Best 145 quotes in «detective quotes» category

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 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.

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 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.

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.

. . . 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.

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.

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

Becoming a fae leader? Not on my bucket list.

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

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

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

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.

Everyone deserv a chance maybe 2 or 3, but always this guy wants something and before he didn't made it don't mean that now again won't reach a conclusion.

Everything can be summed up into an equation.

Every time I got married I was told it was time to settle down, and every time I got divorced I was told it was time to settle up. My accountant says I can't afford to settle down anymore." - Carl Engel (A farewell to Paradise)

Follow my lead, Miss Rook," Jackaby said, rapping on the ornately trimmed door to 1206 Campbell Street. Were my employer a standard private investigator, those might have been simple instructions, but in the time I've been his assistant, I've found very little about Jackaby to be standard. Following his lead tends to call for a somewhat flexible relationship with reality.

Frankly, I wish I could make my heart quit doing an extra thump when Wolfe says satisfactory, Archie. It's childish.

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.

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.

Blood always excites me.

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.

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.

Chatty, defensive, observant. My new favorite witness.

Coaching was hard. Being a detective is murder.

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.

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.

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

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

—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.

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

Have you checked your ass out lately? It’s pretty dang distracting, darling.” ~ Gunner Wilson

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.

He can see what move I'm planning to make in chess and counters before I can do it. He always knows who the killer is in a detective story. I think he could make a career out of detecting, but he wants to write plays for theater. Maybe he could be a Shakespeare instead of a Sherlock. He could be anything. Anything he wants to be.

Have you ever wondered, Dogger," I asked, "if wickedness is a chemical state?" "Indeed I have, Miss Flavia," he said. "I have sometimes thought of little else.

He had called what he felt for Charlotte love and it remained the most profound feeling he had had for any woman. In the pain it had caused him and its lasting after-effects it had more resembled a virus that, even now, he was not He had called what he felt for Charlotte love and it remained the most profound feeling he had had for any woman. In the pain it had caused him and its lasting after-effects it had more resembled a virus that, even now, he was not.

He paused just long enough for me to know I was starting to bug him. I bug a lot of people, they usually do just what Sully did, make a show of putting down the important thing they were doing to go and do the unimportant thing I just asked, solely in the interest of getting rid of me. Sometimes I think the bulk of my societal interaction is annoying people. I wonder what that's doing to my psyche.

He resolved for Detective Geyer to undertake a careful and methodical search for the blunder which a criminal always makes between the inceptions and consummation of his crime.

His thoughts were wheeling and dipping like the gulls over the estuary, groping for an explanation, feeling at last he was making sense of what lie behind Walden's death...

[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 all that there is of the most real.

From the start he'd sworn to himself that the job would never make him callous. But here he was, annoyed at someone for having the gall to get murdered when he had other plans.

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?

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 am a biological detective.

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.