Murder Must Advertise (Lord Peter Wimsey, #10)

by Dorothy L. Sayers

“You don’t need an argument for buying butter. It’s a natural, human instinct.”

You’ll soon find that the biggest obstacle to good advertising is the client.

‘Mr. Garrett,’ I said, ‘if you like to give up your lunch-time every day to trying to find something that everybody will enjoy, you’re welcome to do it.’ ‘Oh, no,’ he said, ‘I’m not the office-boy.’ ‘And who do you think I am,’ I said, ‘the errand-girl?’ So he told me not to lose my temper. It’s all very well, but you get very tired of it,

“Ah!” said Bredon, “how deceptive appearances can be! But it is evident, dear lady, that you do not do your shopping in the true West End. You belong to the section of society that pays for what it buys. I revere, but do not imitate you.

“Tell me, timeless houri,” demanded Mr. Bredon, “what was wrong with my lamented predecessor? Why did Miss Meteyard hate him and why does Ingleby praise him with faint damns?”

"Praise him with faint damns" is great--I can't believe I've never come across it before.

Did Mr. Pym know that Dean was a Bright Young Thing?”

It was a trip re-reading Evelyn Waugh after this. Somehow I don't see him getting along with Sayers.

“How should anything be sacred to an advertiser?” demanded Ingleby, helping himself to four lumps of sugar.

“They all think advertisements write themselves. When I tell people I’m in advertising, they always ask whether I design posters—they never think about the copy.”

She now patronized her wealthy brother with all the superiority which the worker feels over the man who merely possesses money.

“Your narrative style,” said Parker, “though racy, is a little elliptical. Could you not begin at the beginning and go on until you come to the end, and then, if you are able to, stop?”

“Of course, there is some truth in advertising. There’s yeast in bread, but you can’t make bread with yeast alone.

Now, falling down a staircase isn’t like falling off a roof—you do it in instalments, and have time to think about it.

He writes copy about face-cream and corsets, is the son of a provincial draper, was educated at a grammar school and wears, I deeply regret to say, a double-breasted waistcoat.

Whatever you’re doing, stop it and do something else! Whatever you’re buying, pause and buy something different! Be hectored into health and prosperity! Never let up! Never go to sleep! Never be satisfied. If once you are satisfied, all our wheels will run down. Keep going—and if you can’t, try Nutrax for Nerves!

“Wild ’orses,” declared Ginger, finally and completely losing his grasp of the aitches with which a careful nation had endowed him at the expense of the tax-payer, “wild ’orses wouldn’t get a word out o’ me when I’ve give me word to ’old me tongue.”

I’d do anything to get away from Tod. But he knows too much. And besides, he’s got the stuff. Lots of people have tried to chuck Tod, but they always go back again—on Fridays and Saturdays.”

In his search for Darling Special Pencils he had been brought face to face with the practical communism of office life.

Mr. Tallboy was really aghast. He was stricken with shame, and, like many shame-stricken people, took refuge in an outburst of rage against the nearest person handy.

He had never realized the enormous commercial importance of the comparatively poor. Not on the wealthy, who buy only what they want when they want it, was the vast superstructure of industry founded and built up, but on those who, aching for a luxury beyond their reach and for a leisure for ever denied them, could be bullied or wheedled into spending their few hardly won shillings on whatever might give them, if only for a moment, a leisured and luxurious illusion.

Brawls and revolver-shots, with loud sobs and maudlin remorse, are the signs and tokens of fatal passion among leaders of the bright life.

One must be fashionable, though one would not, of course, be vulgarly immodest. Helen considered that she was showing the exact number of vertebrae that the occasion demanded.

My brother, being an English gentleman, possesses a library in all his houses, though he never opens a book. This is called fidelity to ancient tradition.

It was only when he got to the turning into Great Queen Street that he became aware of something lacking in an otherwise satisfactory universe.

Hector Puncheon was a young man with a hearty and healthy digestion. He had heard, of course, of sodium bicarb, and its virtues, but only as a wealthy man hears of hire-purchase.

“He was the kind of man who never has his own cigarettes, and never happens to be there, if he can help it, when it’s his turn to stand the drinks. And he’d pick your brains every time.”

Everybody suspects an eager desire to curry favour, but rudeness, for some reason, is always accepted as a guarantee of good faith.

“It isn’t the savagery. It’s the fact that there’s no animosity behind it. You are all like that.”

“Willis has put his finger on the real offensiveness of the educated Englishman—that he will not even trouble to be angry.”

No doubt it was because agreement on any point was so rare in a quarrelsome world, that the fantastical announcements of advertisers asserted it so strongly and so absurdly.