst
The James Joyce Murder
—Cross
I had other things on my mind on the hills, as I have
now. England was chiefly notable for the fact that you were not there.
Ibid.
KF: Do you think the sign of a happy marriage is the
knowledge of when the other is ready to talk?
RA: I think it’s more the sign of friendship, to be
honest. Occasionally, married people are friends.
Kate Fansler, Reed Amhearst
No Word from Winifred
—Cross
I don’t believe any relationship can succeed that doesn’t
offer both partners solitude and independence as a matter of course.
Sweet Death, Kind Death (61)
—Cross (63)
“Oh, go along home with you! There’s a beautiful girl
waiting for you with dinner, and a few other things, I imagine. And don’t
look so shocked. I’ve heard of sex. Ask Alan.”
I was able to get out the door on the strength
of that astounding idea. I don’t know why the young always think they
invented it. Where did they think they came from?
Dorothy Martin
The Victim in Victoria Station (75)
—Jeanne M. Dams
There's a light in a woman's eyes that speaks louder than
words.
The Hound of the Baskervilles
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Evil indeed is the man who has not one woman to mourn him.
—Doyle
Woman’s heart and mind are insoluble puzzles to the male.
Sherlock Holmes
“The Illustrious Client”
—Doyle
How she got anyone to marry her—let alone an earl—beats
me. She had all the sex appeal of golf clubs.
Baroness “Jack” Troutbeck
Carnage on the Committee
—Ruth Dudley Edwards
Maybe you new men are immune to this, but in my day, someone
telling you you were God and could do anything went a long way.
Ralph Babcock
—Edwards
I shouldn’t have thought Henry could do the necessary.
However, there’s no doubt that sex is a department that is always full of
surprises. The most unlikely people are at it, at the most unlikely ages,
in the most unlikely condition….
Robert Amiss
Publish & Be Murdered
—Edwards
RW: I’ve always found him very pleasant and considerate.
IW: So are a lot of con men, aren’t they? I believe
they make excellent husbands.
Ruth Winter, Ingrid Winter
The Pretty Pink Shroud (25)
—E. X. Ferrars
MB: Those were the days of courtship. Everything he did was
nice.
PM: Go on.
MB: I don’t know how to describe it. You get starry-eyed and
every minute that you’re with a man is just like heaven. Then you marry him,
and in place of being happy you find that you’re terribly fed up with the whole
thing. The glamour vanishes, and you see the man as a very ordinary individual.
Mrs. Blevins; Perry Mason
The Case of the Grinning Gorilla (173)
—Erle Stanley Gardner
But no dispute now ensued. As with many happy married
couples, neither probably paid much attention to what the other said.
Death by Water
—Michael Innes
…certainly falling in love is irrational, and love itself is
impersonal—impersonal even though in no other human relationship is it so
certain that one particular individual is utterly indispensable and another
just as utterly out of court.
What Happened at Hazelwood?
—Innes
Lovers give themselves away. Even if they are sitting
across a room from each other.
The Tenth Life (61)
—R Lockridge
Humanity was frequently exasperating; particularly humanity
in love.
Death of a Tall Man
—Frances & Richard Lockridge
Darling. Is it all right if I love you very much?
Susan Heimrich
With One Stone
—F & R Lockridge
Isn’t he ever going to learn? Learn that if there
isn’t enough me to take care of myself, there isn’t enough me to matter—not
enough me to love, to be loved? That it takes two for this—not one and a
fraction; not one and something that breaks if you drop it?
Ibid.
He stooped, took her face between his hands, and kissed her
hard on the mouth. He felt her come to life beneath his lips. Then
he let her go.
“And don’t think I shall ask you to forgive
me,” he said. “…I’m your man and you know it….When I kissed you just then
you seemed to meet me like a flame. Could I have imagined it?”
“No.”
“It was as if you shouted with your whole body
that you loved me. How can I not be arrogant?”
“How can I not be shaken?”
