Noir Novel Quotes

I don’t like anything pointing at me, dollface, that includes an umbrella, a finger, or a gun, got it?

Jamie’s eyes gleamed. “God forgive me, I want there to be a murderer after the Falconer family so we in the College feel less to blame.

He says it was tourists being careless, where I see a fiendishly clever murder attempt.” “Mr. McCarthy, you’d better explain.” “Patrick, please. You’ll be tempted to laugh. It was a banana skin.

  Mary fought a savage impulse to slam the door on the couple. But they were too interesting to ignore in the circumstances of the murder. She caught sight of Richard spitting out a mouthful of hair.

George’s utterance of the nest and the trap belonged to a bigger mystery she did not yet understand. One day I will, she promised herself. She would stake her life that those last words from her son would be solved by her. They were steppingstones into… whatever the wind and the stars and the valiant trees held for her.

Unbelievable and true. Anna Solokov is neither a frightened girl nor a criminal spider in the center of a huge web of drugs and god knows. No, that dangerous young woman could easily do both at different times, and to different people. No doubt that is part of George’s attraction to her. She is victim. Yet when necessary, or when it suits her, she is victimizer. Does he imagine he is battling for her soul?

I’ll tell the Chief and he’ll squash you like the little flea-ridden castrated cock you are.

Listen, you might as well learn now that life’s nothin’ but a dirt sandwich and save yourself a lot of time.

She’s a cop’s wife. She understands what her husband does for a living,” the priest said.

When those we care about are weakest, that’s when we must be strong for them.

You can use all the hundred dollar words you want,” said Vic, “women like that are like TNT. You go after their man, they’d sooner kill you than look at you.

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

And he never asked you about it?” “No, he never asked. If he had, I’m still not sure I would have told him.” “Told him what?” “That is was his baby.

He used his large shoulders and movements to impose his dominance over others as he strutted around but his facial expressions were a giveaway to people like Maeve who was born into a gritty group of native born fighting Irish. While many saw him as a man who worked his way up to power and influence and attained success that others fail to achieve, she saw him as a sham. He didn’t acquire loyalty by goodwill, but by corruption, fear, and loathing.

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...

Truth never sells; only lies.

Mrs. Moreland, I am now remanding you into the custody of the Maricopa County Sheriff ’s Office while you await your sentence. All bond is revoked. We are adjourned.

That can’t be right, I thought as my head dropped and my chin pressed against my throat. I didn’t do it!

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

After being dry for a couple a weeks, three cocktails went down quicker than a boner in a busted rubber.

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.

How many remember where they were when the war began on the 1st of September 1939? I remember. I should remember. I started it. My name is Robert Leroy Parker.

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.

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.

His voice was the elaborately casual voice of the tough guy in pictures. Pictures have made them all like that.

Did the new lamp work?” I asked. She smiled with a pleased nod. “Viola. Let there be light.

How the Hell is it we go to pick up Jenna Jameson and end up with the fucking chick from those Kill Bill movies?

We'll never know the exact number of victims of the Dirty War [Guerra Sucia]. My novel is noir, pulp fiction, but it's based on a real story.

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.

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")

But suspense presupposes uncertainty. No matter how nightmarish the situation, real suspense is impossible when we know in advance that the protagonist will prevail (as we would if Woolrich had used series characters) or will be destroyed. This is why, despite his congenital pessimism, Woolrich manages any number of times to squeeze out an upbeat resolution. Precisely because we can never know whether a particular novel or story will be light or dark, allegre or noir, his work remains hauntingly suspenseful. ("Introduction")

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.

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.

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.

The hallmarks of the noir style are fear, guilt and loneliness, breakdown and despair, sexual obsession and social corruption, a sense that the world is controlled by, malignant forces preying on us, a rejection of happy endings and a preference for resolutions heavy with doom, but always redeemed by a breathtakingly vivid poetry of word (if the work was a novel or story) or image (if it was a movie). ("Introduction")

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.

