Detective Noir Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Detective Noir. Here they are! All 83 of them:

Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.
Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep (Philip Marlowe, #1))
You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that, oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell. Me, I was part of the nastiness now. Far more a part of it than Rusty Regan was.
Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep (Philip Marlowe, #1))
My friend and business partner, Gerald Peyton was 12 minutes late to the funeral. I’d reminded him it started at 2 p.m. “Yeah, yeah, Frank,” he said. “I’ll be there. Just be sure you make it.” Well, here I sat on my thumbs, and he was the no-show. He stopped at a bar and got sloshed, I thought.
Ed Lynskey (Death Car (P.I. Frank Johnson Mystery #7))
Listen, you might as well learn now that life’s nothin’ but a dirt sandwich and save yourself a lot of time.
A.G. Russo (O'SHAUGHNESSY INVESTIGATIONS, INC.: The Cases Nobody Wanted)
She’s a cop’s wife. She understands what her husband does for a living,” the priest said.
A.G. Russo (O'SHAUGHNESSY INVESTIGATIONS, INC.: The Cases Nobody Wanted)
When those we care about are weakest, that’s when we must be strong for them.
A.G. Russo (O'SHAUGHNESSY INVESTIGATIONS, INC.: The Cases Nobody Wanted)
A check girl in peach-bloom Chinese pajamas came over to take my hat and disapprove of my clothes. She had eyes like strange sins.
Raymond Chandler (The High Window (Philip Marlowe, #3))
Bina, thank you. Bina, listen, this guy. His name wasn't Lasker. This guy-' She puts a hand to his mouth. She has not touched him in three years. It probably would be too much to say that he feels the darkness lift at the touch of her fingertips against his lips. But it shivers, and light bleeds in among the cracks.
Michael Chabon (The Yiddish Policemen's Union)
So that's the way you scientific detectives work. My god! for a fat, middle-aged, hard-boiled, pig-headed guy, you've got the vaguest way of doing things I ever heard of.
Dashiell Hammett (Red Harvest (The Continental Op #1))
Being a Berlin cop in 1942 was a little like putting down mousetraps in a cage full of tigers.
Philip Kerr
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...
David Videcette (The Theseus Paradox (DI Jake Flannagan, #1))
Because noir isn’t really a new thing at all. It’s just a fairy tale with guns. Your hardscrabble detective is nothing more than a noble knight with a cigarette and a disease where his heart should be. He talks prettier, that’s all. He’s no less idealistic—there’re good women and bad women, good jobs and bad jobs. Justice and truth are always worth seeking. He pulls his fedora down like the visor on a suit of armour. He serves his lord faithfully whether he wants to or not. And he is in thrall to the idea of a woman. It’s just that in detective stories, women are usually dead before the curtain goes up. In fairy tales, they’re usually alive.
Catherynne M. Valente (Radiance)
It was a Friday night. I was tooling home from the Mexican border in a light blue convertible and a dark blue mood.
Ross Macdonald (The Lew Archer Omnibus)
The dentist swiveled on his heels and disappeared, leaving me there to massage my jaw back into feeling after its brief, masochistic marriage to the top of my wooden desk.
Jonathan Lethem (Gun, With Occasional Music)
Gerald and Chet left town for the Peyton family reunion held this August below Tappahannock on the Northern Neck. Gerald invited me to go along, but I thanked my best friend and business partner. Shutting down things was bad for our bottom line. So, I stayed put and minded the office.
Ed Lynskey (Bent Halo)
I'm a detective, but nuns could stonewall Sam Spade into an asylum
Dennis Lehane (A Drink Before the War (Kenzie & Gennaro, #1))
His belly was flabby, and it got softer every time I hit it. I hit it often.
Carroll John Daly (Race Williams' Double Date and Other Stories)
I said: ‘All right, talk, but do you mind putting the gun away? My wife doesn't care, but I'm pregnant.
