I found the following sentence in one of our questions: Use of "having" in English,
The customer having left, the criminal takes out a pin from his purse and scrapes off hardened glue from the edges of the keys.
It gave me a grammar warning immediately. After thinking about it for a while, I concluded two points:
The phrase The customer having left looks odd as a participle phrase. It should be just Having left. But then again, if the part The customer were removed, we would have gotten another kind of error, and the meaning would have been changed.
It seem like The customer having left is a dangling participle phrase. The phrase itself and the main clause don't seem to cohere well enough. Some conjunction such as after should have been added, or the sentence should have been revised.
So I would like to ask: Is the phrase 'the customer having left' above good English?
NOTE: I personally don't think it is, otherwise I could write something funny such as this:
John walking into the woods, I followed him, we walking together for two hours, John walked, I walked, John having fallen down, I picked him up, we continuing walking, I like the woods, the woods smelling nice, John saying something, I didn't hear him, we continuing walking, John keeping walking, this was so much fun.