#detect

In the detective story, as in its mirror image, the Quest for the Grail, maps (the ritual of space) and timetables (the ritual of time) are desirable. Nature should reflect its human inhabitants, i.e., it should be the Great Good Place; for the more Eden-like it is, the greater the contradiction of murder. The country is preferable to the town, a well-to-do neighborhood (but not too well-to-do-or there will be a suspicion of ill-gotten gains) better than a slum. The corpse must shock not only because it is a corpse but also because, even for a corpse, it is shockingly out of place, as when a dog makes a mess on a drawing room carpet." (The guilty vicarage: Notes on the detective story, by an addict, Harper's Magazine, May 1948) ↗

— W.H. Auden

#detective-stories #mysteries #setting #writing #nature

The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes. ↗

— Arthur Conan Doyle

#crime #detective #mystery #novel #chance

And then I thought that I had to be like Sherlock Holmes and I had to detach my mind at will to a remarkable degree so that I did not notice how much it was hurting inside my head. ↗

— Mark Haddon

#sherlock-holmes

My glass is not only half-empty, I'm convinced someone spit in it. ↗

— Judy Nichols

#hard-boiled-detective #pessimism #pessimism

Our relationship with literary characters, at least to those that exercise a certain attraction over us, rests in fact on a denial. We know perfectly well, on a conscious level, that these characters “do not exist,” or in any case do not exist in the same way as do the inhabitants of the real world. But things manifest in an entirely different way on the unconscious level, which is interested not in the ontological differences between worlds but in the effect they produce on the psyche. Every psychoanalyst knows how deeply a subject can be influenced, and even shaped, sometimes to the point of tragedy, by a fictional character and the sense of identification it gives rise to. This remark must first of all be understood as a reminder that we ourselves are usually fictional characters for other people […] ↗

— Pierre Bayard

#detective-criticism #fiction #psychology #reading #sherlock-holmes

Eventually I would like to touch all the genres. I would like to do some detective stories, and I want to do a Western. I would want to do humorous Westerns. ↗

— Sergio Aragones

#detective stories #eventually #genres #humorous #i

While I was in jail, they handcuffed me and took me to a backroom, where a detective from the FBI and a Secret Service agent were, and they interrogated me for about three or four hours. ↗

— Sherman Austin

#agent #detective #fbi #four #hours

I went to the premiere of The Detective with Sinatra, and perhaps people jumped to conclusions. He was very protective towards me and never came on to me sexually. ↗

— Jacqueline Bisset

#conclusions #detective #i #jumped #me

When I was growing up, I dreamed about becoming a cowgirl, a detective, a spy, a great actress, or a ballerina. Not a dentist, like my father, or a homemaker, like my mother - and certainly not a writer, although I always loved to read. ↗

— Judy Blume

#actress #although #always #ballerina #becoming

I continue to be a strong believer in the life-saving importance of early detection, and I encourage everyone to be proactive about their preventive screenings. ↗

— Roy Blunt

#believer #continue #detection #early #encourage