Quotes about crime-fiction

All I knew was, my Father was famous for being a loser, and a loser that wanted nothing to do with me, since the day I was born.

My feet crunched over dry hickory leaves. Wood rangers had stapled up Smokey Bear (“Only You Can Prevent Forest Fires!”) signs along the state roads. One cigarette butt flicked out a passing car window and there’d be real hell to pay.

I wake and in those first fuddled moments forget you’re not here. I must have been dreaming about you – a tense, erotic dream. I reach out in bed to the place your body should be. It’s cold and there is no hollow. Even the bed is forgetting you.

I came, I saw, I concurred...

I was its skin, its movement, its shape, its god, its creator, its destroyer. And you thought Dexter was bad. The Bridgeman arrives soon.

The Professor is coming...

You have the Answer. Just get quiet enough to hear it. ~Pat Obuchowski

The old joke is that psychiatrists are doctors who can't stand the sight of blood. Maybe they can't stand it, but if they work where I work, they damn well better get used to it.At least surgeons and prizefighters get to wear gloves

Man-eaters are finally shot dead.

Last time I was on the welcome Wagon, I was holding some guy by the balls for 15 minutes while the inspector explained why should leave (Birmingham) and go home... It were really painful.I bet it was.'Yeah I got terrible cramp in me fingers, but he were very attentive.

Eventually everyone dies, but death, in various forms and ways, still comes as a shock. Then they throw dirt in your face. Then the worms eat you. Or they consign you to flames. The flesh sizzles and the bones crackle. be grateful it happens in that order.

Mee and Ow sat in the shade of a mango tree and were doing their make-up. Both of them wore gloves that reached all the way up to their elbows, to keep the tropical sun off their skins. They looked briefly at Maier, with the curiosity usually reserved for a passing dog. It was too early for professional enthusiasm.

He could sense in her the same spirit that ran in his veins. They were people with independent minds. They were not clerks at desks. They preferred to act. Accomplish something. They were rushing to reach the end. Such people need to be left alone. They are used to the darkness, the silence, the waiting. They belong to the same family. That of leopards.

Policemen are often confronted with situations which baffle them at first. A certain crime scene may seem meaningless, but they have to derive some meaning out of it. They have to connect the dots, find the links, delve into its history, look for evidence, come up with a zillion theories and arrive at truth. The thing is, truth is always stranger than fiction.

As I left his office he continued his telephone conversation, and as Amanda had declared, she was in fact waiting for me. “So, Amanda, what is it now? Who is it you want to fix me up with today?” “Well actually, I don’t have any new candidates in my mind just yet. I actually need some decorating advice.  I want to tackle my living room den. It has been about three years since it has had a lift. It needs a new theme, and I would like your opinion of what direction I should consider . . . modern

I go where I want to go, I do what I want to do, and I am beholden to no one.

For one… If you shoot me and your boss realizes it was without good reason, you’ll have fucked up your trial period. And trust me; I know you’re still in it.” Ian pulled open a drawer in a small brown cabinet.“Secondly, it could end very badly for me and I’d rather prevent that. Getting shot is not on my list of things to do today.” He wrapped his hand around the steel grip of his own weapon and removed it from the drawer.“And last but not least, if you plan to shoot me… Well, it’ll be a matter

Sometimes a girl's gotta be bad to be good.Murder in the Dog Park

My philosophy in life is to eat, drink and investigate - in that order.

I’ve sometimes regretted the women I’ve been.There have been so many: daughter, sister, cop, tough broad, several kinds of whore, jilted lover, ideal wife, heroine, killer.I’ll provide the truth of them all, inasmuch as I’m capable of telling the truth.Keeping secrets, telling lies, they require the same skill. Both become a habit, almost an addiction, that’s hard to break even with the people closest to you, out of the business.They say never trust a woman who tells you her age; if she can’t ke

Sometimes death is even better than to confess a secret.

