Crime Fiction Quotes

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.

~ Holly Hood

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.

~ Ed Lynskey

Man-eaters are finally shot dead.

~ Mahendra Jakhar

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.

~ Jim Mcgrath

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.

~ Mahendra Jakhar

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.

~ Mahendra Jakhar

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.

~ Mahendra Jakhar

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.

~ Tom Vater

I came, I saw, I concurred...

~ Darren E. Laws

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

~ Catherine Astolfo

The Professor is coming...

~ M.k. Hopkins

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

~ Laurie Stevens

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

~ Mike Bartos

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.

~ A.j. Waines

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

~ John D. Macdonald

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

~ Gosho Aoyama

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.

~ James Crumley

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.

~ Stephen King

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

~ Stephen King

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

~ Stephen King

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

~ Stephen King

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

~ Debbi Mack

She was a cute as a washtub.

~ Raymond Chandler

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

~ Ed Lynskey

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.

~ Ed Lynskey

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.

~ Ed Lynskey

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

~ Sara Sheridan

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 manner has never been my strong suit.Dr. Taggart looked distressed and began to ramble incoherently for a minute. I let him work through it though, I figured it was his way of grieving. I wouldn't have even paid attention to it except for the fact that it was kind of goofily, ineptly… well, poignant:Oh, uh, Oh my God. That's terrible. I uh… I hope she didn't have any family. I mean, I don't hope she didn't have any family, what I mean is, if she uh… if she didn't have any family then there would be nobody to get all bummed out about this and uh… you know, when something like this happens, you always think about the poor, heartbroken family, so uh… if she doesn't have any family then uh… the bright side would be that nobody would, you know, have to be all bummed out.Hm. I guess I never thought of it that way. Awkward wording aside, he's kind of got a point there.

~ Jules Cassard

When it came to watching television, Ted was ambidextrous.

~ Judy Penz Sheluk

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.

~ Judy Penz Sheluk

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 foot studio apartment that doubled as a working office. Her perfume won the battle: Light Blue by Dolce & Gabbana. Same scent his third fiancée used to wear.

~ Max Everhart

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.

~ Gillian Flynn

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.

~ Jeffrey Rasley

...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 me into my seat by some centrifugal force and I held her stare, unsure of how to react. Just as swiftly, she dropped her eyes and the moment passed. With one final glance behind her, she was swallowed up in the bodies at the door. She was getting off. Something wasn’t right.

~ A.j. Waines

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 bobbing up and down with the rhythm of the water - and she hadn’t blinked in a long while.

~ A.j. Waines

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.

~ Ed Lynskey

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.

~ Barry N. Malzberg

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 into the detectives’ area.A minute later Rucker was standing by her desk, sweat beaded on his forehead. The starched collar of his shirt was damp. “There’s a head,” he said breathlessly. “Someone’s head in a bucket on the hood of my car.

~ Carmen Amato

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

~ Jess C. Scott

Regress towards progress - Dr Wannamaker

~ Lauren Bradshaw