Detectives Quotes

“Dr. Watson's summary list of Sherlock Holmes's strengths and weaknesses:

"1. Knowledge of Literature: Nil.
2. Knowledge of Philosophy: Nil.
3. Knowledge of Astronomy: Nil.
4. Knowledge of Politics: Feeble.
5. Knowledge of Botany: Variable. Well up in belladonna, opium, and poisons generally. Knows nothing of practical gardening.
6. Knowledge of Geology: Practical but limited. Tells at a glance different soils from each other. After walks has shown me splashes upon his trousers, and told me by their colour and consistence in what part of London he had received them.
7. Knowledge of Chemistry: Profound.
8. Knowledge of Anatomy: Accurate but unsystematic.
9. Knowledge of Sensational Literature: Immense. He appears to know every detail of every horror perpetrated in the century.
10. Plays the violin well.
11. Is an expert singlestick player, boxer, and swordsman.
12. Has a good practical knowledge of British law.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet

“The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Blue Cross: A Father Brown Mystery

“I don't mind your showing me your legs. They're very swell legs and it's a pleasure to make their acquaintace. I don't mind if you don't like my manners. They're pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter nights.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

“Yeah. Floyd is his batman."
His what?"
Batman, like in the British army, each officer had a batman, a personal servant."
You spend too much time reading, Spenser. You know more stuff that don't make you money than anybody I know.”
― Robert B. Parker, Mortal Stakes

“Beyond the obvious facts that he has at some time done manual labour, that he takes snuff, that he is a Freemason, that he has been in China, and that he has done a considerable amount of writing lately, I can deduce nothing else.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Red-Headed League

“I pulled the MG in beside him at the curb and he got in.
"This thing ain't big enough for either one of us," he said. "When you getting something that fits?"
"It goes with my preppy look," I said. "You get one of these, they let you drive around the north shore, watch polo, anything you want."
I let the clutch in and turned right on Dartmouth.
"How you get laid in one of these?" Hawk said.
"You just don't understand preppy," I said. "I know it's not your fault. You're only a couple generations out of the jungle. I realize that. But if you're preppy you don't get laid in a car."
"Where do you get laid if you preppy?"
I sniffed. "One doesn't," I said.
"Preppies gonna be outnumbered in a while," Hawk said.”
― Robert B. Parker

“Has anyone ever told you," I said, "that you coalesce reality?"
"No. They only say that I'm good in the sack."
"They are accurate but limited," I said. "And if you give me their names I'll kill them.”
― Robert B. Parker

“I took my .38 out and looked to see that there were bullets in all the proper places. I knew there would be, but it did no harm to be careful. And I'd seen Clint Eastwood do it once in the movies.”
― Robert B. Parker, Small Vices

“Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor.”
― Raymond Chandler

“Perhaps this is the purpose of detective investigations, real and fictional -- to transform sensation, horror and grief into a puzzle, and then to solve the puzzle, to make it go away. 'The detective story,' observed Raymond Chandler in 1949, 'is a tragedy with a happy ending.' A storybook detective starts by confronting us with a murder and ends by absolving us of it. He clears us of guilt. He relieves us of uncertainty. He removes us from the presence of death.”
― Kate Summerscale, The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective

“How about the wrong crowd," I said. "You getting in with them?"
"Not much luck," Paul said. "I'm trying like hell, but the wrong crowd doesn't seem to want me."
"Don't quit," I said. "You want something, you go after it. I was nearly thirty-five before I could get in with wrong crowd.”
― Robert B. Parker

“You surprise me, Hastings. Do you not know that all celebrated detectives have brothers who would be even more celebrated than they are were it not for constitutional indolence?”
― Agatha Christie, The Big Four

“I couldn't have made a better shot, if I had been one of those detectives who see a chap walking along the street and deduce that he is a retired manufacturer of poppet valves named Robinson with rheumatism in one arm, living at Clapham.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, The Code of the Woosters

“The two men sat silent for a little, and then Lord Peter said:

"D'you like your job?"

The detective considered the question, and replied:

"Yes—yes, I do. I know it to be useful, and I am fitted to it. I do it quite well—not with inspiration, perhaps, but sufficiently well to take a pride in it. It is full of variety and it forces one to keep up to the mark and not get slack. And there's a future to it. Yes, I like it. Why?"

"Oh, nothing," said Peter. "It's a hobby to me, you see. I took it up when the bottom of things was rather knocked out for me, because it was so damned exciting, and the worst of it is, I enjoy it—up to a point. If it was all on paper I'd enjoy every bit of it. I love the beginning of a job—when one doesn't know any of the people and it's just exciting and amusing. But if it comes to really running down a live person and getting him hanged, or even quodded, poor devil, there don't seem as if there was any excuse for me buttin' in, since I don't have to make my livin' by it. And I feel as if I oughtn't ever to find it amusin'. But I do.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Whose Body?

“Very strange things comes to our knowledge in families, miss; bless your heart, what you would think to be phenomenons, quite ... Aye, and even in gen-teel families, in high families, in great families ... and you have no idea ... what games goes on!”
― Charles Dickens, Bleak House

“The detective story, as created by Poe, is something as specialised and as intellectual as a chess problem, whereas the best English detective fiction has relied less on the beauty of the mathematical problem and much more on the intangible human element. [...] In The Moonstone the mystery is finally solved, not altogether by human ingenuity, but largely by accident. Since Collins, the best heroes of English detective fiction have been, like Sergeant Cuff, fallible.”
― T.S. Eliot, Selected Essays: 1917-1932

“Thus, by science I mean, first of all, a worldview giving primacy to reason and observation and a methodology aimed at acquiring accurate knowledge of the natural and social world. This methodology is characterized, above all else, by the critical spirit: namely, the commitment to the incessant testing of assertions through observations and/or experiments — the more stringent the tests, the better — and to revising or discarding those theories that fail the test. One corollary of the critical spirit is fallibilism: namely, the understanding that all our empirical knowledge is tentative, incomplete and open to revision in the light of new evidence or cogent new arguments (though, of course, the most well-established aspects of scientific knowledge are unlikely to be discarded entirely).