Reaching for the basket of sex accoutrements, she took a thin, red tube, squeezed some clear gel onto her fingertips and returned to fondle his balls. “What’s that?” he asked, feeling a warm, tingling sensation around his genitals.“You not try before?” She smiled saucily.He shook his head.“…Special for you.

She knew with chilling and absolute certainty she was next.

Today, women have as much of a place as protagonists and antagonist as men.

Angel you may have lucked out this time, but just remember I’m going to be on your ass until I get my revenge. I promise you this will not be the last time you will see me! You’re a dead man Medina, maybe not now but soon! - Orlando to Angel under the crumbling furnace in the hotel.

That's the thing about digging holes,” Quinn said. “There are no assurances you'll find what you want—or want what you find.

I don't want you to say anything. I want you to listen. You know, being confident isn't the same as being right.

His voice as smooth as silk, Grant started into his standard crowd-pleaser: Sinatra’s 'My Kind of Town.

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.

False assurances were certainly more harmful than none at all.

In the half-century of his life, a tick on the Doomsday clock, he had borne witness to the most unbelievable technological advances. He had started off listening to an old Bush radio in the corner of the living room and now he had a phone in his hand on which he could pretend to throw a scrunched-up piece of paper into a waste bin. The world had waited a long time for that.

I looked at her, with her hair spilled out on the pillows and the warmth of her body warming mine. And I thought, god-dang, if this ain't a heck of a way to be in bed with a pretty woman. The two of you arguing about murder, and threatening each other, when you're supposed to be in love and you could be doing something pretty nice. And then I thought, well, maybe it ain't so strange after all. Maybe it's like this with most people, everyone doing pretty much the same thing except in a different

Practically every fella that breaks the law has a danged good reason, to his own way of thinking, which makes every case exceptional, not just one or two. Take you, for example.

Listen, we got two stiffs and a river of red in a villa in Herne Bay...

I let my gaze travel out the picture window. Unlike at my old doublewide trailer perched on the fringe of a played out quarry, here I owned a real yard with real grass that screamed for mowing each Monday a.m. I sat at the kitchen table, cooling off from just having finished this week's job. Yes, here in 2005, I was a full-fledged suburbanite, but I'd been called worse.

Quote taken from Chapter 1: That's the idea. Listen, Frank, this one is different. She's a keeper." He let that part gel in me. "Get your head screwed on straight and move to Richmond. You hate it living in Pelham.

A pawn only needs to move five spaces to become the queen" - from Bhendi Bazaar

Whose Daddy's Little Girl Now?

Never patronize your readers. That means don't talk down to them.

My inner goddess confirms that staring at a beautiful/rich/powerful face is the basis of True Love.

No sun cream or condoms, just in case you’re looking at the lady-boys. There’s plenty of AIDS lingering about and every STD you can imagine.

He said when the Lord made people He made them all the same for starters. But life marks people. If you know the way, you can read them like maps.

There was a ringing in his ears, like a dead phone line that he couldn’t hang up on.

The laws governed people’s happiness. To be lawless was to be happy.

I ought to warn you, dear, he can get rather wild when he’s hungry

We were about to give up and call it a night when somebody threw the girl off the bridge.

Flowers are fragile and ephemeral...Even if you meant to protect them with a surrounding fence from wind and rain, they would die without sunlight...and a spindly fence has no power against a strong wind. - Haibara Ai

When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.

When you’retwenty-one, life is a roadmap.It’s only when you get to betwenty-five or so that youbegin to suspect you’ve beenlooking at the map upsidedown, and not until you’reforty are you entirely sure.

But sooner or later the last good time would come around. It does for all of us.

She looked beautiful,standing there barefoot in her faded jeans. I wanted to take her in my arms, and lift her, and carry her into some untroubled future.Instead, I left her where she was. That's not the world we live in, she'd said, and how right she was,

We're not quite ending where we began, but close enough.Close enough.

Life, like that water droplet, is everlasting and imperishable. There is only a transition, never an end !

You can run from the past, but it always catches up with you.

