Best 145 quotes in «detective quotes» category

How could I tell Clarence that finding another dead body was anything but dreadful? On the contrary: it was thrilling; it was exciting; it was exhilarating, it was invigorating; to say nothing of electrifying and above all, satisfying. How could I tell the dear man that murder made me feel so gloriously alive?

[Hugh] winced as I squealed the tyres, but after all, it wasn't his motorcar. Holmes did more than wince before we were out of Oxford, but I didn't hit anybody, and only brushed the farm cart slightly. It wasn't his automobile either, and what do men know about driving?

I actually do have a motto,” said Heat. “It’s ‘Never forget who you work for.'" And as she voiced the words, Nikki felt a creeping unease. It wasn’t exactly shame, but it was close. For the first time it sounded hollow. Fake. Why? She examined herself, trying to see what was different. The stress, that was new. And when she looked at that, she recognized that the hardest part of her day lately was working to avoid confrontation with Captain Montrose. That’s when it came to her. In that moment, sitting nearly naked in Rook’s living room, playing some silly nineteenth-century parlor game, she came to an unexpected insight. In that moment Nikki woke up and saw with great clarity who she had become - and who she had stopped being. Without noticing it, Heat had begun seeing herself as working for her captain and had lost sight of her guiding principle, that she worked for the victim.

I am a biological detective.

I am all that there is of the most real.

I don't believe for one moment that I killed him [...] But if I didn't, somebody else did. I must appoint myself Investigator. I must catch this malefactor, this pig. And if at any time it looks as if I am going to catch myself, I can always accept my resignation.

I can’t believe it.’ I whispered. ‘You can’t let him lure you back in, Felicia. He’s wrong. He’s wrong!’ Vanian pleaded, I could feel the quiver of his magic, the wisps that were fighting against the iron burning into his wrists, I could feel the crackle as it fought in the air, against his emotions, against his pain. I shook my head, was about to speak but Adam grabbed him by the front of his shirt; as if a few more tears and shreds couldn’t go amiss. The tightness of his grip paled the Faerie’s cheeks, caused the blood to trickle down faster, dropping to the floor. ‘My wife.’ He yelled, ‘She’s my wife, silverblood.’ With each growl of a syllable he accented it with a punch to Vanian’s face. I couldn’t take much more. I jumped over and pulled at Adam’s shoulders, fingertips driving into the nook of his collarbone, pressing down with as much as I had in me, anything to break his hold. He recoiled and rose his hand to me, at first I flinched but I stopped. He wouldn’t hurt me. He wouldn’t.

I could tell he was becoming sulky, as boys and men do when they're caught bluffing. And I ignored him, as girls and women do when they catch them out.

I didn't like the calm tone reminiscent of his composure at the library, nor was I comfortable with his blank expression. We had a crime scene without forensics, and a body without a medical examiner. If I didn't counter whatever fresh hell Edward was about to unleash, we’d also lose concrete evidence we had yet to procure. --Prepped for the Kill, Marjorie Gardens Mystery Book 2

I don't greatly care for passes this early in the morning.

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.

If there was one thing which Sloan had learned over the years it was that you should never underestimate the element of luck in detective work.

If you're good at this job, and I am, then every step in a murder case moves you in one direction: towards order. We get thrown shards of senseless wreckage, and we piece them together until we can lift the picture out of the darkness and hold it up to the white light of day, solid, complete, clear. Under all the paperwork and the politics, this is the job; this is its cool shining heart that I love with every fiber of mine. This case was different. It was running backwards, dragging us with it on some ferocious ebb tide. Every step washed us deeper in black chaos, wrapped us tighter in tendrils of crazy and pulled us downwards.

I get a little obsessive, it was my hallmark as a coach. I'm more effective when it gets personal and I tend to stick with a thing until it gets personal. I haven't been doing this that long but so far, knock on wood, I've never had to give up. There's something rewarding about it—when you grab that first slender thread that unravels the whole web. I just can't stand seeing anyone get away with something, and I'm dreading the first time I have to walk away from a case knowing who did it and why, but that there's nothing I can do about it. Amy's right to worry, I'm the world's worst loser, as several generations of junior high teams could tell you. I still mourn games I lost 10 years ago. I swear, I wake up sweating and angry over a pass-action I should have known not to call, I'm not kidding. It's not healthy.

I had been a happy normal wife and mother in Orange County until ten years ago, when I was attacked by an evil vampire... and turned into one myself. It's made my life since gross and scary and, let's face it, weird.

I had chosen to play the detective—and if there is one thing that unites all the detectives I've ever read about, it's their inherent loneliness. The suspects know each other. They may well be family or friends. But the detective is always the outsider. He asks the necessary questions but he doesn't actually form a relationship with anyone. He doesn't trust them, and they in turn are afraid of him. It's a relationship based entirely on deception and it's one that, ultimately, goes nowhere. Once the killer has been identified, the detective leaves and is never seen again. In fact, everyone is glad to see the back of him.

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 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.

I guess us folks in California are kind of straitlaced and old-fashioned." Hahaha, I thought on the way downstairs. I never thought I'd say those words with a straight face...

I guess you’re going for the hard-ass Texas Ranger thing today” ~ Laney Briggs

I hate it when young attractive women tell me I remind them of their father.

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.

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...

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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 is not for me to suspect but to detect.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Persistence is often a detective's greatest ally.

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.

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

- 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.

Not his real home, his real home, the one he never named any more, was the dark and sooty chamber in his heart that contained his sister and his brother and, because it was an accommodating kind of space, the entire filthy history of the industrial revolution.