Best 145 quotes in «detective quotes» category

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.

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

Untuk apa menemukan kebenaran jika hanya disembunyikan?

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.

Wolfe still paid no attention to me. As a matter of fact, I didn't expect him to, since he was busy taking exercise. He had recently got the impression he weighed too much- which was about the same as if the Atlantic Ocean had decided it was too wet...

Why do you want to know?" she asked. "No special reason. The Idiot guide to detectives says that you you are supposed to ask questions like that.

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

You must see it for yourself before anyone can see it with you.” Katrina Rose

You don’t rewrite it, censor it, or edit it, to suit some warped view you have of the past and your own present.

You'll be in good hands with the colonel, you'll see." The colonel? Okay, I was obviously stuck in a Gone With the Wind theme park. Or maybe a Kentucky Fried Chicken farm. Or I was simply hallucinating...

Would you like some more pancakes?" Annie asked. I could tell that Annie was a smart girl. I hate to eat on the job. But I must keep up my strength.

XVXVI, or 10-5-10-5-1, yielded H-E-H-E-A, which, unless she wanted to show her derisive laughter, made no sense.

You have bigger balls than some men I know.

You look at me as if I were a conjuror,' Holmes remarked, with a laugh.

you were attacked by cement monkeys?

about Tommy, you went through your whole life craving these little pockets of time and missing them for more time than you had them.

A black telephone receiver was stuffed in the small space between his ear and his shoulder; he motioned for them to sit in the stiff wooden armchairs in front of his desk. Moments later he hung up the phone, the base ringing lightly from the impact. “So you’re still in a mess, aren’t you?” he said.

A Dick and Jane story written in blood and battered bone. See Spot. See Spot run. See Spot run from a gaping chest wound. Run Spot run. See Detective smear Spot into a baggy for DNA testing.

All the clues are there in front of us,hidden under a veil,we cannot get the clue by searching for,we have to search for the veil instead.

All people, whether Aspie or neuro-typical are predisposed by their society to make guesses, jump to conclusions and then seek to defend those conclusions, regardless of logic or changing circumstance. This is sloppy, illogical thinking which may not hinder your life too much, under normal circumstances. But if you want to be a great detective, then such thinking will absolutely ruin your chances.

All that Anne Rice crap is true, I thought on my way out the door; New Orleans really does have a vampire problem. Besides me, of course.

Al... You ever kill anybody? In the United States? Because I know you mean it and everything, but I know these guys better than I know you. They're soldiers, that's all. No questions, no time to ask, no talk. Cops are worse, and less predictable. When you pull a gun, you've gotta be ready to kill somebody, and I'm telling you it's better to run.

As the greatest of detectives makes the greatest of criminals, a specialist in investigation is also a specialist in murder.

And then he had trained them, those lupine eyes, on her. The hunger in them so startled her that she took a step backward, striking her head against an iron pillar with such force that she later found crumbs of dried blood in her hair. It was a purely impersonal hunger, if such a thing there was - and here her report to Mr. Panicker faltered under the burden of his disapproval for her "romantic nature" - a hunger devoid of prurience, appetite, malice, or goodwill. It was a hunger, she decided later, for information. And yet there was liveliness in his gaze, a kind of cool vitality that was nearly amusement, as if a steady lifelong diet of mundane observations had preserved the youthful-ness of his optic organs alone.

A smile is hidden beneath the mustache, it crinkles the corners of his hooded eyes. “I didn’t. I have other business in town and I told my friend I would attend to the matter of his son, as he could not do so himself.” “Very kind of you.” “Yes. I have been looking forward to it for quite some time.” Daddy’s lemonade is almost gone, he sips it carefully, turning his eyes back to the water. “Looking forward to seeing the lad or to conducting your business?” Daddy is toying with him. “Both. You see, I had never actually met his son.” The glass rests against Daddy’s lips, unmoving. Mr. Geyer watches him closely. “But now I have, so I can get on with my,” he fixes his own gaze on the water, as though trying to see whatever it is that has transfixed my father, “business.

. . . and there was for a moment an unbreakable bond between us: the eternal bond of chemistry. I glowed with all the fire of a newborn galaxy.