She was a cute as a washtub.

In near panic, I craned my neck to gaze over the cabin’s roofline a bursting fireball.

Just the night before, a puma’s howl had set a chill at my spine and, man, life didn’t get any richer than that.

Dreema and you disagree. She cottons to Richmond, but you can't be weaned off Pelham. So I offer you a fair middle ground: relocate to northern Virginia. She transfers to the state morgue on Braddock Road, and you get to stay near your old beat.

The good thing about the aristocracy – German or English – was that they were easily traced, Mirabelle thought.

Did somebody die?”“Yes,” I replied.“Who?” he asked, starting to freak out. I pulled out my notepad and asked him if he knew a Marcie Tucker. “Marcie? Hm, Marcie, it doesn't ring a bell but… Oh yeah, the temp who's filling in while my regular assistant is out, I think her name is Marcie. In fact, she was supposed to be here today. I was actually starting to worry that… Wait. Is she…”“Unfortunately yes,” I said, “Marcie was found in her apartment late last night uh… no longer alive.” My bedside ma

The viewpoint character in each story is usually someone trapped in a living nightmare, but this doesn't guarantee that we and the protagonist are at one. In fact Woolrich often makes us pull away from the person at the center of the storm, splitting our reaction in two, stripping his protagonist of moral authority, denying us the luxury of unequivocal identification, drawing characters so psychologically warped and sometimes so despicable that a part of us wants to see them suffer. Woolrich als

Either I’ve got a wart on my nose they find curious, or I’ve grown a tail, Albie Merani muttered to himself. Just then he thought. I’d better get a move on, got work to do. He hurried across to some stairs, heading down deeper into station, then followed the signs to the pod station.

Regress towards progress - Dr Wannamaker

I've always said women are vicious creatures - Detective Zach Grimes

I needed to know, Jesse. I needed to get inside his head. To find this son of a bitch, I need to get inside his head.” - Stephanie Carovella

Surprised huh, thought you had me back in prison didn’t you? To answer your question what keeps me alive is my drive, my drive to kill you! I have nothing, but hate for you and your family. It will be my pleasure taking you out. I don’t care about power, plutonium or even being rich. None of that matters to me. I only care about taking you out. Even if I die I want to be the one who is called the killer of Angel Medina! There’s no where for you to go. Now we will truly see who is better! Come on

It’s getting a little chilly in here! Why don’t we sit by the fireplace and I’ll tell you the story of how I single handedly killed the Medina boys!

They say it's always darkest before the dawn and it was pitch black by the time I arrived at the Marriott. However I still had a few bullets left for my deadbeat uncle that tried to stab me in the back.

When it came to watching television, Ted was ambidextrous.

There are times when you have to commit a crime to prevent an even bigger one. At least, that’s what I tell myself when I can’t sleep at night.

On a Wednesday morning in mid-June, Eli Sharpe was sitting at his desk treating jetlag with strong coffee when he heard a knock on his apartment door. After a second, more insistent knock, he added a dash of George Dickel to his Folgers and hid the pint in a desk drawer. “It’s open,” he said loudly and stood up to receive his visitor. In walked a tall blonde, her high heels stabbing the scuffed- up hardwoods, her perfume battling the smell of coffee and dust permeating Eli’s six-hundred square f

At that exact moment, 6-0-0, the sun climbed over the skyline of oaks, revealing its full summer angry-god self. Its reflection flared across the river toward our house, a long, blaring finger aimed at me through our frail bedroom curtains. Accusing: You have been seen. You will be seen.

I started out a human being. But pretty much had all the humanity wrung out of me after passing the Bar and practicing law for ten years. Not sure what I am now.