Roderick Alleyn, Agatha Troy
Death in a White Tie
—Ngaio Marsh
It is a neo-Freudian myth that the best way to learn a
foreign language is in bed. Whatever the origin of human speech, it was not
sexual, for making love is one of the few social situations where words are
totally unnecessary.
A
Question of Time
—Helen
McCloy
He felt very talkative, as most older men do when a young
girl looks as delightfully listenable as Titania.
The Haunted Bookshop
—Christopher Morley
After a certain number of years I doubt if many men do
notice their wives’ appearance very often, unless someone else draws their
attention to it.
Tessa Crichton
Dead on Cue
—Anne Morice
She thought, I’m a fool, but Daniel hurt, in trouble,
touches my heart and always will. You couldn’t get over the tenderness you had
for someone you had loved deeply, even if the love itself was gone.
Compartment K
—Helen Reilly
A man who marries again doesn’t deserve to lose his first
wife.
A Guilty Thing Surprised
—Ruth Rendell
Wexford was a modest man with a humble idea of his own
attractions in so far as he ever thought about them. To his own wife he
seemed to be unfailingly attractive after 30 years of marriage, but this was
something to be thankful for and dismissed rather than speculated about.
Speaker of Mandarin
—Ruth Rendell
Dora was there to meet him on the platform at Kowbon
Station. She had missed her husband and guessed he had missed her but
they had been married, after all, for more than 30 years and so she was a
little surprised by the ardour of his embrace.
Ibid.
Bad enough to make mistakes, without going ahead and
marrying them.
Dennis Dennis
My Kingdom for a Hearse
—Craig Rice
Almost all
women, I have found, although not overconscious themselves of the charm and
attraction of their husbands, are of the conviction that these husbands exert a
dangerous fascination over other women, and that this charm, which does not
reveal itself in the home circle, is used abroad with occasionally disastrous
effects.
“Sight Unseen” in
The Confession and Sight Unseen
—Mary Roberts Rinehart
H: All my life I have been wandering in the dark—but
now I have found your
heart—and am satisfied.
P: And what do all the great words come to in the end,
but that?—I love you—I
am at rest with you—I have come
home.
Harriet and Peter Wimsey
Busman’s Honeymoon
—Dorothy L Sayers
HV: I suppose one oughtn’t to marry anybody, unless one’s
prepared to make him a full-time job.
MdV: I suppose not; though there are a few rare people, I
believe, who don’t look on themselves as jobs but as fellow-creatures.
Harriet Vane, Miss de Vine
Gaudy Night
—Dorothy L Sayers
You have had the luck to come up against a very unselfish
and very honest man. He has done what you asked him without caring what
it cost him and without shirking the issue.
Miss de Vine
Gaudy Night
—Sayers
But when you have come to a conclusion about all this, will
you remember that it was I who asked you to take a dispassionate view, and I
who told you that of all the devils let loose in the world there was no devil
like devoted love….I don’t mean passion. Passion is a good stupid brute
that will pull the plough six days a week if you give him the run of his heels
on Sundays. But love’s a nervous, over-mastering brute, if you can’t rein
him, it’s best to have no truck with him.
Lord Peter Wimsey to Harriet Vane
Ibid.
I do know that the worst sin—perhaps the only sin—passion
can commit is to be joyless. It must lie down with laughter or make its
bed in hell—there is no middle way. Don’t, for God’s sake, ever think you
owe me anything. If I can’t have the real thing, I can make do with
imitation. But I will not have surrenders or crucifixions….If you have
come to feel any kindness for me at all, tell me you would never make me that
offer again.
Peter
Ibid.
P: Harriet, you know that I love you: will you marry me?
H: Tell me one thing, Peter, will it make you desperately
unhappy if I say no?
P: Desperately?…My dear, I will not insult either you or
myself with a word like that. I can only tell you that if you will marry
me it will give me very great happiness.
Peter, Harriet
Ibid.
(On why he would want to marry Harriet)
Why? Oh well—I thought you’d be rather an attractive person
to marry. That’s all. I mean, I sort of took a fancy to you.
I can’t tell you why. There’s no rule about it, you know.
