#detective

Has anyone ever told you," I said, "that you coalesce reality?" "No. They only say that I'm good in the sack." "They are accurate but limited," I said. "And if you give me their names I'll kill them. ↗

— Robert B. Parker

#humor #spenser #humor

If anyone ever told five-year-olds the truth about life, he thought, there’d be a rash of kindergarten suicides. ↗

— P.J. Tracy

#live-bait #p-j-tracy #life

It was always the same for her when she arrived to meet the body. After she unbuckled her seat belt, after she pulled a stick pen from the rubber band on the sun visor, after her long fingers brushed her hip to feel the comfort of her service piece, what she always did was pause. Not long. Just the length of a slow deep breath. That's all it took for her to remember the one thing she will never forget. Another body waited. She drew the breath. And when she could feel the raw edges of the hole that had been blown in her life, Detective Nikki Heat was ready. She opened the car door and went to work . . . Heat could have made it easier on herself by parking closer, but this was another of her rituals: the walk up. Every crime scene was a flavor of chaos, and these two hundred feet afforded the detective her only chance to fill the clean slate with her own impressions. ↗

— Richard Castle

#detective #detective-fiction #life

Dead men are heavier than broken hearts. ↗

— Raymond Chandler

#noir #men

The two men sat silent for a little, and then Lord Peter said: "D'you like your job?" The detective considered the question, and replied: "Yes—yes, I do. I know it to be useful, and I am fitted to it. I do it quite well—not with inspiration, perhaps, but sufficiently well to take a pride in it. It is full of variety and it forces one to keep up to the mark and not get slack. And there's a future to it. Yes, I like it. Why?" "Oh, nothing," said Peter. "It's a hobby to me, you see. I took it up when the bottom of things was rather knocked out for me, because it was so damned exciting, and the worst of it is, I enjoy it—up to a point. If it was all on paper I'd enjoy every bit of it. I love the beginning of a job—when one doesn't know any of the people and it's just exciting and amusing. But if it comes to really running down a live person and getting him hanged, or even quodded, poor devil, there don't seem as if there was any excuse for me buttin' in, since I don't have to make my livin' by it. And I feel as if I oughtn't ever to find it amusin'. But I do. ↗

— Dorothy L. Sayers

#hobbies #justice-system #mysteries #vocation #inspirational

Jumping to conclusions is like playing with damp gunpowder: both likely to go off in wrong direction. ↗

— Charlie Chang

#humour #myster #change

I don't mind your showing me your legs. They're very swell legs and it's a pleasure to make their acquaintace. I don't mind if you don't like my manners. They're pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter nights. ↗

— Raymond Chandler

#sharp #manners

"One cannot be a mother without first being a person; family, husband, and children should not be allowed, as is so often the case, to steal a woman’s selfhood and her dreams." Mother to Sherlock, Mycroft, and Enola Holmes by author Nancy Springer ↗

— Vannessagrace

#drama #intrigue #mystery #priviate-investigator #thriller

It means that no matter what you write, be it a biography, an autobiography, a detective novel, or a conversation on the street, it all becomes fiction as soon as you write it down. ↗

— Guillermo Cabrera Infante

#becomes #biography #conversation #detective #down

Sure, I'll have characters drop in and out of books but the main cast of characters always changes. Maybe I'm wrong but I think if had the same joe detective guy or gal, I wouldn't write them as well; I wouldn't do as good a job. ↗

— Carl Hiaasen

#books #cast #changes #characters #detective