Henry Kane > Quotes

“Oh ho, the private eyeball! Poor, prosaic, wretched eyeball. Alas, alack, woe and whoa! Harder and faster they chain him to the stone of stereotype—more and more he cannot earn his daily bread without conforming to the curious standards so stringently set out for him. Once upon a time he had to talk from out of the side of stiff-lipped mouth in accents clipped and surly, and there was the bleak but sheer necessity of constant sexual acrobatics with each and every lady who entered within earshot of the case, no matter how casually. And if by chance the case were not a “caper,” it was no damned case at all. There was the day he had to punch all people in the belly with the natural follow-through of one perfect, accurate, and final punch to the chin (for some reason called the button, as you may recall), but that was before the advent of judo. After judo (after World War II, that is), our hero merely had to straighten his palm and smite the nape of his vis-à-vis, who would immediately fall prone or supine but obligingly comatose.”
― Henry Kane, Death of a Flack

“Please go on,” I said in the sympathetic, gruff-hearty tones of an inspector at Scotland Yard—all I needed was long underwear, a tweed suit, a walrus mustache, a British accent, a right-hand drive, socialized medicine, and a disarming manner.”
― Henry Kane, Death of a Flack