Best 145 quotes in «detective quotes» category

I left a note for my mother. I always leave a note for my mother when I am on a case.

...I'll tell you something else too; by the time we're through we shall have had all we can stand of this North woman. I wouldn't mind betting she thinks we have nothing better to do than run around in circles while she gets on with this three-act problem play of hers.

I love introverts. They don't waste words. Excessive extroverts can be very wasteful. I don't trust them in any kind of intricate or delicate matter.

I put the carpetbag on a ledge, and then, hanging upside down by my razor-clawed feet, slept until sunset. A first for me, and actually quite comfortable. Lord help me.

It's a tough job being somebody's personal assistant. You have to anwser their phone, manage their correspondence, run their errands, pay their bills, arrange their schedule, and basically do whatever tasks, menial to major, they are too busy or self absorbed or distranted or pampered or disinterested to do themselves.

It seems you can’t go anywhere today without seeing some popular culture rendition of Vampyres. I went into a bookstore a few weeks ago and there was an entire section devoted to Teenage Paranormal Romance. Can you imagine?

It takes a certain kind of man willing to work long, grueling hours in a career offering few rewards.

In just about every other book I can think of, we're chasing on the heels of our heroes - the spies, the soldiers, the romantics, the adventurers. But we stand shoulder to shoulder with the detective.

In the nineteenth century, The Romantics viewed Nature as benign, a glowing reflection of God's grace. Now we know better. Nature is brutal and, if it is feminine, she's not the kind of woman you can trust. Human beings may be her finest achievement yet, but when you get right down to brass tacks, we're meat. AIDS and organisms like streptococcus don't give a crap that we subdued the earth or produced a Shakespeare...

Investigation was like a series of job interviews. Getting the door slammed in your face at every attempt wasn’t the exciting life of the detective portrayed on film or television.

I only swing for one girl. But if she's into a certain kind of kink, who am I to deny her such pleasantries?"~ Luke Wagner

I should mortify a dozen Sir Johns if it might aid my investigation." - Elizabeth Bennet

I stole a bit of a chopped vegetable and was about to put it in my mouth when Jae’s long fingers closed over my wrist. “What? You can’t eat this raw?” “It’s bitter melon. You won’t like it.” He went into the fridge and came out with something that looked halfway familiar. “Here, leftover bao. There’s char siu inside.” “The red pork stuff? Yeah, I like that. I thought it was Chinese.” “It is. We also eat hamburgers and spaghetti.

It all came back to something I’d figured out once about the detective business. There were two ways to go along: underground or on top. I never found out which was best. Underground you had the element of surprise on your side, but it was harder to move around. On top you went everywhere, taking cracks at everybody, and everybody taking cracks at you. You had to be tough to play it that way. Well, I was tough.

It does that to you, being a detective. You look at blank space and see gears turning, motives and cunning; nothing looks innocent any more. Most times when you prove away the gears, the blank space looks lovely, peaceful. But that arm: innocent, it looked just as dangerous.

It has often been said that the more unusual the murder the easier it is to solve, but this is a theory I don't believe. Nothing is easy, nothing is simple, and you should think of your investigations as a complicated experiment: look at what remains constant and look at what changes, ask the right questions and don't be afraid of wrong answers, and above all rely on observation and rely on experience.

I thought it was just a picture of madness. But that wasn't. It was a message, it has to be, those words are too specific.

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.

It was quite elementary,' returned the detective with a languid gesture of one hand.

I used to believe, bless my naive little heart, that I had something to offer the robbed dead. Not revenge-there’s no revenge in the world that could return the tiniest fraction of what they’ve lost-and not justice, whatever that means, but the one thing left to give them: the truth. I was good at it. I had one, at least, of the things that make a great detective: the instinct for truth, the inner magnet whose pull tells you beyond any doubt what’s dross, what’s alloy, and what’s the pure, uncut metal. I dug out the nuggets without caring when they cut my fingers and brought them in my cupped hands to lay on graves, until I found out-Operation Vestal again-how slippery they were, how easily they crumbled, how deep they sliced and, in the end, how very little they were worth.

It would do her good to have some demons to fight, to be swung out in space and held over some bottomless pit now and then.

I used to believe, bless my naive little heart, that I had something to offer the robbed dead. Not revenge-there’s no revenge in the world that could return the tiniest fraction of what they’ve lost-and not justice, whatever that means, but the one thing left to give them: the truth. I was good at it. I had one, at least, of the things that make a great detective: the instinct for truth, the inner magnet whose pull tells you beyond any doubt what’s dross, what’s alloy, and what’s the pure, uncut metal. I dug out the nuggest without caring when they cut my fingers and brought them in my cupped hands to lay on graves, until I found out-Operation Vestal again-how slippery they were, how easily they crumbled, how deep they sliced and, in the end, how very little they were worth.

My mother’s father, Grandfather Thieme, the son of a railroad engineer, looked quite dapper as a young man. Prior to 1933 the Hamburg Police Department consisted of 21 units, with 2,100 men. My grandfather was a Polizist with the Sicherheitspolizei or uniformed policeman with the department. Later, with an expansion of the Hamburg Police Department to 5,500 men and the formation of an investigative branch, he was promoted to the esteemed position of a Kriminalbeamte inspector. He rose to the rank of Chief of Detectives, and had a reputation of being tough, and not someone you could mess with. Having a baldhead and the general appearance of Telly Savalas, the late Hollywood movie actor, I don’t think anyone did. An action story and part of my grandfather’s legacy was when he chased a felon across the rooftops of prewar Hamburg, firing his Dienstpistole, service revolver, as he made his way from one steep inclined slate roof to the next. Of course, Grandpa got his man! Even with this factual tidbit, there isn’t all that much I know about him, other than that, at the then ripe old age of sixty-four, he peacefully died in his chair while reading the evening newspaper.