. . . I stress that my use of the term 'science' is not limited to the natural sciences, but includes investigations aimed at acquiring accurate knowledge of factual matters relating to any aspect of the world by using rational empirical methods analogous to those employed in the natural sciences. (Please note the limitation to questions of fact. I intentionally exclude from my purview questions of ethics, aesthetics, ultimate purpose, and so forth.) Thus, 'science' (as I use the term) is routinely practiced not only by physicists, chemists and biologists, but also by historians, detectives, plumbers and indeed all human beings in (some aspects of) our daily lives. (Of course, the fact that we all practice science from time to time does not mean that we all practice it equally well, or that we practice it equally well in all areas of our lives.)”
― Alan Sokal

“We would never call inexplicable little insights 'hunches,' for fear of drawing the universe's attention. But they happened, and you knew you had been in the proximity of one that had come through if you saw a detective kiss his or her fingers and touch his or her chest where a pendant to Warsha, patron saint of inexplicable inspirations, would, theoretically, hang.”
― China Miéville, The City & the City

“We split a bottle of Norman cider. Not everybody sells Norman cider by the bottle.
"Has a European feel" Susan said.
"That sounds terrific" I said. "Can I have one?"
Susan grinned at me. "How did you ever get to be so big without growing up?" she said.
"Iron self-control" I said.”
― Robert B. Parker, Ceremony

“...You have any suggestions, make them. I'm in charge but humble. No need to salute when you see me."
Fraser said, "Mind if we snicker every once in a while behind your back?"
"Hell, no," I said. "Everyone else does.”
― Robert B. Parker, The Widening Gyre

“Thank you sir," she said. "I hope that your friend feels better soon."
I shrugged. "The ways of the Lord" I said, "are often dark, but never pleasant.”
― Robert B. Parker, The Widening Gyre

“After a while I got hungry and went to the kitchen. There was nothing to eat. I drank another beer and looked again, and found half a loaf of whole wheat bread behind the beer in the back of the refrigerator...”
― Robert B. Parker, Mortal Stakes

“You seem to have quite a taste for discussing these horrible subjects," she said, rather scornfully; "you ought to have been a detective police officer."

"I sometimes think I should have been a good one."

"Why?"

"Because I am patient.”
― Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley's Secret

“Detective Inspector Eccles sighed. He may ordinarily have met his sigh with the question of why the newly appointed Superintendent Dickinson was turning up to this late hour crime scene, he may also ordinarily question why his superior officer was dressed as Julius Caesar, in full tunic and green leafy wreath, yet ever since the new and youngest-ever-appointed superintendent had arrived at the Met it had been all too clear he was an officer who didn’t quite do things by the eBook.”
― Tom Conrad

“Even without Lotty's adjuration, I would have stuck to side streets: simply moving my head between the side mirrors started the throbbing in my eye again. Spenser never complained about pain, I reminded myself, nor Marlowe, let alone Kate Fansler. Suck it up Warshawski, don't let those WASPS show up the Pollacks.”
― Sara Paretsky, Brush Back

“His thick eyebrows drew together in a familiar frown. The blood pooled around the half-body was a bright cherry red. He bent to look closer at the woman's face. It was flushed pink, even following this horrible death. Norris's reaction was recorded by a crime writer and would later become part of his often theatrical legend. He walked over to the waiting detectives and announced, 'Boys, you can't hold this man for murder.”
― Deborah Blum, The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York

“Si ha leído usted alguna novela de detectives, Susana, debe saber que el criminal es siempre el hombre menos sospechoso.”
― Agatha Christie, Earthlight

“El otro testigo estrella (que el capitán Charles me presentó) era un desgarbado hombre llamado Robert. Él se encargaba de todas las refacciones menores en el edificio. Era sordomudo de nacimiento. Nos entregó un papel. En esa hoja amarillenta, con su fea letra, describió lo que había visto la noche anterior.”
― Diego Armando Arciniegas Malagón, El detective Johan Jarek

“Nielsen empezó a retroceder con su rehén. El policía y su captor caminaban muy lentamente, con dirección a las escaleras. Ese cuchillo en el cuello nos mantenía a varios metros de distancia.”
― Diego Armando Arciniegas Malagón, El detective Johan Jarek

“The worst does sometimes happen. As men we have to count on that possibility, have to arm ourselves against it, and above all we have to realize that since absurdities necessarily occur, and nowadays manifest themselves with more and more forcefulness, we can prevent ourselves from being destroyed by them and can make ourselves relatively comfortable upon this earth only if we humbly include these absurdities in our thinking, reckon with the inevitable fractures and distortions of human reason when it attempts honestly to deal with reality. We have to realize that without this knowledge we are in danger of making an absolute of absurdity, of taking it “in itself,” as though it were established somewhere outside the human mind; we would then be forced to regard the absurd as an error which it was within our power to avoid; on the basis of which illusion we might find ourselves executing the whole world out of a kind of defiant morality one we undertook to try to establish a flawless rational structure, for its very flawless perfection would be its deadly mendacity and a sign of the most frightful blindness.”
― Friedrich Dürrenmatt, The Pledge