Detective Fiction Quotes

“His mouth went dry and for a split second he had a metallic taste on the sides of his tongue. He stood, turned, and gulped. A vision had appeared from somewhere. Was she real? She was tall, with long, glossy light-gold hair surrounding a perfectly shaped face. The front of her silk white robe was open down to a delightful cleavage where a long silver cross hung. As she walked slowly past Alec to sit at the desk, the robe parted for a fleeting glimpse of her leg. A scent of lily of the valley meandered over him. A hand with long graceful fingers indicated for him to sit again in his chair. She was real!
She was, without doubt, the most beautiful woman Alec had ever seen.”
― Hugo Woolley, The Wasp Trap

“My friend and business partner, Gerald Peyton was 12 minutes late to the funeral. I’d reminded him it started at 2 p.m. “Yeah, yeah, Frank,” he said. “I’ll be there. Just be sure you make it.” Well, here I sat on my thumbs, and he was the no-show. He stopped at a bar and got sloshed, I thought.”
― Ed Lynskey, Death Car

“A check girl in peach-bloom Chinese pajamas came over to take my hat and disapprove of my clothes. She had eyes like strange sins.”
― Raymond Chandler, The High Window

“Gerald and Chet left town for the Peyton family reunion held this August below Tappahannock on the Northern Neck. Gerald invited me to go along, but I thanked my best friend and business partner. Shutting down things was bad for our bottom line. So, I stayed put and minded the office.”
― Ed Lynskey, Bent Halo

“Al Hickey: It's not about anything.
Frank Boggs: Yeah, it's about four hundred grand”
― Phillip Rock, Hickey & Boggs

“In the detective story, as in its mirror image, the Quest for the Grail, maps (the ritual of space) and timetables (the ritual of time) are desirable. Nature should reflect its human inhabitants, i.e., it should be the Great Good Place; for the more Eden-like it is, the greater the contradiction of murder. The country is preferable to the town, a well-to-do neighborhood (but not too well-to-do-or there will be a suspicion of ill-gotten gains) better than a slum. The corpse must shock not only because it is a corpse but also because, even for a corpse, it is shockingly out of place, as when a dog makes a mess on a drawing room carpet."

(The guilty vicarage: Notes on the detective story, by an addict, Harper's Magazine, May 1948)”
― W.H. Auden

“Al Hickey: [following the final shootout] Nobody came... nobody cares. It's still not about anything.
Frank Boggs: Yeah, you told me.”
― Phillip Rock, Hickey & Boggs

“Do you read crime fiction?”

“I dote on it. It’s such a relief to escape from one’s work into an entirely different atmosphere.”

“It’s not as bad as that,” Nigel protested.

“Perhaps not quite as bad as that. Any faithful account of police investigations, in even the most spectacular homicide case, would be abysmally dull. I should have thought you’d seen enough of the game to realise that. The files are a plethora of drab details, most of them entirely irrelevant. Your crime novelist gets over all that by writing grandly about routine work and then selecting the essentials. Quite rightly. He’d be the world’s worst bore if he did otherwise.”
― Ngaio Marsh, The Nursing Home Murder

“It’s not like the movies. There are rarely gunshots or explosions, bad guys hunting you down. You follow a lead to where it takes you. Most times it takes you to a dead end and you have to return to the beginning and follow another. Usually, you have to follow dozens of leads before you get anywhere. But, sometimes, you get lucky, and every door you open leads you to another until, finally, you stumble upon the truth. It’s not about justice, you see, or money—God knows it’s not about money. It’s about bringing the truth to light. It’s not glamorous, but it makes the world a little more truthful a place. That’s enough for me.”
― Philip Elliott, Porno Valley

“You're a private detective.”
"That's right.”
“What do you detect?”
“Right now? Subtle condescension.”
― Dann McDorman, West Heart Kill

“The Moonstone is the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels. But it is something more important than that; it is the best of all the novels written by that man who among the novelists of the nineteenth century was in every way the most closely associated with Charles Dickens. You cannot appreciate Collins without taking Dickens into account; and the work of Dickens after 1850 would not be what it is but for the reciprocal influence of Collins.”
― Eliot, T.S.

“Frank, have you seen today’s obits?” Gerald asked.
“Never look at them,” I replied. “I only read the comics, sports, and horoscopes.”
“Can’t you see I’m being serious?”
“Who bit the dust, then?”
― Ed Lynskey, Iceman

“If the lady loves her husband, she does not love your Majesty.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Collection

“The idea of happiness pitching up in my life like that all of a sudden it terrified me”
― Hisashi Kashiwai, The Kamogawa Food Detectives

“Nick wasn’t used to dealing with rich powerful men.  There weren’t many in Santa Ana.  There were some.  Every town had them.  He’d just never had to deal with them.  He didn’t like dealing with this one.  He’d had power in money.  Evidenced in the will it took build some sort of empire and have a house like this.  Nick was a barely graduated high school cop that was really just a cop so that he could surf and drink on his days off.”
― Matt Orlando, Westgate: A Nick Marino Mystery