...We were pulling into the next station, when the woman suddenly got to her feet and made a move to squeeze past me. As her knees made contact with mine, she turned towards me. Her eyes locked straight onto mine, her eyelids pinned back, with a look I could only describe as sheer dread. In the next second, deep tram-lines formed between her eyebrows and her expression shifted. It was as if she was silently imploring me, entreating me. To do what? I had no idea. I was immobile, her gaze pressing

She had been lying there, facedown in the water long before the tide had turned at 3.04 that morning. Her eyes were staring into the river, her blonde hair first fanning out, then drawing back under her head with the wash of the water, like a pulsating jellyfish. The belt of her raincoat was caught on the branches of an overhanging tree and she’d been hooked, destined to forever flap against the corner of the broken pier with outstretched arms. She wasn’t going anywhere now; she was simply bobbi

Payne sought clarification. “Vertical or horizontal?”“Horizontal, of course.”“Sorry but I can’t help you.” “Will you pipe down for a minute? Naturally she was dead since I work at a cemetery. Her face struck a chord though. So, I rummaged around in the old Rory memory bank, and Emily is what rings a bell. Didn’t we go to school with an Emily? Tenth or eleventh grade, if I recall it correctly.

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 charact

Emilia typed in her password and checked her inbox. A review by the Secretariat de Gobernación of drug cartel activities across Mexico. A report of a robbery in Acapulco’s poorest barrio neighborhood that would probably never be investigated. Notice of a reward for a child kidnapped in Ixtapa who was almost certainly dead by now. Her phone rang. It was the desk sergeant saying that a Señor Rooker wished to see her. Emilia avoided Rico’s eye as she said, yes, the sergeant could let el señor pass

The whole thing becomes like this evil enchantment from a fairy tale, but you're made to believe the spell can never be broken.

Crime isn't pretty, only fashionably dressed.

Get a load of this, Frank.” Gerald Peyton’s pause set off his pronouncement. “She is expecting to get a wedding ring.”“That’s understandable,” I said, unsure how he could afford a ring on what our firm cleared. Diamond rings—more sold in December than in any other month of the year—went for a cool grand per karat. Weeks ago, I’d priced them—again—for my domestic situation. “What seems to be the problem?”“That’s a big leap for me to make.”“I expect you’ll make it with room to spare.

A diamond wedding ring, you say?”I studied his face. Was he putting me on? He looked earnest. “As any guy would expect, a diamond is what she’s after,” I said. “Did you hold out hope you’d get by for anything less?

God, I swear I’ve never seen a more nervous bunch of people. Like a bunch of rats in a science lab.

Drug addicts had their drugs. Alcoholics had their bottles. Serial killers had their murders.

Because I want to have sex with him--and because that's sinful--I'm blushing and flushing furiously under his scrutinizing scrutiny.

Her aunt and uncle worked fifteen hours a day in their desperate attempt to keep the corner shop in profit, and their Sundays were marked by exhaustion. The moral code by which they lived was that of cleanliness, respectability and prudence. Religion was for those who had the time for it, a middle-class indulgence.

Kara knew je only recognised t and a on a string and he was nothing more than a sleazy pupeeter

We pay people and reward them for greed and sleaze . When a sex tape gets made a star is born with a publicity agent on speed dial a six figure pay cheque and a tacky lingerie line....selling filth so you can get your face on Time magazine... From Jukebox

For every criminal mastermind, there were ten cretins: the cruel algebra of intelligence applied across the masses.

The battle rages everyday. In the Arena of God

Distance and time and a whitewashed mind hadn’t kept a child from growing, from existing, from demanding a place on this earth.

Rage and despair shook her for minutes or hours. She was unaware of the passage of time. Finally spent, she retreated inward and collapsed onto the floor in a fetal position, the letter in shreds around her. The room had grown dark. Like a gentle snowfall, the cold mantle of an unbearable silence descended.

Her immediate impulse was one of self-preservation. She was tied up in this somehow, she didn’t know why or how, but there was something waiting for her on the other side of this crowd.

This wasn't the last of it. Now that Finia was carrying his baby, they would be together forever, whether she liked it or not.

How dare she not give in to his "vulnerability." There was only so much rejection he could take.

Finia glanced towards her bedroom, wishing the darkness would swallow her whole.