Becoming a fae leader? Not on my bucket list.

Believe no-one, doubt everything and remember, everyone lies". ~Prof. Nick Fennimore

Before you work with me you must know that I am an atheist and I believe in neither supreme powers of any God or the trickery of the Devil, I am student of the criminal psychology and believe that behind every murder there is psychopath at work with some insidious agenda at play and motive unknown to human mind.

Being a Berlin cop in 1942 was a little like putting down mousetraps in a cage full of tigers.

Blood always excites me.

Blackstone's Police Operational Handbook recommends the ABC of serious investigation: Assume nothing, Believe nothing, and Check everything.

But if I want to murder somebody, will it really be the best plan to make sure I'm alone with him?' Lord Pooley's eyes recovered their frosty twinkle as he looked at the little clergyman. He only said: 'If you want to murder somebody, I should advise it.

But he couldn't feel self-pity in the face of the memorial. He hadn't lost nearly enough as these children, who'd lost their homeland and, in many cases,their whole families. Perhaps they had gained something, too, though. They had at least escaped the concentration camps, been taken in by good, caring families, and had grown up to live their lives in relative freedom.

Coaching was hard. Being a detective is murder.

Chatty, defensive, observant. My new favorite witness.

Don't follow someone into the dark, Stevie. I've seen it happen too many times.

Conan Doyle deluded a century of readers into thinking we're all deductive geniuses.

Covert operations relied on the unguarded slip, the unconscious choosing of one word over another.

Despite a protective Geyer threatening to “break the neck of the first reporter who attempted to interview the woman,” a determined reporter caught Mrs. Pitezel on her way out of the Rossin House dining room.

Dana was what Steve called a "silent partner" in the Brixton Brothers Detective Agency. Being a silent partner meant that Dana didn't carry a business card, that his name didn't appear on the company letterhead, and he wanted nothing to do with the Brixton Brothers Detective Agency.

Don't wanna ever take your shoes off in coconut land. Never know when you're gonna have to run.

Ever since we’d found Wilson, his cousin’s calmness bothered me. I realized now I felt less unease with angry outbursts from grieving relatives, than I had with the slow, ticking time bomb of the quiet and collected. --Prepped for Kill, Marjorie Gardens Mystery Book 2

—Então o senhor tem uma teoria? —Um detetive, M. Martin, sempre tem uma teoria. É o que se espera dele. Pessoalmente, não chamo de teoria. Digo que é uma ideiazinha. Essa é a primeira fase. —E a segunda? —Se a ideiazinha for acertada, então eu sei! É bastante simples, como se vê. —Gostaria que me dissesse qual é a sua teoria... ou ideiazinha.

He began as a minor imitator of Fitzgerald, wrote a novel in the late twenties which won a prize, became dissatisfied with his work, stopped writing for a period of years. When he came back it was to BLACK MASK and the other detective magazines with a curious and terrible fiction which had never been seen before in the genre markets; Hart Crane and certainly Hemingway were writing of people on the edge of their emotions and their possibility but the genre mystery markets were filled with characters whose pain was circumstantial, whose resolution was through action; Woolrich's gallery was of those so damaged that their lives could only be seen as vast anticlimax to central and terrible events which had occurred long before the incidents of the story. Hammett and his great disciple, Chandler, had verged toward this more than a little, there is no minimizing the depth of their contribution to the mystery and to literature but Hammett and Chandler were still working within the devices of their category: detectives confronted problems and solved (or more commonly failed to solve) them, evil was generalized but had at least specific manifestations: Woolrich went far out on the edge. His characters killed, were killed, witnessed murder, attempted to solve it but the events were peripheral to the central circumstances. What I am trying to say, perhaps, is that Hammett and Chandler wrote of death but the novels and short stories of Woolrich *were* death. In all of its delicacy and grace, its fragile beauty as well as its finality. Most of his plots made no objective sense. Woolrich was writing at the cutting edge of his time. Twenty years later his vision would attract a Truffaut whose own influences had been the philosophy of Sartre, the French nouvelle vague, the central conception that nothing really mattered. At all. But the suffering. Ah, that mattered; that mattered quite a bit.