Hard Boiled Noir Quotes

He was a guy who talked with commas, like a heavy novel. Over the phone anyway.

The coffee shop smell was strong enough to build a garage on.

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.

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...

The old man had been tanned by the light of too many beer signs, and it just goes to show that you can’t live on three packs of Chesterfields and a fifth of bourbon a day without starting to drift far too fuckin’ wide in the turns.

I said: ‘All right, talk, but do you mind putting the gun away? My wife doesn't care, but I'm pregnant.

It was a Friday night. I was tooling home from the Mexican border in a light blue convertible and a dark blue mood.

His belly was flabby, and it got softer every time I hit it. I hit it often.

Human beings shouldn't have to enter such doors, shouldn't have to stay behind them. No moon ever entered there, no stars, no anything at all. They were worse than the grave, for in the grave is an absence of consciousness. And God, she reflected, ordered the grave for all of us; but God didn't order such burrows in a third-class New York City Hotel.

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.

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.

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.

When a beautiful blonde asks, you don't say no.

Miss Leary, do you mean to insinuate that I should go encouraging homo-sex-uality amongst these corpses?

Marlowe,” he said, even more earnestly, “I’ll try hard, but I don’t think I am going to like you.” “I’m screaming,” I said. “With rage and pain.

She's dead. So is your fat pansy. You can be dead, too, if you want.

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.

A quick butchers shows up Old Bill three-handed, also a particularly nasty female grass–-and if looks were acid baths the two she collects from us would reduce her to gristle quicker than Mrs. Durand-Deacon.

The room buzzes around us but we’re fixed on each other, engaged in a battle of who can deprecate me more. She obviously doesn’t believe such a man can exist and keeps at it, prodding and goading me like a fisherman harpooning an already beached whale.

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.

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.

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.

uninformed skepticism is the domain of fools.

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.

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.

look for him in Baker, or continue to Barstow.

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.

He had her buns up kneelin’, and he was wheelin’ and dealin’.

Out of the apartment houses come women who should be young but have faces like stale beer; men with pulled-down hats and quick eyes that look the street over behind the cupped hand that shields the match flame; worn intellectuals with cigarette coughs and no money in the bank; fly cops with granite faces and unwavering eyes; cokies and coke peddlers; people who look like nothing in particular and know it, and once in a while even men that actually go to work. But they come out early, when the wide cracked sidewalks are empty and still have dew on them.

He looked at the corner of the ceiling with an absent stare. I looked at him with a not so absent stare. He looked like a man who could be trusted with a secret—if it was his own secret.

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.

Jaundice and black crap ain't going to scare me off the juice, kid. When you grow up and walk into the shit-storm that's waiting for your out there," Rose waved her cigarette at the window, "you'll be chink-yellow and shittin' black too.

Annie stood up, walked into the kitchen, and returned with the bottle of George Dickel. She took a hard slug from the bottle, felt a kind of resolve seep into her bones, a noir-like, hard-boiled toughness. Alcohol, she suddenly understood, would solve this problem. It would create other, more pressing problems, but for now, steadily rising into inebriation, she felt like she could handle the situation at hand. She could deal with shit.

What I'm trying to do is save your ass, gorgeous.