Crime Fiction Quotes

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?

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

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.

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...

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

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 also denies us the luxury of total disidentification with all sorts of sociopaths, especially those who wear badges. His Noir Cop tales are crammed with acts of police sadism, casually committed or at least endorsed by the detective protagonist. These monstrosities are explicitly condemned almost never and the moral outrage we feel has no internal support in the stories except the objective horror of what is shown, so that one might almost believe that a part of Woolrich wants us to enjoy the spectacles. If so, it's yet another instance of how his most powerful novels and stories are divided against themselves so as to evoke in us a divided response that mirrors his own self-division.("Introduction")

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

She knew with chilling and absolute certainty she was next.

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

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.

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

Crime isn't pretty, only fashionably dressed.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

I came, I saw, I concurred...

Sometimes death is even better than to confess a secret.

Whose Daddy's Little Girl Now?

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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 way. And all the time they're holding heaven in their hands.

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.

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

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.

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!

The battle rages everyday. In the Arena of God

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.

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

Regress towards progress - Dr Wannamaker

The Professor is coming...

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

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 keep that secret, she can’t keep yours.I’m fifty-nine.

As I left his office he continued his telephone conversation, and as Amanda had declared, she was in fact waiting for me. t“So, Amanda, what is it now? Who is it you want to fix me up with today?”t“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 contemporary or vintage?”t“Well, what does your husband think, or does he have a vote?”t“Well, on paper, yes, but between us women . . . absolutely not.