In the “random but wonderful” category, a quote from one of the Pink Carnation books was featured in last week’s Forbes Magazine!

I am so thrilled to be hanging out there with Agatha Christie and Dom Perignon. (Especially Dom Perignon! Pass the bubbly, please….)

The quote in question is from The Garden Intrigue, Augustus Whittlesby in spy mode, rather than poet mode.

Here’s the full passage:

Augustus had no proof that either Emma Delagardie or her cousin, the one with the strange name, had anything to do with Bonaparte’s mysterious device, but the coincidences were piling up, too many for comfort. It had seemed innocuous enough that Bonaparte intended to test his device during the visit of the American envoy. The presence of the Americans might be intended only as a distraction a smokescreen. One had the impression that they were brash and not terribly bright, thus making them perfect fodder for the role of unwitting decoy.

Likewise, it would ordinarily mean little that the American envoy’s nephew had a diagram of some sort of mechanical whatnot in his waistcoat pocket. It might be nothing more than a sketch for a new patent stove or a design for an improved water closet, Yankee ingenuity once again at work. They were a strange and mercantile people, these Americans. One never knew what they might come up with next.

Fun fact: the phrase “a strange and mercantile people” was a deliberate play on the title of Paul Langford’s classic social history of Georgian England: A Polite and Commercial People. It seemed only right to twist the phrase a bit for England’s ingenious and indefatigable American cousins….