Detective Novels Quotes

“I was so high, I needed a stepladder to scratch my own ass.”
― Kinky Friedman

“What was Dr. Mera's motive for murder? I don't need to tell that to a writer of detective novels such as yourself. You know well enough yourself that even without a motive, a murderer lives to kill.”
― Rampo Edogawa

“He began as a minor imitator of Fitzgerald, wrote a novel in the late twenties which won a prize, became dissatisfied with his work, stopped writing for a period of years. When he came back it was to BLACK MASK and the other detective magazines with a curious and terrible fiction which had never been seen before in the genre markets; Hart Crane and certainly Hemingway were writing of people on the edge of their emotions and their possibility but the genre mystery markets were filled with characters whose pain was circumstantial, whose resolution was through action; Woolrich's gallery was of those so damaged that their lives could only be seen as vast anticlimax to central and terrible events which had occurred long before the incidents of the story. Hammett and his great disciple, Chandler, had verged toward this more than a little, there is no minimizing the depth of their contribution to the mystery and to literature but Hammett and Chandler were still working within the devices of their category: detectives confronted problems and solved (or more commonly failed to solve) them, evil was generalized but had at least specific manifestations: Woolrich went far out on the edge. His characters killed, were killed, witnessed murder, attempted to solve it but the events were peripheral to the central circumstances. What I am trying to say, perhaps, is that Hammett and Chandler wrote of death but the novels and short stories of Woolrich *were* death. In all of its delicacy and grace, its fragile beauty as well as its finality.

Most of his plots made no objective sense. Woolrich was writing at the cutting edge of his time. Twenty years later his vision would attract a Truffaut whose own influences had been the philosophy of Sartre, the French nouvelle vague, the central conception that nothing really mattered. At all. But the suffering. Ah, that mattered; that mattered quite a bit.”
― Barry N. Malzberg, The Fantastic Stories of Cornell Woolrich

“I don't take much stock of detectives in novels - chaps that do things and never let you see how they do them. That's just inspiration: not business.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Complete Sherlock Holmes: Volume II

“Look here,' said Nigel suddenly, 'let's pretend it's a detective novel. Where would we be by this time? About halfway through, I should think. Well, who's your pick'

'I am invariably gulled by detective novels. No herring so red but I raise my voice and give chase.'

'Don't be ridiculous.' said Nigel.

'Fact. You see in real detection herrings are so often out of season.'

'Well, never mind, who's your pick?'

'It depends on the author. If it's Agatha Christie, Miss Wade's occulted guilt drips from every page. Dorothy Sayers's Lord Peter would plump for Pringle, I fancy. Inspector French would go for Ogden. Of course, Ogden, on the face of it, is the first suspect.”
― Ngaio Marsh, Death in Ecstasy

“Humanity thrown together in the equivalent of a Petri dish under a microscope bred malignant organisms as often as benign.”
― B.V. Lawson, Played to Death

“My feet crunched over dry hickory leaves. Wood rangers had stapled up Smokey Bear (“Only You Can Prevent Forest Fires!”) signs along the state roads. One cigarette butt flicked out a passing car window and there’d be real hell to pay.”
― ed lynskey, The Blue Cheer

“It was midnight when I parked my car under Union Square. A wet wind blew across the almost deserted square, blowing fogged breath from the sea on the dark pavements. Flashing neons on all four sides repudiated the night.”
― Ross MacDonald, The Way Some People Die

“She was wearing a long, tight black dress that pushed her fun parts up like a vanilla soufflé, and it had a slit on the side high enough to let her thigh peek through to make a few promises it didn’t intend to keep. Below all that, on her two tiny feet, she had a pair of black heels so high the person who made them must’ve needed building permits, and the way she moved in all of it would make a jungle cat jealous.”
― Matt Abraham, Dane Curse

“We all have something special in us, it's a matter of finding it, and knowing what to do with it.”
― Robert Magarian, You'll Never See Me Again: A Crime to Remember