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The Courts are the great bulwark against tyranny: and tyranny need not always take the shape of a king, a dictator, a general, or a nobleman: it may easily be disguised as a democratic assembly.

A speech which is witty we are inclined to dismiss as so much 'froth', forgetting that froth is the best sign that there is good beer below.

although the Courts of Justice are in principle open to all, the Highest Court ofJustice is not; and the majority of the citizens pass to their graves without ever beholding one of the most quaint and fascinating spectacles in London—the House of Lords sitting in judicature

It seemed not very long ago a monstrous thing that a man should bring a swiftly moving machine upon the highway—a machine that roared like a dragon at those who stood in its path, a machine that claimed a superior status to the walking citizen by virtue simply of its speed and strength. For this looked like the discredited doctrine that Might is Right. Yet this once monstrous thing is now a normal part of our lives.

The conduct of the accused was admittedly unusual; but novelty of behaviour is not necessarily a crime, though it may be evidence of imbecility.

And so, through the evasions of judges, the indolence of the Legislature, and the ignorance of the people, what began as an historical accident has gradually acquired the status of a moral principle. The student of the laws of England may rub his eyes in pained astonishment, but it is not the first time that such a thing has happened, and I do not suppose that it will be the last.

Sex, sports and writing are the three fields where it is considered somehow a fall from grace to accept money for doing what you’re good at.

The Azores are never, ever going to be mistaken for Club Med. The weather, probably the leading edge of my friend the storm, was overcast and clammy. The landscape was vertical and dour, darkly jagged, unfit for human occupancy, rather like a Bronte novel without the characters. If there were a Michelin guide to the place, it would consist of one word: Don’t.

The courage and daring, the ingenuity and imagination, the skill and talent demonstrated in these escapes, if used in the interests of society rather than directed against society, would undoubtedly make such men as these among society’s most valuable citizens. But the challenge is given these men, and they accept that challenge. They are not challenged to use their talents to benefit society, but to outwit society.

Most escapees seem to use up all their ingenuity in the process of getting out, and none at all in the job of staying out. They have fantastic courage and daring in the planning and execution of one swiftly completed job, be it a murder or a bank robbery or a prison break, but seem totally incapable of giving the same thought and interest to the day-to-day job of living successfully within society.

Screenplays are very confined, limited to the surface of things, limited in a thousand ways. A screenplay is just an outline with dialogue.

Rex Stout has done something very rare in his novels. He has created an ongoing mini-world, a sealed-off chamber as distinct from our world as Middle Earth. When I pick up Ross Macdonald I expect his character in _our_ California, but when I pick up Rex Stout I know I will enter once more into that same alternate universe, in which Archie Goodwin will drive a Heron through the streets of some city called New York.

I’ve managed to avoid all the traps. Since I was never a bestseller, no one’s expectations about my work were very high, but since I was prolific, I could turn out enough wordage to make a living.

When Kahawa was published I got complaining letters and their general tenor was “I’ve always liked your books, and so has my teenage son, but how can I show him this book with all this graphic sex?” 500,000 dead; bodies hacked and mutilated and debased and destroyed; corridors running with blood; and nobody complained about the violence. They complained about the sex. Ah, such wee, sleekit, cow’rin, tim’rous beasties

Research is my own personal Sargasso Sea. It’s exactly like entering one of our civilization’s mental attics, a quotation book or thesaurus or large dictionary, looking for just one thing, and being found in there three days later by search parties, seated on the dusty floor, intently reading.

One thing I know about the caper is that it helps if the job is outrageous in one way or another. Once, for instance, before the government started paying by check, Parker stole the entire payroll from a United States Air Force Base. Dortmunder, not to be outdone, has made off with an entire bank, temporarily housed in a mobile home.

[Jimmy the Kid] is an invented novel from a pseudonymous author appearing in a real novel by the same author based on a producer’s idea to use a real-life case in which actual criminals performed a crime based on The Snatch, by Lionel White.

I’m terrible at predictions, always have been. I don’t even know what I’m going to do next, so I’m not likely to be a particularly reliable oracle when it comes to the fate of an entire genre of popular fiction. Come to think of it, it’s probably my inability to guess what’s going to happen next that makes me such a fan of the mystery short story in the first place.

The mistake is that too many people are confused about what reading fiction is for. They believe you’re supposed to read novels to be improved, to be present at the clash of great ideas, to be challenged by new and profound ways to look at life. And then it turns out, they’re too tired. Just for now, just as a stopgap, sheepishly they slink off, inadvertently to read fiction for the right reason: Because it’s fun.

“Suspense” is not a kind of story, it’s an element in all story, it’s the element that creates the desire to know what happens next, which is to say, the desire to be told the story. Suspense is the nicotine of storytelling, the drug that brings us back. We can’t co-opt the word for one single genre.

The private eyes of the twenties weren’t vigilantes, because they weren’t devoted to a cause. Hammer and Scott and so on, in the fifties and sixties, were devoted to a cause. History is an elephant; mess with her and you could get stepped on. The Vietnam War made the opinions of Hammer and Scott seem boorish and irrelevant; their popularity slipped and has not recovered.

World War I had left people tired and alienated. World War II left them hopped-up, incomplete, wanting the party not to be over, but at the same time feeling lost and nostalgic for their prewar lives. The war had gone on too long, had been too brutal, had changed too many things. Nobody could go home again.

Spillane took the plot of The Maltese Falcon, the brooding darkness of Chandler, the overstated tough talk of the second-rate hardboiled writers, wedded them all to the anxious, impatient overcharged postwar atmosphere, and came up with a winner.

in popular fiction, when a new genre moves out of its youth, the vitality necessary to its survival comes in fact from ritual, and, further, that ritual is a kind of poison which inevitably will kill it.

The puzzles tended to be rather more like crossword puzzles, in that the solution might hinge on esoteric knowledge, of bell-ringing or Chinese vases or Turkish cigarette ash. But on come the hardboiled dicks, and everything goes out the window. Puzzle solutions require knowledge no more esoteric than that people are sometimes greedy, people are sometimes jealous, people are sometimes afraid.

Conan Doyle used the puzzle for its own sake, as Poe had, and as many other practitioners did, and as they could do because there were no _large_ puzzles. In the orderly, self-confident, measured prewar world, the only possible enigmas were small ones.

There were only four months between the end of the war and the beginning of Prohibition, which I think has to be listed as the most stupid social experiment since the Children’s Crusade. In addition to organizing crime, giving criminal gangs a vast new source of wealth, making the corruption of policemen and politicians absolutely inevitable, Prohibition put us all over on the criminal's side.

they have to be Fifties mystery novels, full of Kirk Douglas–type characters. If you write Thirties mystery novels, whodunits with puzzles and clever murderers (never killers) and cleverer detectives, or if you write Forties private eye novels—“A mean man walks down these lone streets”—you can’t possibly get out of the ghetto.

You see an ad for a book, it says the book is a blockbuster, that means it’s a category crime novel—usually forty thousand words too fat—breaking for the big money.

Craig Rice was influenced by Thorne Smith, who was magnificent, but every time I try to borrow from Thorne Smith the material dies in my hands. It’s difficult to be truly whimsical without being arch. I can’t do it.