Literature is the extant body of written art. All novels belong to it. The value judgement concealed in distinguishing one novel as literature and another as genre vanishes with the distinction. Every readable novel can give true pleasure. Every novel read by choice is read because it gives true pleasure. Literature consists of many genres, including mystery, science fiction, fantasy, naturalism, realism, magical realism, graphic, erotic, experimental, psychological, social, political, historical, bildungsroman, romance, western, army life, young adult, thriller, etc., etc…. and the proliferating cross-species and subgenres such as erotic Regency, noir police procedural, or historical thriller with zombies. Some of these categories are descriptive, some are maintained largely as marketing devices. Some are old, some new, some ephemeral. Genres exist, forms and types and kinds of fiction exist and need to be understood: but no genre is inherently, categorically superior or inferior. (Hypothesis on Literature vs. Genre)

This may not be art as art commonly goes; the lack of discipline, of control, would seem to rule it out of that category. And yet Woolrich's lack of control over emotions is a crucial element in his work, not only because it intensifies the fragility and momentariness of love but also because it tears away the comfortable belief, evident in some of the greatest works of the human imagination such as Oedipus Rex, that nobility in the face of nothingness is possible. And if Woolrich's work is not art as commonly understood, there is an art beyond art, whose form is not the novel or story but the scream; and of this art Woolrich is beyond doubt a master. ("Introduction")

Alongside Martian Timeslip and The Man in the High Castle,” Dick told this author in 1981, “Sheep? is one of my three favorite novels.

Maybe these dreams of ours just floats away. Here we go again...changin' face.

Sur le siège˚, il a oublié˚ son petit manteau˚ noir. Louis prend le manteau et appelle : « Monsieur ! Vous avez oublié votre menton˚ ! le siège: seat oublier: to forget le manteau: coat le menton: chin

If any city was a study in noir et blanc—be it black-and-white photography, film, or literature—Paris was it. The French versions of all three techniques were born during the Age of Romanticism. So was the concept of the daredevil avenger-antihero of the noir crime novel genre, the so-called polar, a Parisian specialty I learned to love.

Parry said, “I’m a coward. I don’t like pain.” “We’re all cowards,” Coley said. “There’s no such thing as courage. There’s only fear. A fear of getting hurt and a fear of dying. That’s why the human race has lasted so long. You won’t

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.

uninformed skepticism is the domain of fools.

Part of my brain sometimes worked separately from the rest of it, and I often went along for the ride to see where it was taking me.

I stood in front of the black dress, staring it down. I felt like it had taken an aggressive stance against me instead of merely hanging limply from the hanger. It was like a scene from a film noir. One of us wasn’t going to make it out alive.

The stench of death and blood hit me hard. In the room's corner, blood had pooled and hardened over parts of the slated wood floor near the bedroom window. There was also blood spattered against the corner walls. The room was sparse, filled with the essentials of an old man. The bed looked slept in. A small painting in an ornate frame hung on the wall above it. It was a print from one of William Turner’s works, an English painter from the early 1980s. It depicted a ship, capsized with its crew in lifeboats struggling against a powerful storm.

On the wicker coffee table to her right stood a stack of romance novels, a monogrammed YETI tumbler, a bottle of 2004 Pino noir, and an AR-15. It was a whole mood.

A man begging for his life is a sonnet. That man screaming for it to end is a symphony.

Kenneth Oscuro ripped off 13 cartons of cigarettes from a bodega. He then turned around and swapped them, even up, at a pawnshop for a 12-inch cutthroat razor. He made it his most prized possession.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Sometimes in life you meet a femme fatale and you can refuse them nothing they treat you like dirt but even the dirt they dish out has a taste you can resist? From the novel 'Adventures of a Dark Duke: The Pin

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

And to think I could be at home cleaning the cat box," Esther Charlemagne said. "Watching for a Peeping Tom is so much better." ~ Chapter 2 The Night Shadow by Cheri Vause

You can’t read about someone’s life and click favorite and make one-sentence comments and call that a friendship.

Due diligence involves a lot of paperwork and sometimes more footwork than you could possibly imagine; hopefully you’ll find the process of getting the job done as fascinating as I do. Real-world puzzle-solving is always going to interest me more than any novel, escape room, or video game. I do believe that the truth is out there; there is an answer if you ask the right questions.

I found out long ago that the place where the law is apt to be abused most is right around a courthouse. – Jim Thompson

You are always waiting. If you have lost something, waiting will not bring it back. If you are hoping for redemption, waiting will ensure you never earn it.” from the novel Hotel Noir

How long can we close our hearts to the despised and dispossessed? What are our slums, our penitentiaries, and our refugee camps if not a reflection of our own lovelessness?” from the novel Hotel Noir

Cheap novels and cheap films about cheap people ran concurrent with American boosterism and yahooism and made a subversive point just by being. They described a fully existing fringe America and fed viewers and readers the demography of a Secret Pervert Republic. It was just garish enough to be laughed off as unreal and just pathetic enough to be recognizably human.

who like the taste of being hurt. That makes you lower than the mice and the roaches. At least they try to save their skins, they got a normal outlook. But you, you’re just a clown that ain’t funny. And that’s a sad picture, that’s the saddest picture of all. Like on the outside it’s the stupid crazy smile and inside it’s a gloomy place where all they play is the blues. He frowned.