Dashiell Hammett (The Thin Man)
He was dignity distorted, bravery become knavery, sanctimoniousness masking sin. He was a mirror, jeering at the subject it reflected. Yet so muted were the jeers, so delicate the inaccuracies of delineation, that they evaded detection. True and false were blended together. The false was merely an extended shadow of the true.
Jim Thompson (Swell-Looking Babe (Mulholland Classic))
Expect the unexpected like a chain smoking, hard drinking, monochrome world dwelling Noir Detective
Dean Cavanagh
She walks into my life legs first, a long drink of water in the desert of my thirties. Her shoes are red; her eyes are green. She's an Italian flag in occupied territory, and I fall for her like Paris. She mixes my metaphors like a martini and serves up my heart tartare. They all do. Every time. They have to. It's that kind of story.
Catherynne M. Valente (The Bread We Eat in Dreams)
Whatever you are thinking, your thoughts are surely about something other than the word with which this sentence will end. But even as you hear these very words echoing in your very head, and think whatever thoughts they inspire, your brain is using the word it is reading right now and the words it read just before to make a reasonable guess about the identity of the word it will read next, which is what allows you to read so fluently.4 Any brain that has been raised on a steady diet of film noir and cheap detective novels fully expects the word night to follow the phrase It was a dark and stormy, and thus when it does encounter the word night, it is especially well prepared to digest it. As long as your brain’s guess about the next word turns out to be right, you cruise along happily, left to right, left to right, turning black squiggles into ideas, scenes, characters, and concepts, blissfully unaware that your nexting brain is predicting the future of the sentence at a fantastic rate. It is only when your brain predicts badly that you suddenly feel avocado.
Daniel Todd Gilbert (Stumbling on Happiness)
In near panic, I craned my neck to gaze over the cabin’s roofline a bursting fireball.
Ed Lynskey (The Blue Cheer (P.I. Frank Johnson #3))
Now take it easy. This is a gun I have at your back. Don't you feel it?" I felt it. I took it easy.
Ross Macdonald (The Drowning Pool (Lew Archer, #2))
It all started when she walked into my office that night unannounced. She told me she was in trouble. So I asked what kind. She said it was of the killing kind. Wanted to know if I could be trusted. I said up to a point, depending on who got killed.
Oliver Dean Spencer (Tell Me That You Love Me)
There was nothing like the cold, heavy steel of a gun, the soft moan of an appreciative woman or the sharp burn of a good single malt to make a man grateful to be alive. Tonight, with his gun gone and his sex life a wasteland, Dash had to settle for whiskey.
Amy Andrews (Limbo (The Joy Valentine Mysteries, #1))
about Tommy, you went through your whole life craving these little pockets of time and missing them for more time than you had them.
Lily Gardner (A Bitch Called Hope (Lennox Cooper, #1))
Ah ha!' the Doc screeched suddenly, wheeling around. ''The salicylic acid! Maybe it SHOULD have been heated first!
Clare Havens (The Secret Formula (Bella Street Mysteries, #1))
After being dry for a couple a weeks, three cocktails went down quicker than a boner in a busted rubber.
Brian Azzarello (100 Bullets, Vol. 5: The Counterfifth Detective)
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 (The Blue Cheer (P.I. Frank Johnson #3))
I gave chase, and he took a shot at me, so I did the only thing I could in the circumstances…. I stabbed him in the shoulder.
Kerry Greenwood (Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries Bundle, Books 1-4)
There was fear too. It moved through his body like an anaconda grown fat and slow on discarded rinds and terror.
John Guzlowski (Suitcase Charlie: A Noir Crime Thriller (Hank & Marvin - Chicago Detectives Book 1))
The tin pan notes of a piano drift faintly into the night. A man curses and a window slams. Far distant an ash can clatters on stone and the almost human screech of a cat pierces the night.
