[Kate Benedict]

There's a long tradition of titling books with phrases from poetry. In a narcississtic mood, I decided to imagine some book titles from my own recent work, along with their genre. It was fun; join in?
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This Sodden Arondissement (noir)
The Sanctum That You Promised Me (Harlequin romance)
Within Me Within You (marriage guidebook)
Scene of the Ax (mystery)
It Could Only Have Been Eartha (Earth Kitt bio)
Destination: Nusquam (sci fi)
They Wear A Single Face (horror)
No Waiting, No Escrow (make it rich in real estate)

[Maryann Corbett]

Kate, I've got a couple of those real estate manuals, too ("Showings" and "Old World Charm").

"Dissonance": A treatise on the physics of sound.
"Fist": A history of bare-knuckle boxing in the nineteenth century.

Or am I missing something and making it too easy?

[John Whitworth]

Slightly off-topic, but perhaps not really. Detective stories are often titles from well-known tags of poetry.

Some Buried Caesar (Rex Stout)
The Moving Toyshop (Edmund Crispin)
Hamlet, Revenge (Michael Innes) Well, not so well-known but what would you expect with Michael Innes?
The Lady in the Lake (Raymond Chandler) A deliberate misquotation of course
There Came Both Mist and Snow (Can't remember but Spherians surely will)
Gaudy Night (Dorothy L. Sayers)
Ten Little...whoops! (Agatha Christie)

I once wrote a detective story myself (unpublished and, I think, just as well) and called it Dishonoured Shroud. When I did so it occured to me thast that quatrain of Eliot would give us an almost endless stream of tiitles.

Someone Indistinct
At the Door Apart
The Nightingales are Singing
The Convent of the Sacred Heart
The Bloody Wood
When Agamemnon Cried Aloud
Liquid Siftings
Stain the Stiff

Well, perhaps that last one is a cheat but you see what I mean. Does that Tell us something about the Eliot method? I think it may. And I suspect Auden would yield similar results.

My favourite quotation title is not a detective story at all. Her Privates We is an autobiography of the author's time in the British Army. And the best quotation for a POEM title must be Sam Gwynn's Train For Ill.

[W.F. Lantry]

Originally Posted by John Whitworth

The Moving Toyshop (Edmund Crispin)
There Came Both Mist and Snow (Can't remember but Spherians surely will)

Another Michael Innes, would you believe? Haven't read it, but thanks for reminding me of Edmund Crispin. Haven't thought of him in a squirrel's age. I think his Frequent Hearses fits the bill as well...

Thanks,

Bill

[R. S. Gwynn]

Ah, don't forget Murder Most Foul.

Has there ever been a book titled Bacchus and His Pards? If not, there should be.

Just saw Blithe Spirit on Broadway, by the way, and am now reading Some Tame Gazelle.

[Gail White]

Originally Posted by R. S. Gwynn

Ah, don't forget Murder Most Foul.

Just saw Blithe Spirit on Broadway, by the way, and am now reading Some Tame Gazelle.

Ah, another Barbara Pym fan in the making!
I've read them all, but "Gazelle" is still my favorite.

(and don't forget her other title/quotation: "The Sweet Dove Died.")

[Gail White]

Further on this topic, I've always fancied calling a book "Little Nourishment" in tribute to Elinor Wylie:

Let no charitable hope
Confuse my mind with images
Of eagle or of antelope:
I am by nature none of these.

I was, being human, born alone.
I am, being woman, hard beset.
I live by squeezing from a stone
The little nourishment I get.

In masks outrageous and austere
The years go by in single file,
But none has merited my sneer,
And none has quite escaped my smile.

[Stephen Collington]

This reminds me of a favourite game. It's sometimes called "Deflation"--take the title of a famous book or movie or whatever, and bring it down a notch:

Collect Call of the Wild
Mansfield Park'n'fly
Rhinestone as Big as the Ritz

etc.

You get extra points if you can fuse two titles in one. Mix'n'Mashup.

Gone with the Wind in the Willows
Fathers and Sons and Lovers

and a personal favourite . . .

Memoirs of Hadrian Mole

*

[John Whitworth]

Hamlet the Dame
Hadrian the Seventh Seal (sequel to Tarka the Otter)

[Allen Tice]

never mind

- Allen