“The Borges fascinated by gangsters and hoodlums is hardly read in the States. Beyond, perhaps, “Death and the Compass,” Borges’s obsession with outlaws (from Billy the Kid to New York hoodlums) tends to be overlooked. It is also vastly ignored that this is his first link to the United States—it is through crooks and murderers that he
initially addresses the North American tradition. And it is thanks to these lowlifes that we get detectives, and it is thanks to them that we arrive at the art of suspicion that makes stories like “The Lottery in Babylon” possible. It is thanks to these criminals that Borges arrives at the semiotic anxiety that leads to the conception of the world as a text. These thugs and crooks are, then, in a way the humble source of some of the lofty metaphysical speculations
that American readers seem to love most in Borges.”
― Hernán Díaz, Borges, Between History and Eternity

“I looked at him anew, with an understanding I never had before and with awe for the magnitude of such a mind. In a flash I understood the cocaine, his moods, and his genius." Remarkable Power of Stimulus, due out Nov. 2020.”
― Gretchen Altabef, Sherlock Holmes These Scattered Houses

“I feel death and pain like a tickling pleasure caressing my cheek with a loving, outstretched finger. The sane are troubled by this. The insane thrive on its liberation.”
― Jack De'Lacy, A String of Eagles

“The arrows in the glasses disappeared. I stopped on the embankment. My eyes were filled with tears. I wiped my tears with a white handkerchief and threw it into the Rhine. The handkerchief was carried away as was my last hope for peace . . .”
― Mariia Manko, Through the Magic Sunglasses

“Abaya?!'
Sayid was so surprised, and it seemed to me that I had said too much. Probably, it was the astonishment of a Muslim who could not imagine a Christian woman wearing abaya.
'Sayid, do you believe me?”
― Mariia Manko, Through the Magic Sunglasses

“Although most of my own work has been as a novelist, I have greatly enjoyed the challenge of the short story. Much has to be achieved with limited means. There is not spacefor long and detailed descriptions of place, but the setting must still come alivefor the reader. Characterisation is as important as in the novel, but the essentialsof a personality must be established with an economy of words. The plot must be strongbut not too complex, and the denouement, to which every sentence of the narrative should inexorably lead, must surprise the reader but not leave him feeling cheated. All should command the most ingenious element of the short story: the shock of surprise. The good short story is accordingly difficult to write well, but in this busy ageit can provide one of the most satisfactory reading experiences.”
― P.D. James, The Mistletoe Murder And Other Stories

“Why did I throw in with him? I suppose we Irish had a mule-headed loyalty baked into our DNA. I could rely on one bedrock truth. Gerald had my back, no matter how lopsided the odds turned. No truer measure of friendship existed to my way of thinking.”
― Ed Lynskey, Death Car

“West, you scare me how you think like a perp,
were you a troubled kid growing up?”

“No, I just read a lot of the “Hardy Boy’s”
― Doris Nickles, Smith and Weston: Crime Case Tales

“Headstones, they aren’t for the dead, they’re for the living.”
― S.K. Waters, The Dead Won't Tell

“HE FELL DOWN HARD—stone-cold dead, next to my feet. It didn’t take much—just a pull of the trigger. The way I figured; a bullet always had its way of settling things. It asked no questions. Just did what it was told. And I hadn’t planned on resolving my disagreement with the Thin Man that way. But he left me no choice. He pulled his Luger, deciding that one of his .28s was the only way to resolve the issue. Trouble was, he missed. But a .22 from my Colt didn’t.”
― Oliver Dean Spencer, The Case of the Runaway Orangutan

“The intentions are not born, they are seeds planted by mentors during one's youth, and it is watered by them periodically until it sprouts into a hideous flower, and only learns to grow until someone rips the root from the mind.” (psychologist)
“Are you saying he watched his parents eat people?”
“No, habits are usually not directly nurtured from the source. They are created by the culprit as a way to cope with the level of absence in their hearts. They need to feel something, whether it be guilt or exhilaration. Though identifying a passion has trials, it’s common for criminals to experiment before they stick with a system of how to commit the crime.”
{The Latent Identities Of Darwin}”
― FinPoet

“This piece of literature, in particular, seems to have greater a moral purpose and tendency to deviate from the customary concept of art. It’s an odd style, would appear that this nameless author is trying to revolutionize voice.”
{The Latent Identities Of Darwin}”
― FinPoet

“What mystery novels need are – some might call me old-fashioned – a great detective, a mansion, a shady cast of residents, bloody murders, impossible crimes and never-before-seen tricks played by the murderer. Call it my castle in the sky, but I’m happy as long as I can enjoy such a world. But always in an intellectual manner.”
― Yukito Ayatsuji, The Decagon House Murders

“The look she gave under her eyelashes to Lady Valentina was indeed familial. In my line of work, I'd seen it before; it usually ends with someone dying under mysterious circumstances, along with a lost will, and the police involved.”
― Byrd Nash, Ghost Talker

“My Papa thinks I should take a break from detecting for a while.”
― Kitty Felde, State of the Union