Nero Wolfe: Prisoner's Base and Triple Jeopardy

[cimorene]

• The way she pronounced words it wasn't exactly baby talk, but it gave you the feeling that in four seconds it would be.


• a voice that could have used more vinegar and less oil


• Lawyers are incapable of taking a joke about getting disbarred because it costs them so much time and money to get barred.


• "What's that noise you're making?"
  
  "It's something special," I told him, "and it takes a lot of practice. Don't try it offhand. It's a derisive chortle."


• I had been wrong about him Tuesday when I figured that he had always been fifty years old and always would be. He had already put on at least five years, and he had shrunk. Instead of tagging him a neat little squirt I would now call him a magnified beetle.


• "You know," I told Purley, "eccentrics are such interesting people."
  
  "Not to me," he objected. "Every goddam murderer I've ever seen was an eccentric."

—Rex Stout, Prisoner's Base
This was one of my favorites so far.

• [T]he judicious thing to do was wait and see, but there was no point in being judicious about something I didn't like, so I had already checked it off as a dud.


• There are not many murderers so vicious and inhuman that I would enjoy seeing them caught by Rowcliff.


• "It's bedtime. This morass of fatuity has given me indigestion. Good night."


• "Good-by, you double-breasted nitwit."

—Rex Stout, "The Squirt and the Monkey", in Triple Jeopardy
This story and "The Cop Killer", #2 in Triple Jeopardy, were also favorites.