Carroll John Daly (The Snarl of the Beast (Race Williams #1))
A Dick and Jane story written in blood and battered bone. See Spot. See Spot run. See Spot run from a gaping chest wound. Run Spot run. See Detective smear Spot into a baggy for DNA testing.
J.E. Mac (Damaged Good)
There were men in their fifties, men who take a stab at fitness, men who try. They may not look young, but they still look viable. Lammers wasn't one of those. Lammers was one of those crack-in-the-ass guys ten months pregnant with a beer baby.
Lily Gardner (A Bitch Called Hope (Lennox Cooper, #1))
Shouldering the duffel bag with the Marine Corps bulldog, Old Man knocked Jan's photo off the bed table. He turned to stone staring down at the photo. His face then splintered into hurt. Tears seeped into his eyes. He grappled for the nearest bedpost and slumped forward on extended arms. His shoulders jerked and head sagged a little while his heart broke. Old Man cried the mute cry of men of his generation.
Ed Lynskey (The Blue Cheer (P.I. Frank Johnson #3))
An historian is a kind detective in search of the fact — remote or otherwise - that brings to a set of events apparently unconnected with each other, the link that unites them, their justification, their logic. You cannot imagine what great delights this profession affords. It’s as if, in every incunablum, consumed by worms and steeped in boredom, in every inarticulate scrawl, in every collection of forgotten chronicles, there presides a mischievous sprite, winking at you, who at the appropriate time confers on you your reward in the form of renewed wonder.
Jacques Yonnet (Paris Noir: The Secret History of a City)
The Land of Civilian was a dry bitter place where you sat in your car staring at drawn curtains and closed doors for hours on end, and where everything was a big, freaking secret.
Lily Gardner (A Bitch Called Hope (Lennox Cooper, #1))
that was the thing about luck, its laws were those of scarcity.
Lily Gardner (A Bitch Called Hope (Lennox Cooper, #1))
When a beautiful blonde asks, you don't say no.
V.T. Davy (Black Art)
Normally, I don't take to drinking so early in the morning, but I bend the rules when I get my ass kicked before sunrise."--Thomas Morelli
C.J. Fella (Rise of the Black Hand: The Case Files of Thomas Morelli (The Black Hand, #1))
Faith doesn't move mountains, Detective. It just obscures the view.
Corey Redekop (The Exile Book of New Canadian Noir)
Billie was hoping to get these two alive but was feeling rapidly less stuck on the idea.
Tara Moss (The War Widow (Billie Walker Mystery, #1))
His voice was the elaborately casual voice of the tough guy in pictures. Pictures have made them all like that.
Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep and Other Novels)
You do know I’m not psychic, right?’ Dash looked down at her. ‘Joy...you do know that normal people don’t see ghosts, right?
Amy Andrews (Limbo (The Joy Valentine Mysteries, #1))
I was a licensed investigator who knocked off somebody who needed knocking off bad and he couldn’t get to me. So I was a murderer by definition and all the law could do was shake its finger.
Mickey Spillane (The Mike Hammer Collection, Volume 1: I,the Jury / My Gun is Quick / Vengeance is Mine!)
It’s not like the movies. There are rarely gunshots or explosions, bad guys hunting you down. You follow a lead to where it takes you. Most times it takes you to a dead end and you have to return to the beginning and follow another. Usually, you have to follow dozens of leads before you get anywhere. But, sometimes, you get lucky, and every door you open leads you to another until, finally, you stumble upon the truth. It’s not about justice, you see, or money—God knows it’s not about money. It’s about bringing the truth to light. It’s not glamorous, but it makes the world a little more truthful a place. That’s enough for me.
Philip Elliott (Porno Valley)
So you shoot people," she said quietly. "You're a killer." "Me? How?" "The papers and the police fixed it up nicely. But I don't believe everything I read." "Oh, you think I accounted for Geiger - or Brody-or both of them." She didn't say anything. "I didn't have to," I said. "I might have. I suppose, and got away with it. Neither of them would have hesitated to throw lead at." "That makes you a killer at heart, like all cops." "Oh, nuts.
Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep (Philip Marlowe, #1))
His most characteristic detective stories end with the realization that no rational account of events is possible, and his suspense stories tend to close with terror not dissipated but omnipresent, like God. ("Introduction")
Francis M. Nevins Jr. (Darkness At Dawn)
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 (The Blue Cheer (P.I. Frank Johnson #3))
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")
Francis M. Nevins Jr. (Night and Fear: A Centenary Collection of Stories by Cornell Woolrich (Otto Penzler Book))
From Chapter 1: The main rub was the lack of RnR and I burned out. Three years and three stripes later, I ejected from the MP Corps, vowing I'd never do police or criminal investigative work again. Instead, I returned home when I should've learned better.
Ed Lynskey (Pelham Fell Here (P.I. Frank Johnson #1))
He was wearing a gleaming cream-coloured linen suit, and a Panama hat. The weirdest thing about this was that he was not the most outlandish-looking person in the room by a long way. Not that Little Miss Dresses-Like-Bogart over here has a right to complain
Alexis Hall (Shadows & Dreams (Kate Kane, Paranormal Investigator, #2))
Looking back, I know that the man possessed no gift of prophecy; he simply worked to assure his own future, while I skated uncertainly toward mine. It was his flat-voiced "Cherchez la femme" that still haunts me. Because our partnership was nothing but a bungling road to the Dahlia. And in the end, she was to own the two of us completely.
James Ellroy (The Black Dahlia (L.A. Quartet, #1))
She told me she was 17 going on 22, when she left home to find a new life in the city. She wanted to get into acting and be a big star someday. I said that was swell but a tough racket to break into. She said she knew that going in. She thought maybe she'd get a lucky break and go from there. I told her lucky breaks always came with a price.
Oliver Dean Spencer (Tell Me That You Love Me)
Calvino remembered he had no food in the house and would have to go shopping on Sukhumvit Road. Then he planned to crawl into his bed and sleep, the kind of deep sleep without dreams or hopes, a sleep without regrets, without knowing or thinking how things got the way they are or how occasional fragments of decency escaped the forces of gravity.
Christopher G. Moore
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.
Ed Lynskey (The Zinc Zoo (P.I. Frank Johnson #5))
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 (The Fantastic Stories of Cornell Woolrich (Alternatives SF Series))
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.
Ed Lynskey (After the Big Noise (P.I. Frank Johnson #6))
In the official police account, the plumber was shot and robbed on the street. Not true—guys stick together—the detective didn't want the victim's wife to know he was flagrante delicto with a prostitute when wounded. I didn't want her hurt or embarrassed either. She figured it out herself. I met her later, after their divorce, and she brought up the subject. The hospital returned her injured husband's garments. She was washing them when she realized that, although there were a number of bullet holes in his body, there were none in his clothes.
Edna Buchanan (The Corpse Had a Familiar Face: Covering Miami, America's Hottest Beat)
Dash shoved his hands on his hips and looked down into the bowl. ‘You gave my fish pink rocks?’ he said as he turned to face her. Joy shrugged. ‘I didn’t really look at the colour I just grabbed the nearest bag.’ ‘It had to be pink?’ ‘There’s some blue as well.’ He looked into the bowl again. ‘Not really.’ Joy couldn’t believe she was having a conversation about pink rocks when the bigger question of what the hell he’d found out about the robberies was still unanswered. ‘You think it’s going to turn Ralph gay?’ she asked sweetly. ‘Given that he’s living his life out solo it’s kind of a moot question, don’t you think?’ ‘You’re right, I think he needs a girlfriend. Or a boyfriend.’ ‘With those rocks? I think he needs Fishtank Barbie in there.’ ‘Is your masculinity threatened because your fish has pink rocks?’ Dash folded his arms. ‘He’s a bloke. He doesn’t do pink.’ Joy glanced at the bowl. ‘It works,’ she said. ‘It...blends.’ ‘He’s orange,’ Dash said. ‘Since when have pink and orange gone together?
Amy Andrews (Limbo (The Joy Valentine Mysteries, #1))
I like two men, two guns that kind of thing, I don't do subtle.
C.S. Boag (The Hood with No Hands (Mister Rainbow, #1))
When you write, you start with what you know and build from there. I knew a little something about the border, Texas and Mexico from my journalism days. Knew some cops and redneck outlaws, too. And I knew I wanted to write a noirish detective novel. So I started with that and went from there. Out popped Ed Earl Burch, Carla Sue Cantrell and THE LAST SECOND CHANCE: An Ed Earl Burch Novel.
Jim Nesbitt (The Last Second Chance (Ed Earl Burch, #1))
I've always thought hard-boiled detective novels an American art form. At their best, they're more than who-dun-its or thrillers, they're vehicles for a writer's observations about culture, politics, philosophy, music, history and a time or a place. Or life, it’s ownself. When you read James Ellroy, Dashiell Hammett or James Lee Burke, their stories are always about far more than good guys chasing bad guys. That’s the kind of book I wanted to write. Still do.
Jim Nesbitt
When a book, any sort of book, reaches a certain intensity of artistic performance, it becomes literature. That intensity may be a matter of style, situation, character, emotional tone, or idea, or half a dozen other things. It may also be a perfection of control over the movement of a story similar to the control a great pitcher has over the ball. That is to me what you have more than anything else and more than anyone else. . . . The character that lasts is an ordinary guy with some extraordi-nary qualities. Perry Mason is the perfect detective because he has the intellectual approach of the juridical mind and at the same time the restless quality of the adventurer who won’t stay put. I think he is just about perfect. So let’s not have any more of that phooey about “as literature my stuff still stinks.” Who says so—William Dean Howells? Raymond Chandler to Erle Stanley Gardner, 1946
Richard B. Schwartz (Nice and Noir: Contemporary American Crime Fiction (Volume 1))
Why did I throw in with him? I suppose we Irish had a mule-headed loyalty baked into our DNA. I could rely on one bedrock truth. Gerald had my back, no matter how lopsided the odds turned. No truer measure of friendship existed to my way of thinking.
Ed Lynskey (Death Car (P.I. Frank Johnson Mystery #7))
Do you want me to see what I can find out? Nose around, tap into the grapevine, keep my ear to the ground?" Nikki grinned and added, "I've been reading a lot of noir detective novels lately. Please say I can.
Tamara Berry (Buried in a Good Book (By the Book Mysteries, #1))
Kit Zai’s a cop, now a victim of the newly established anticorruption agency, ICAC. Unlike its numerous predecessors which would go away after getting paid, the ICAC seems to mean business, and has caused a financial crisis in the force. Many, especially plainclothes detectives like Kit, have started bouncing at nightclubs and gambling dens and whatever to sustain a lifestyle they had long taken for granted. The same mix of cops and thugs are now hanging out at the same dumps under a different symbiotic arrangement. A comedian once suggested solving the triad problem by recruiting more police: The law of conservation tells us that having one more cop means one less thug on the street.
Jason Y. Ng (Hong Kong Noir)
Through his opened bedroom window, he noticed that the night sky had turned a crimson red. The moon, punctured by hues of cerulean blue, hung precariously over the withering willow trees that lined the riverbank, located several hundred yards away. The storm predicted by the forecasters was heading his way.
Oliver Dean Spencer (Call of the Nightingale (A James Cartwright PI Mystery - Book 2))
HE FELL DOWN HARD—stone-cold dead, next to my feet. It didn’t take much—just a pull of the trigger. The way I figured; a bullet always had its way of settling things. It asked no questions. Just did what it was told. And I hadn’t planned on resolving my disagreement with the Thin Man that way. But he left me no choice. He pulled his Luger, deciding that one of his .28s was the only way to resolve the issue. Trouble was, he missed. But a .22 from my Colt didn’t.
Oliver Dean Spencer (The Case of the Runaway Orangutan (James Cartwright Pi))
A woman could do a lot of crazy things for a pair of fine-looking dimples.
Amy Andrews (Limbo (The Joy Valentine Mysteries, #1))
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.
Ed Lynskey
Tailing someone is like maintaining a relationship: you keep at it until they give you the slip, or until they confirm everything you suspect them of.
Mark Crutchfield (The Last Best Gift: Eye Witnesses to the Celebrity Sabbath Massacre)
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?
Ed Lynskey (After the Big Noise (P.I. Frank Johnson #6))
Making her debut in 1947, Black Canary was the archetype of the new Film Noir era heroine. Originally, Black Canary was a mysterious female vigilante, who played the role of criminal in order to infiltrate the underworld and bring its gangsters to justice. A gorgeous blonde in a low cut black swimsuit, bolero jacket and fishnet tights, Black Canary was actually Dinah Drake, a florist who wore her black hair tied in a bun, and sensible, high-necked blouses. When trouble brewed, Dinah slipped into her fishnets and pinned on a blonde wig to become the gutsy, karate chopping Black Canary. But Dinah had another incentive to lead a secret life. A roguishly handsome private detective named Larry Lance became a frequent customer in Dinah’s florist shop. He had a knack for getting into trouble, and Dinah would usually end up switching into her Black Canary guise to rescue him.
Mike Madrid (The Supergirls: Fashion, Feminism, Fantasy, and the History of Comic Book Heroines)
Sally the Sleuth” was a new twist on the usual format, and not just because it was a comic strip. From pulp novels to film noir, detective stories were hugely popular in the 1930s, and the women who appeared in them tended to fall into two categories. Some were assistants to the detective or, very rarely, detectives themselves, innocent women who needed men’s help to get the job done. Others were femme fatales, women on the side of evil who relied on their feminine wiles to steer good men wrong. With Sally, Barreaux combined both roles into a female detective who was willing to use her sexuality to nab crooks.
Tim Hanley (Sally the Sleuth)
This is the best book ever written on its subject. Granted being the only such book takes a lot of the steam out of that accomplishment.
Robert Escobar (Saps, Blackjacks and Slungshots: A History of Forgotten Weapons)
Tinkie had insisted on, and paid for, the frosted-glass door that said Delaney Detective Agency. Classic noir. The only classy thing about our digs.
Carolyn Haines (Bones of a Feather (Sarah Booth Delaney, #11))
The Stormcrow City is just a big meat grinder; People get in on one end, and comes out on another. We're just turning the handle.
Mladen Đorđević (Svetioničar - Pritajeno zlo (Utočište #2))
THE POUNDING RAIN HAD STOPPED as suddenly as it had begun. Sheets of silver green neon clung hungrily to the moist black asphalt like some reptilian skin.
Oliver Dean Spencer (Tell Me That You Love Me)
Just making the cement now, only takes five minutes." "I did it in four once," Pauly whispered boastfully to Johnny, "but if I'm honest, I was never completely happy that it set properly." "Who was it for?" "Big Joe the Hammer." "Oh, yeah," Johnny nodded. "Didn't I hear he was spotted in Vegas a few weeks back?" Pauly nodded morosely. "Yeah, like I said, I didn't think it had set properly.
Clare Havens (The Secret Formula (Bella Street Mysteries, #1))
Ah ha!" the Doc screeched suddenly, wheeling around. "The salicylic acid! Maybe it SHOULD have been heated first!
Clare Havens (The Secret Formula (Bella Street Mysteries, #1))
Simon's brain tried to comprehend the situation. 'Was an international supermodel really holding Doc Gutson, leader of the infamous Bloodworth Gang, captive?
Clare Havens (Doc Gutson's Revenge (Bella Street Mysteries, #2))