Bulldog Drummond Quotes

The faults of women, children, servants, the weak, the indigent, and the ignorant are the faults of husbands, father, masters, the strong, the rich, and the learned." Wal!

it saves bother to get an animal to walk to the slaughterhouse rather than having to drag it there. And

Only a keen sense of public duty restrains me from plugging you where you sit, you ineffable swine.

know

There must have been some streak of romanticism in him, a feeling that he was going to be a Bulldog Drummond

They were representative of the poorer type of clerk—the type which Woodbines its fingers to a brilliant orange; the type that screams insults at a football referee on Saturday afternoon. And yet to the close observer something more might be read on their faces: a greedy, hungry look, a shifty untrustworthy look—the look of those who are jealous of everyone better placed than themselves, but who are incapable of trying to better their own position except by the relative method of dragging back their more fortunate acquaintances; the look of little men dissatisfied not so much with their own littleness as with the bigness of other people.

Of course the detectives are cleverer than us. We expect them to be. But that doesn’t mean they’re paragons of virtue. Holmes is depressed. Poirot is vain. Miss Marple is brusque and eccentric. They don’t have to be attractive. Look at Nero Wolfe who was so fat that he couldn’t even leave his New York home and had to have a custom-made chair to support his weight! Or Father Brown who had ‘a face as round and dull as a Norfolk dumpling . . . eyes as empty as the North Sea’. Lord Peter Wimsey, ex-Eton, ex-Oxford, is thin and seemingly weedy and sports a monocle. Bulldog Drummond might have been able to kill a man with his bare hands (and may have been the inspiration for James Bond) but he was no male model either. In fact H.C. McNeile hits the nail on the head when he writes that Drummond had ‘the fortunate possession of that cheerful type of ugliness which inspires immediate confidence in its owner’. We don’t need to like or admire our detectives. We stick with them because we have confidence in them.

Toff, the Baron, Sexton Blake, Bulldog Drummond