Paul Hasbrouck

“...you know what English is? The result of the efforts of Norman men-at-arms to make dates with Saxon barmaids.”
― H. Beam Piper, Fuzzy Sapiens

“Certainly, de Grandin was not the first occult detective—Algernon Blackwood’s John Silence, Hodgson’s Thomas Carnacki, and Sax Rohmer’s Moris Klaw preceded him—nor was he the last, as Wellman’s John Thunstone, Margery Lawrence’s Miles Pennoyer, and Joseph Payne Brennan’s Lucius Leffing all either overlapped with the end of de Grandin’s run or followed him.”
― Seabury Quinn, The Horror on the Links

“In an extraordinarily bold move, Carr allows Fell in chapter seventeen [in, The Hollow Man by John Dickson Carr (1935)] to address the reader directly, giving a disquisition on the lockedroom mystery that has often been reprinted as an essay on the subject: ‘We’re in a detective story, and we don’t fool the reader by pretending we’re not . . . Let’s candidly glory in the noblest pursuit possible to characters in a book . . . When I say that a story about a hermetically sealed chamber is more interesting than anything else in detective fiction, that’s merely prejudice. I like my murders to be frequent, gory, and grotesque. I like some vividness of colour and imagination flashing out of my plot, since I cannot find a story enthralling solely on the grounds that it sounds as though it might really have happened.’ Fell proceeds to offer an analysis of different types of locked-room scenarios so impressively detailed that it has never been surpassed.”
― Martin Edwards, The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books

“Knowledge is power. The devil it is! One man can have a great deal of knowledge without its giving him the least power, while another possesses supreme authority but next to no knowledge.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms