Dead March for Penelope Blow Quotes

“Broome puffed his pipe and brushed his moustache with his forefinger. It was difficult to know which part of his behaviour was a pose and which genuine. He was like a character out of Kipling.”
― George Bellairs, Dead March for Penelope Blow

“But I thought… It said in the papers…’ ‘You don’t want to believe all you read in the papers, Mrs Buckley.’ Mrs Buckley wished she didn’t believe it all! All these spies and Communists and murderers got on her nerves.”
― George Bellairs, Dead March for Penelope Blow

“I made them comfortable and was always glad to accommodate them in my ’umble home.’ The fire was scorching, the air stuffy and Mrs Buckley appalling. Cromwell wanted to get it over and be off. One almost expected the street door to bang, footsteps to sound along the passage, and Uriah Heep to fling open the door, kiss Mrs Buckley and say their ’ome was very ’umble…”
― George Bellairs, Dead March for Penelope Blow

“Jacques was not ostentatious in his religion. He said grace over the tea, but his speech was free from evangelical fuss.”
― George Bellairs, Dead March for Penelope Blow

“During a lull, Paston introduced Littlejohn. Mrs Hempseed said she was pleased to meet him. The name of Scotland Yard seemed to strike no admiration, awe or terror in her heart.”
― George Bellairs, Dead March for Penelope Blow

“Mrs Minshull began to cry. Her whole frame grew convulsed, for she was tightly corseted, and her sobs threatened to explode the tight envelope of black silk in which she was laced.”
― George Bellairs, Dead March for Penelope Blow

“made off as fast as his poor feet would take him and returned with a plate of tomato soup bearing in itself a curdy precipitate…”
― George Bellairs, Dead March for Penelope Blow

“The Duke of York, which had at one time been a coaching-house, had not long been acquired by a London company who had already started to make it abhorrent and to deprive it of character by extensive alterations.”
― George Bellairs, Dead March for Penelope Blow

“a number of other vehicles, full of top hats, black crepe, and male and female faces bearing fixed expressions of spurious grief,”
― George Bellairs, Dead March for Penelope Blow

“generally believed that she’d married him for his money. During her pregnancy, her mother had read Poe’s ‘The Raven’ and no other name would do for her offspring than Lenore.”
― George Bellairs, Dead March for Penelope Blow

“Harold Blow slipped some notes in Mrs Buckley’s talon”
― George Bellairs, Dead March for Penelope Blow

“The bobby’s eyes goggled at the complicated instructions and he wondered how one so guileless looking could concoct such a cunning scheme.”
― George Bellairs, Dead March for Penelope Blow