Looking back, I know that the man possessed no gift of prophecy; he simply worked to assure his own future, while I skated uncertainly toward mine. It was his flat-voiced "Cherchez la femme" that still haunts me. Because our partnership was nothing but a bungling road to the Dahlia. And in the end, she was to own the two of us completely.

Murder and suicide aren't genetic,' Julia said, scoffing sandwiches in the Black Swan in Helmsley after their visit to Rievaulx Terraces. 'Nathan isn't predisposed to tragedy.' Jackson wasn't so sure about that but he kept that thought to himself.

My last name is Poirot, like Agatha Christie's famous detective Hercule Poirot; no relation to the fictional character.

My style isn't subtle, I know that. I'm sure in fact it violates all kinds of rules about interrogation and all that, I never studied the field. I'm not sure it would have helped anyway—some of the greatest quarterbacks of all time had unconventional styles, I think that's the way the world ought to work. You don't take a guy who's finding success and make him unlearn his style and do it the traditional way, it's encouraging mediocrity. Nobody ever knew when Randall Cunningham was going to get happy feet or when Favre was going to shovel pass a TD out of a sack. You train that stuff out of them and you take away that surprise. So I ask questions, I look for soft, spongy areas and push on them to see if the person cries out. It doesn't endear me to a lot of people, but I've got enough friends and I'm not looking for more.

- No estoy dispuesto a hablar, Eddie. ¿Por qué iba a hacerlo? Dejó la pistola sobre el escritorio y la golpeó con la mano abierta. - Esto -dijo-. Y yo podría hacer que le resultara provechoso. - Ya, eso suena mejor. No meta la pistola en este asunto. Yo siempre estoy dispuesto a escuchar el sonido del dinero.

It is not for me to suspect but to detect.

Norm was lean, his short, straight black hair parted on the side, his mustache trimmed like he’d never heard of Adolf Hitler.

Now, ironically, in astronomy, the word "revolution" means "a celestial object that comes full circle." Did you know that? Which, if you think about it, is pretty funny, considering here on earth it means change.

Once I went professionally to an archaeological expedition- and I learnt something there. In the course of an excavation, when something comes up out of the ground, evEryThing is cleared away very carefully all around it. You take away the loose earth, and you scare here and there with a knife until finally your object is there, all alone, ready to be drawn and photographed with no extraneous matter confusing it. That is what I have been seeking TO do- clear away the extraneous matter so that we can see the truth-the naked shining truth.

Persistence is often a detective's greatest ally.

¿Quiere que vaya a la iglesia y me confiese? ¿Cree que los detectives nos rebajamos a hablar con sacerdotes? No existe para nosotros el arrepentimiento, la reconciliación ni el perdón. Somos filósofos de la acción, y solo nos miramos en el espejo de nuestros actos.

Terrible accident; body parts was everywhere—-fingers, toes, wings, beaks. Ambulance people tried to scoop him all up, but apparently it ain’t so easy as you might think—telling a chicken from a Chinaman, I mean. Anyways, they got his weight off his driver’s license, picked up a hundred and thirty pounds of pieces and buried ‘em. Now his wife come every year 'bout this time to pay her respects. We don't serve chicken while she's here. Hope you ain't got a taste for it.

that was the thing about luck, its laws were those of scarcity.

The great thing in these cases is to keep an absolutely open mind. Most crimes, you see, are so absurdly simple.

There were men in their fifties, men who take a stab at fitness, men who try. They may not look young, but they still look viable. Lammers wasn't one of those. Lammers was one of those crack-in-the-ass guys ten months pregnant with a beer baby.

The truth must be quite plain, if one could just clear away the litter.

This has been a covert preparation for an overt operation." - Rory in NEVER GO ALONE

This was the second murder with which I’d found myself associated. Unlike the death of my client in April, my estranged uncle and his gang had nothing to do with this. And as far as I was aware, Arthur Teague was not a thug with the Fernoza Family mafia. --Prepped for the Kill, Marjorie Gardens Mystery Book 2

Time is a terrible thing because it can erase both joys and pains.

To catch the bad guys, you've got to think like a bad guy - and that's why all the best detectives have a dark side...

To the modern detective, truth is rarely its own reward; usually it is its own punishment. And if you cannot track mystery to the back of its ugly cave, then be content to stand at the edge of the dark and call it by name.

Untuk apa menemukan kebenaran jika hanya disembunyikan?

Val had a horrific image of Lisa peering through a magnifying glass like a grotesquely teenybopper version of Nancy Drew — in jeggings.

Well, strap my ass to a flagpole and hoist it skyward' an all to familiar voice declared.

We played a couple games of pool and shared a basket of fried shrimp and onion rings. He was a good player, but on long shots I noticed his hands shook. I hadn't noticed it before but his motor control was clearly damaged; sometimes he'd go through several positions to arrive at the one he wanted, as though he had to sneak up on it. “I used to be a better player,” he said quietly, and I thought about what it must feel like at his age to say something like that. We hugged each other goodbye and I don't think it was just the tequila. I think he'd finally started to trust me and let me in past the front door. That was the last time I saw him.

When a beautiful blonde asks, you don't say no.

when you live outside the law, you have to be flexible