Catherine Aird > Quotes

“If you can't be a good example, then you'll just have to be a horrible warning.”
― Catherine Aird

“Though,' observed Sloan profoundly, 'where there's a will there's usually a relative.”
― Catherine Aird, Passing Strange

“He did his best to explain this to Inspector Sloan afterwards. 'A funny feeling, sir.' 'Yes?' Funny feelings were not encouraged at Berebury Police Station.”
― Catherine Aird, Parting Breath

“If there was one thing which Sloan had learned over the years it was that you should never underestimate the element of luck in detective work.”
― Catherine Aird, A Going Concern

“Although the last enemy might be death, in long and sad police experience, the first enemy could usually be found, Cain and Abel fashion, within the family circle.”
― Catherine Aird, Passing Strange

“Sloane wasn't interested. As a police officer he was concerned with crime, not punishment.”
― Catherine Aird, The Religious Body

“Death went well with bare stone and it was the little crowd of modern men who looked incongruous.”
― Catherine Aird, The Stately Home Murder

“You know, Eric, I could have sworn I heard a goat bleating while I was working in the slype yesterday evening.
I expect the Dean had separated it from the sheep, Eric said solemnly. Isn't that what clergy are for?”
― Catherine Aird, Amendment of Life: A Mystery

“That's the idea sir," he said heartily, "Smaller villains.”
― Catherine Aird, Parting Breath

“Not even the Superintendent could play about with gravity.”
― Catherine Aird, His Burial Too

“Neither task appealed to a man of his temperament. One required action and the other thought. Both were anathematical to Constable Mason. His working life had been centered around the skillful ‘referral to higher authority’ of anything involving any effort.”
― Catherine Aird, Harm's Way

“Gone out to look for a hair to split, I expect.”
― Catherine Aird, Slight Mourning

“The whole bang shooting match were there if you ask me—Hobbett, Cartwright, MacAuley, Ranby, Bullen, Parker, fifty nuns and now this woman.”
― Catherine Aird, The Religious Body

“WHO HAS HIS BIRTH DAY, HAS HIS BURIALL TOO; AS WE INTO THE WORLD COME, OUT WE GOE.”
― Catherine Aird, His Burial Too

“What condition?’

‘He's got a bad heart as well as the leg injuries he got in the war which put him in his wheelchair.’

‘Ah.’ If there was one thing which every policeman knew it was that families were bad for every medical condition, but especially for heart ones. Legs were less important.”
― Catherine Aird, Stiff News

“We know hardly anything about anything.”
― Catherine Aird, Slight Mourning

“Really,’ she exclaimed, stumping into the kitchen and plonking herself down on the nearest chair, ‘this place is getting worse than Nightmare Abbey. Whatever next?’

A grammatical purist might have wondered why Miss Bentley hadn't said ‘whoever’ rather than ‘whatever’ but the former headteacher belonged to the Superintendent Leeyes school of taking bad news as a personal affront rather than as an occasion for sympathy for the victim.”
― Catherine Aird, Stiff News

“I never touch nothing with writing on it.”
― Catherine Aird, His Burial Too

“Since the coat has absolutely no intrinsic value, Inspector, I must regretfully conclude that the choice lies between an outbreak of gesture politics or the damage being the work of a mind deranged.’

Sloan tried another tack. ‘And which would you think the more likely?’

‘Malice or madness? I’ve no idea at all, Inspector.”
― Catherine Aird, Stiff News

“Heads are useful ... And should be kept.”
― Catherine Aird, Harm's Way

“In detective work you thought in much the same way as you would pick your way across a swamp, testing for firm ground each time you took a step forward.”
― Catherine Aird, His Burial Too

“Your amateur’s not cluttered up with academic prejudice, Miss Holroyd,” Richard Tindall was fond of saying. “He hasn’t read every single thing that has ever been written on the subject. The amateur sees a problem in its simplest form and it doesn’t occur to him that it’s insoluble.”
― Catherine Aird, His Burial Too

“Dead and never called her mother, in fact,” misquoted Sloan, who had once seen the Berebury Amateur Dramatic Society play East Lynne, and never forgotten the searing experience.”
― Catherine Aird, Henrietta Who?

“about them always.”
― Catherine Aird, Henrietta Who?

“Pax Intrantibus, Salus Exeuntibus”
― Catherine Aird, The Calleshire Chronicles Volume One: The Religious Body, Henrietta Who?, and The Stately Home Murder

“Jezebel didn't drive up in a chariot.”
― Catherine Aird, Passing Strange