Unnatural Causes

There are few couples as unhappy as those who are too proud to admit their unhappiness.

What about his style?" asked Dalgliesh who was beginning to think that his reading had been unnecessarily restricted. "Turgid but grammatical. And, in these days, when every illiterate debutante thinks she is a novelist, who am I to quarrel with that? Written with Fowler on his left hand and Roget on his right. Stale, flat and, alas, rapidly becoming unprofitable..." "What was he like as a person?" asked Dalgliesh. "Oh, difficult. Very difficult, poor fellow! I thought you knew him? A precise, self-opinionated, nervous little man perpetually fretting about his sales, his publicity or his book jackets. He overvalued his own talent and undervalued everyone else's, which didn't exactly make for popularity." "A typical writer, in fact?" suggested Dalgliesh mischievously.

I have enough trouble living with my own neurosis without coping with other people’s.

[Soho] is all things to all men, catering comprehensively for those needs which money can buy. You see it as you wish. An agreeable place to dine; a cosmopolitan village tucked away behind Piccadilly with its own mysterious village life, one of the best shopping centres for food in London, the nastiest and most sordid nursery of crime in Europe. Even the travel journalists, obsessed by its ambiguities, can't make up their minds.

(A murderer about their victim:) "He was an expert in vicarious death. I should like to have been there to see how he enjoyed the real thing.

were. It was as pointlessly presumptuous to try to change them as it was impertinent to pity them.

It was easy to understand how the local legends had grown that sometimes, on an autumn night, once could hear the muffled beat of horses' hoofs as smugglers brought their kegs and bales from Sizewell Gap to hide them in the marshes or carry them inland across the desolate Westleton heathlands. Easy, too, on such a night to hear from the sea the faint bells of long-drowned churches, St. Leonard's, St. John's, St. Peter's and All Saints clanging their dirges for the souls of dead men. And now there might be new legends to keep the countryman indoors on the autumn nights. The October legends. One of a naked woman, pale under the moon, walking through the waves to her death: one of a dead and handless man drifting out on the tide.

His room was still and very quiet, insulated by sound building and oak boards from the jabber of the dissenting voices below. He unlatched the window in the seaward wall and forced it open with both hands against the blast of the gale. the wind rushed into the room swirling the bed cover into folds, sweeping the papers from his desk and rustling the pages of his bedside Jane Austen like a giant hand. It took his breath away so that he leaned gasping against the window ledge, welcoming the sting of spray on his face and tasting the salt drying on his lips. When he closed the window the silence seemed absolute. The thundering surf receded and faded like the far-away moaning on another shore.

what did that matter? Despite what he had said to his aunt

Good. I do dislike discussing wine longer than I need.