George Bellairs > Quotes

“Perrick must be in love and men in love are completely changed, for good or evil.”
― George Bellairs, The Cursing Stones Murder

“Since the investigation of the death of Deemster Quantrell, the parson had earned an unsought and rather spurious reputation for being the local Sherlock Holmes!”
― George Bellairs, The Cursing Stones Murder

“A cock was strutting among his hens and gave a throaty, growling cluck as the intruders arrived. To make himself the centre of attraction, this great bird was pretending to find scraps of food and continuously calling his proteges to come and get it. They ran to him eagerly each time, only to return empty, but hen-like repeated the caper indefinitely. One white hen monotonously leapt at a hanging cabbage, pecking-off bits with each jump, like a little clockwork toy.”
― George Bellairs, The Dead Shall be Raised & Murder of a Quack

“the return of the Manx Shearwater. She was coming in from scallop dredging between Contrary Head and Jurby Point and instead of taking it easy on account of the weather, she was tearing across Peel Bay for all she was worth. A south-westerly gale was blowing and the sea was rough, but in her anxiety to make harbour she drove her bow into the steep waves until it vanished completely. Then she rose high in the air as though preparing to take a long jump for port.”
― George Bellairs, The Cursing Stones Murder

“affair”
― George Bellairs, Death in Room Five

“he gingerly lowered himself on a horsehair couch, which felt like an unshaven chin and the hairs of which pierced even the stout cloth of his regulation trousers and tickled the skin beneath.”
― George Bellairs, Death Stops the Frolic

“UNCLE JONAS”
― George Bellairs, Outrage on Gallows Hill

“she does some knitting. Confused work which usually takes the form of presents which nobody can use. But it pleases her to give them and it keeps her interested and occupied. Recently she gave me a jumper in purple and white wool, miles too large for me and with odd sleeves. Had I worn it, it might have created a fashion.”
― George Bellairs, Death of a Shadow

“But behind all her visions of possible matrimony — and there had been a few — was the comfort of the photo on the mantelpiece. She had loved and lost him and, come what may, there was still consolation in that past romance. He had been a soldier billeted in Swarebridge in 1915. He met her at the Saturday evening concerts at the Sunday School. She had been worth looking at then. So he took her home and afterwards met her, took her for walks along the path by the Sware, and kissed her a time or two. Then off to another place and, unknown to Miss Sleaford, another girl. A few letters which she still kept somewhere safe among a welter of odds and ends and a newspaper cutting telling that he was missing. He turned up after the armistice, but not at Swarebridge. In the heart of Miss Sleaford was enshrined through twenty lonely years, a young man who, still alive and now gross and fat, keeps a little pub in the Walworth Road and beats up his wife every Saturday night.”
― George Bellairs, Death Stops the Frolic

“Patchett was later heard to remark that Singleton hadn’t the guts to murder a rice pudding, which was a shrewd, if obscure comment.”
― George Bellairs, Death Stops the Frolic

“the hum of the distant traffic, with the militant horns of the motorists blaring now and then at one another.”
― George Bellairs, Death in Room Five

“Laura Cruft was dressed in a green linen frock which outlined her rounded figure. She had about her an athletic sensual sinuosity,”
― George Bellairs, Outrage on Gallows Hill

“those in the body of the hall danced. There seemed to be thousands of them. Littlejohn had never seen anything like it. From his viewpoint it looked as if you couldn’t throw a penny between any pair. Shuffling languidly, many hardly moving, but just rolling and swaying, others with heads askew and buried deep in their shoulders and with hindquarters rhythmically rotating, this great amorphous mass looked like the contents of a drop of pond water viewed under a microscope. Twirling, wriggling, revolving or oozing dreamily. A shot from a René Clair camera, showing heads going round and round.”
― George Bellairs, He'd Rather Be Dead

“The porter didn’t know Littlejohn but sensed that he was of the police. He was Swiss and trained to tolerate the antics of the eccentric. When he saw the joker was an Englishman his curiosity left him.”
― George Bellairs, Death of a Shadow

“Mr. Sylvanus Groan, the County Coroner,”
― George Bellairs, Outrage on Gallows Hill

“protruding eyes”
― George Bellairs, Outrage on Gallows Hill

“A few large olive trees struggled for life near the roadside, their twisted roots seeming to explore the hard, caked soil in search of a little water.”
― George Bellairs, Death in High Provence

“made off as fast as his poor feet would take him and returned with a plate of tomato soup bearing in itself a curdy precipitate…”
― George Bellairs, Dead March for Penelope Blow

“a lecture. It should have been by Mrs. Topnott, of the neighbouring village of Ditchling Episcopi, on Some Jams I have Made,”
― George Bellairs, Outrage on Gallows Hill

“Enter a Gangster”
― George Bellairs, Death Stops the Frolic

“killed." "It's not that, parson. I'm not a Sherlock Holmes, an intellectual detective, who sits in an armchair and solves his cases.”
― George Bellairs, The Cursing Stones Murder

“The daylight revealed, too, a large Irish cargo-boat, which had crept in Peel for shelter in the dark. Tied up beside the crowd of soiled and weather-beaten fishing-vessels and coasters, she looked mawkish and out of her element, like a stately, self-conscious hen, mothering a lot of unruly ducklings.”
― George Bellairs, The Cursing Stones Murder

“The Duke of York, which had at one time been a coaching-house, had not long been acquired by a London company who had already started to make it abhorrent and to deprive it of character by extensive alterations.”
― George Bellairs, Dead March for Penelope Blow

“bulging eyes”
― George Bellairs, Outrage on Gallows Hill

“A small fair man with a little moustache smeared across his upper lip,”
― George Bellairs, Death in Room Five

“Glaisher was lanky and thin with a furrowed face and a tired manner. Only his black, sparkling eyes were animated. For the rest, he looked like a dissipated French savant of the last century. The cut of his clothes was even out-of-date. Perhaps it was living a semi-fossilised life in Melchester made him such a relic.”
― George Bellairs, Outrage on Gallows Hill

“Mr Lancelot Trotman looked like a very well-bred fish. Small head with pale blue cod’s eyes; a perfect sweep of chest and belly which seemed to curve right to his feet; and as he walked his legs moved from the knees only in a paddling motion, like swimming in air. The short fin-like arms, the white flapping hands and sensual lips which had a half-drinking expression permanently upon them, the straight nose. It was as if a magician had taken a large carp from a pond, blessed it, and sent it to Savile Row with orders to get dressed and become a man.”
― George Bellairs, Crime in Lepers' Hollow

“a number of other vehicles, full of top hats, black crepe, and male and female faces bearing fixed expressions of spurious grief,”
― George Bellairs, Dead March for Penelope Blow

“And there she was, mutton dressed up as lamb, tall and slim and pallid-looking through dieting to keep her figure, and her hair dyed and her face painted to make her look younger.”
― George Bellairs, Death in Room Five

“Fate, the monstrous scene-shifter, was setting the stage for the death of Uncle Fred, the elderly man.”
― George Bellairs, Corpse at the Carnival