#detective

There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge. ↗

— Raymond Chandler

#hard-boiled #santa-anas #short-story

It means that no matter what you write, be it a biography, an autobiography, a detective novel, or a conversation on the street, it all becomes fiction as soon as you write it down. ↗

— Guillermo Cabrera Infante

#becomes #biography #conversation #detective #down

I enjoy doing the research of nonfiction; that gives me some pleasure, being a detective again. ↗

— Joseph Wambaugh

#being #detective #doing #enjoy #gives

Well I think that the mind of a serial killer and the mind of the detectives represent the duality we face as people. ↗

— Paul Guilfoyle

#duality #face #i #i think #killer

Yes, and many times it's frustrating, because I'm simply part of the show, and I'm not in the creative end of it, who goes out with detectives and tries to find these things out. ↗

— Robert Stack

#creative #detectives #end #find #frustrating

There are no crimes and no criminals in these days. What is the use of having brains in our profession? I know well that I have it in me to make my name famous. No man lives or has ever lived who has brought the same amount of study and of natural talent to the detection of crime which I have done. And what is the result? There is no crime to detect, or, at most, some bungling villainy with a motive so transparent that even a Scotland Yard official can see through it. ↗

— Arthur Conan Doyle

#crime-solving #criminals #detectives #sherlock-holmes #superiority

In the detective story, as in its mirror image, the Quest for the Grail, maps (the ritual of space) and timetables (the ritual of time) are desirable. Nature should reflect its human inhabitants, i.e., it should be the Great Good Place; for the more Eden-like it is, the greater the contradiction of murder. The country is preferable to the town, a well-to-do neighborhood (but not too well-to-do-or there will be a suspicion of ill-gotten gains) better than a slum. The corpse must shock not only because it is a corpse but also because, even for a corpse, it is shockingly out of place, as when a dog makes a mess on a drawing room carpet." (The guilty vicarage: Notes on the detective story, by an addict, Harper's Magazine, May 1948) ↗

— W.H. Auden

#detective-stories #mysteries #setting #writing #nature

And then I thought that I had to be like Sherlock Holmes and I had to detach my mind at will to a remarkable degree so that I did not notice how much it was hurting inside my head. ↗

— Mark Haddon

#sherlock-holmes

Danger is the snack food of a true sleuth. ↗

— Mac Barnett

#detectives #middle-grade #proverbs #quips #sayings

I have never read horror, nor do I consider The Exorcist to be such, but rather as a suspenseful supernatural detective story, or paranormal police procedural. ↗

— William Peter Blatty

#detective #detective story #exorcist #horror #i