Ed McBain > Quotes

“Any new corpses today?"
"None yet."
"Pity. I’m getting so I miss my morning coffee and corpse.”
― Ed McBain, Cop Hater

“Sarcasm is a weapon of the intellectual,”
― Ed McBain, Cop Hater

“The body lay outside an abandoned, boarded-up theater. The theater had started as a first-run movie house, many years back when the neighborhood had still been fashionable. As the neighborhood began rotting, the theater began showing second-run films, and then old movies, and finally foreign-language films.”
― Ed McBain

“We got enough champagne here to start a France.”
― Ed McBain, 'Til Death

“The widow of Michael Reardon was a full‐breasted woman in her late thirties. She had dark hair and green eyes, and an Irish nose spattered with a clichéful of freckles. She had a face for merry‐go‐rounds and roller coaster rides, a face that could split in laughter and girlish glee when water was splashed on her at the seashore. She was a girl who could get drunk sniffing the vermouth cork before it was passed over a martini. She was a girl who went to church on Sundays, a girl who’d belonged to the Newman Club when she was younger, a girl who was a virgin two days after Mike”
― Ed McBain, Cop Hater

“Are you hungry?”
“A little,” I paused, “and thirsty.”
“Miss Collins will get you some dinner. And a glass of milk.”
“Milk?” I said. I tried to raise my eyebrows but even that hurt.
“Milk,” the doctor repeated.”
― Ed McBain, The Gutter and the Grave

“Drugs and stealing go together like bagels and lox.”
― Ed McBain, Lullaby

“It always rains on Mondays anyway. Monday is the bitchingest day in the week and should be struck completely from the calendar.”
― Ed McBain, The Gutter and the Grave

“Long before any genius producer began singing the blues on an imaginary hill in an unnamed city where a mix of a dozen or so cops came and went in what was known to script writers as “the usual squadroom boil,” Cop Hater set the tone and the pattern for a police series in which—so far as I was concerned—there were no restrictions on content or style.”
― Ed McBain, The Pusher

“There are all kinds of feathers. There are chicken feathers, and duck feathers, and quail feathers, and goose feathers, and flamingo feathers, and horse feathers, and even Leonard Feathers.”
― Ed McBain, The Pusher

“But The Preacher operated on the theory that if you told a big enough lie often enough, people would accept it as the truth.”
― Ed McBain, Kiss

“The feathers in the one pillow on the bed were duck down. The feather found, therefore, had not come from the pillow. It was found stuck to a smear of blood, so chances were it was left by the killer and not left by someone who’d been in the room previous to the killer. If the killer, therefore, had a pigeon feather stuck to his clothes, chances were he was a pigeon fancier. All the cops had to do was track down every pigeon fancier in the city. That job was for the birds.”
― Ed McBain, The Pusher

“little wrapped package,”
― Ed McBain, Eight Black Horses

“There is not much you can say to a man’s mother when the man is dead. There is not much you can say at all.”
― Ed McBain, Cop Hater

“Sex offenders were the least-respected convicts in any prison society; if a violator of Article 130 could have pretended that he was an ax murderer instead, or an arsonist, or a man who had filled a ditch with fourteen poisoned wives, he’d have preferred that to entering the prison as a sex offender.”
― Ed McBain, Blood Relatives

“It’s not an exclamation point. There are no interjections in mathematics.”
― Ed McBain, The Heckler

“She drops her femininity and turns female. The polish is gone, the mechanized competence; she becomes a little scatterbrained and a little cuddly; she crosses her legs recklessly and allows her lipstick to be kissed clear off her mouth, and she responds to the male hands on her body, and she turns soft and inviting and miraculously primitive. The night is a female time, and the city is nothing but a woman.”
― Ed McBain, The Empty Hours

“twice”
― Ed McBain, Three Blind Mice

“As a matter of fact, if either of the two men were Buckingham or Ovid or Byron, they might have respectively realized that “love is the salt of life,” and “the perpetual source of fears and anxieties,” and “a capricious power”—but they weren’t poets, they”
― Ed McBain, Eighty Million Eyes

“We can’t let a cop be killed because a cop is a symbol of law and order.”
― Ed McBain, Cop Hater

“where the theater is,”
― Ed McBain, Vespers

“three”
― Ed McBain, The Frumious Bandersnatch

“Matthew said, “Torrance is claiming his wife obtained an ex parte divorce that is not a binding one. According to him, they were still married at the time of her death. Under Florida law, and as a surviving spouse, he now intends to elect a statutory share of her estate. At least, that’s what Mrs. Donovan told me.” “You understand I can neither affirm nor deny that.” “Of course. You’re aware, though, that in Florida, the statutory share is thirty percent of the fair market value of the net estate.” “Yes, I’m aware of that,” D’Allessandro said. “The major part of Willa Torrance’s”
― Ed McBain, There was a Little Girl

“well”
― Ed McBain, There was a Little Girl

“lot of money over”
― Ed McBain, There was a Little Girl

“Il lui arrivait souvent de regarder les vieilles dames qui traversaient d'un pas traînant les rues de la ville là ou l'autobus menaçait et savait qu'à l'intérieur de ces corps ratatinés souriaient des visages resplendissants d'adolescentes.”
― Ed McBain, The Big Bad City

“them perhaps half an hour to finish all they have to do. Alan gets behind the wheel and honks the horn. In the stillness of the night, it sounds like”
― Ed McBain, The Big Bad City (UK)

“Some kid was shoving muggles. Marijuana, Dad. We call it—” “I know the names,” Byrnes said.”
― Ed McBain, The Pusher

“Well, I keep a few guns.” “How many?” “Six,” Bronckin said. “What?” “Yeah.” “Name them.” “The two .45s. Then there’s a Luger, and a Mauser, and I even got a Tokarev.” “What else?” “Oh, just a .22.” “All in your room?” “Yeah, it’s quite a collection.”
― Ed McBain, Cop Hater

“stood”
― Ed McBain, Cop Hater