Lord Peter Wimsey
Strong Poison
—Sayers
H: …by the way, you’re bearing in mind, aren’t you, that
I’ve had a lover?
P: Oh, yes. So have I, if it comes to that. In
fact, several. It’s the sort of thing that might happen to anybody.
I can produce quite good testimonials. I’m told that I make love rather nicely—only
I’m at a disadvantage at the moment. One can’t be very convincing at the
other end of a table with a bloke looking in at the
door.
Harriet, Peter
Ibid.
Women do want romance in their lives, and there is so little
of it about.
The Documents in the Case
—Dorothy L. Sayers & Robert Eustace
Dearest, do you really want to be married to the sort of
unsatisfactory bloke I am? It is extraordinarily brave and dear of
you. You will have a devil of a time. I want to warn you now that
when I say I want you to keep your independence and exquisite detachment, I
don’t mean it. I shall try to mould you into a mirror of myself, fatally
and inevitably. When I say I am not jealous either of your work or your
friends, I am lying. When I promise to look at things from your point of
view, I am promising what I cannot perform. When I declare myself ready
to discuss everything fully and freely and have a situation mette, I am
pretending to be more honest than a man ever is or can be. I shall be
reticent, inconsistent, selfish, and jealous. I shall put my interests
before yours, and the slightest suggestion that I should put myself out to give
you peace and quietness to work in will wound my self-importance. I know
it. I shall pretend to give you your freedom, and make such an unholy
martyr of myself that you will take up your chains for the sake of a quiet
life. You will end by hating me, and leave me for some scamp of a fellow
who knows how to handle women. And you will be quite right from your
point of view. I have been trying to look honestly into the thing, and I
want to warn you. You think I am “different,” but I am not.
Munting
Ibid.
To keep a husband you have to let him be a little wild
sometimes.
Emily Bryce
Glass on the Stairs
—Margaret Scherf
Most of the joy of being in love with a pretty woman is the
envy we arouse in all our intimates.
Finbow
Death Under Sail
—C. P. Snow
…for almost anybody it is just the most difficult
thing in the world to realize that someone you love is not in love with
you. With the most honest of people, the feats of self-deception that can
be performed are quite amazing.
Finbow
—Snow
…Sam never got over loving Margarita. I don’t hold that to
his credit. I see no more virtue in keeping on loving a person who has proved
unworthy than I see in hating a person who has turned out to be blameless, or
in continuing to do any other unreasonable thing.
The Desert Moon Mystery
—Kay Cleaver Strahan
If there is anything that will make two people duller to all
other people than being engaged to each other, I am sure I don’t know what it
is.
—Strahan
Love, though, mercy knows, I know little enough about it,
can’t be measured with a pint cup like flour.
Mrs. Magin
—Strahan
Ever notice how it’s all the time the best-lookin’ an’ the
ugliest that cause the most trouble. Give me a medium good-looker any
day. They don’t go around confusin’ things.
Asey Mayo
Death Lights a Candle
—Phoebe Atwood Taylor
They stood still for a moment. There was at once too much
and too little to say, and none of it could be said within earshot of half the
village streaming home.
The Key
—Patricia Wentworth
If men knew how very foolish they appear when they allow a
silly young woman to twist them round her little finger, it would at any rate
preserve them from exposing themselves to ridicule in company.
Miss Doncaster
—Wentworth
Eliza, ejecting a queen wasp from a honey pot, remarked with
a rasp in her voice that, insects or men, it was all one when there was honey
about, they were bound to trap themselves no matter what came of it.
Through the Wall (59)
—Wentworth
That was a lot of fun, Bev! Happy Valentines!
ReplyDeleteI moved my blog to Wordpress so you won't see Peggy Ann's Post anymore it will be Peggy's Porch.
These are great, Bev! Thanks so much for the compilation. No wonder my favorite Valentines are mysteries!
ReplyDeleteWhat a great idea for a love post, and what a wonderful collection. After all, where better place than crime stories for advice on love and happy marriages....??!!
ReplyDelete