I’d rather go broke giving enemas to house lizards than make money from customers like him. Old George made a fist and thrust it toward the water buffalo mounted on the wall above his head.

All yings are time rats, time bandits. Open their guts and what you find inside their digestive tract are the second and minutes of hundreds of men’s lives. Time cannibals. All those broken minute and hour hands just lying undigested in their stomach. It makes me want to drink.

Thais have a saying about a frog living inside a coconut shell. The frog believes that the world inside the shell is the whole universe. In the private investigation business, Vincent Calvino had clients who like the frog. What they saw from inside their shell blinded them, made them unable to solve a problem. So they hired Calvino. He knew the drill. Shells offered comfort and security. Leaving could be a dangerous business.

(Calvino) had long ago accepted that his business model as a private investigator in Bangkok needed to incorporate spirit house offerings, lizard and gecko yammering, fortune tellers’ predictions of auspicious days and times, and Chinese reading of faces and head shapes before any decision would be made. . .the day soon came when they no longer seemed crazy.

Just then someone called his name and he turned and saw the torn and colorless polo shirt, the slacks that couldn’t be patched any more. He saw the sunken-cheeked cadaver, the living waste of time and effort that added up to the face and body of his younger brother.

I sat atop Forêt Noire, who was acting strangely pompous and bossy around the other horses. I almost started to believe it was Forêt that was keeping me from riding any of the others.

Noir works, whether films, novels, or short stories, are existential, pessimistic tales about people, including(or especially) protagonists, who are seriously flawed and morally questionable.

I don’t know what got her into this kind of life. I know she isn’t made for it. She’s such a healthy girl, she’s full of living. She needs a guy. She needs a home. And kids. If they put her in prison, she’ll decay. I want to see her laughing. I want to see her bending over a stove. Wheeling a baby carriage down the street. I can’t see her behind bars. I can’t see that.

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.

All they needed for revenge was his mind, her body and one lucky night in Vegas.

She knew all the ways of building up a mark's confidence. She knew how to feed them a little of the sweetest bait whether it was sex or money or power, whatever it was that they adored the most. You were really feeding them the delicious poison of their own egos. You had to let them have a taste of it, and you had to promise them more. You had to make them believe that it would all come true.

Les électeurs avaient rejeté les hommes politiques en vrac : les vieux, les jeunes, les tout jeunes. Si, par le passé, les gens avaient reculé, horrifiés, devant ceux qui voulaient abattre l'État, à présent ils refusaient, dégoûtés, ceux qui l'avaient dévoré, comme autant de gros vers dans une pomme, sous prétexte de le servir à un titre ou à un autre. On aurait dit qu'une énorme vague noire avait déferlé : d'abord dissimulée sous les fastueux décors du pouvoir et sous une logorrhée aussi effrontée qu'arrogante, elle était devenue de plus en plus visible et s'était abattue sur tous les coins de l'Italie.

I have a Theory. It’s that an awful thing has happened – our cerebellum has not been correctly connected to our brain. This could be the worst mistake in our programming. Someone has made us badly. This is why our model ought to be replaced. If our cerebellum were connected to our brain, we would possess full knowledge of our own anatomy, of what was happening inside our bodies. Oh, we’d say to ourselves, the level of potassium in my blood has fallen. My third cervical vertebra is feeling tension. My blood pressure is low today, I must move about. Yesterday’s egg mayonnaise has sent my cholesterol level too high so I must watch what I eat today. We have this body of ours, a troublesome piece of luggage, we don’t really know anything about it and we need all sorts of Tools to find out about its most natural processes. Isn’t it scandalous that the last time a doctor wanted to check what was happening in my stomach he made me have a gastroscopy? I had to swallow a thick tube, and it took a camera to reveal the inside of my stomach to us. The only coarse and primitive Tool gifted us for consolation is pain. The angels, if they really do exist, must be splitting their sides laughing at us. Fancy being given a body and not knowing anything about it. There’s no instruction manual.

The best place to begin is with the Library of America’s two-volume collection, Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s & 40s and Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s. Together they include all the major writers as well as bring some lesser-known authors to a wider audience. In general chronological order, here are some depths to which you can lower yourself:

The Killer Inside Me is a chilling first-person story of an evil lawman, while Pop. 1280 is a strangely funny version of the same plot. Of all the noir writers, Thompson is the most popular today, in part because several of his novels, including The Grifters, were successfully adapted for film.