Detective Stories Quotes

“Ah! Madame, I reserve the explanations for the last chapter.”
― Agatha Christie, Evil Under the Sun

“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

“You have the Answer. Just get quiet enough to hear it. ~Pat Obuchowski”
― Laurie Stevens, The Dark Before Dawn

“To me, detective stories are a great solace, a sort of mental knitting, where it doesn't matter if you drop a stitch."

[From a letter to George Lyttelton]”
― Rupert Hart-Davis, Man of Letters: The Extraordinary Life and Times of Literary Impresario Rupert Hart-Davis

“The detective story is the normal recreation of noble minds.”
― Philip Guedalla, The Omnibus of Crime

“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

“I like a good murder that can't be found out. That is, of course it is very shocking, but I like to hear about it.”
― Emily Eden, The Semi-Detached House

“There is no mystery to happiness. Unhappy men are all alike. Some wound they suffered long ago, some wish denied, some blow to pride, some kindling spark of love put out by scorn -- or worse, indifference -- cleaves to them, or they to it, and so they live each day within a shroud of yesterdays. The happy man dies not look back. He doesn't look ahead. He lives in the present.”
― Jed Rubenfeld, The Interpretation of Murder

“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

“It seems that the Parisian Oulipo group has recently constructed a matrix of all possible murder-story situations and has found that there is still to be written a book in which the murderer is the reader.

Moral: there exist obsessive ideas, they are never personal; books talk among themselves, and any true detection should prove that we are the guilty party.”
― Umberto Eco, Postscript to the Name of the Rose

“I don't greatly care for passes this early in the morning.”
― Raymond Chandler

“In the detective story, as in its mirror image, the Quest for the Grail, maps (the ritual of space) and timetables (the ritual of time) are desirable. Nature should reflect its human inhabitants, i.e., it should be the Great Good Place; for the more Eden-like it is, the greater the contradiction of murder. The country is preferable to the town, a well-to-do neighborhood (but not too well-to-do-or there will be a suspicion of ill-gotten gains) better than a slum. The corpse must shock not only because it is a corpse but also because, even for a corpse, it is shockingly out of place, as when a dog makes a mess on a drawing room carpet."

(The guilty vicarage: Notes on the detective story, by an addict, Harper's Magazine, May 1948)”
― W.H. Auden

“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

“The mystery story is two stories in one: the story of what happened and the story of what appeared to happen.”
― Mary Roberts Rinehart

“Lady Sylvia McCordle: Mr Weissman -- Tell us about the film you're going to make.
Morris Weissman: Oh, sure. It's called "Charlie Chan In London". It's a detective story.
Mabel Nesbitt: Set in London?
Morris Weissman: Well, not really. Most of it takes place at a shooting party in a country house. Sort of like this one, actually. Murder in the middle of the night, a lot of guests for the weekend, everyone's a suspect. You know, that sort of thing.
Constance: How horrid. And who turns out to have done it?
Morris Weissman: Oh, I couldn't tell you that. It would spoil it for you.
Constance: Oh, but none of us will see it.”
― Julian Fellowes, Gosford Park: The Shooting Script

“Now that we can buy anything we want we seem to read detective stories.”
― Elizabeth Savage, The Last Night at the Ritz

“Like all really nice people, you have a weakness for detective stories, and feel that there are not enough of them. So, after all that you have done for me, the least that I can do for you is to write you one.”
― A.A. Milne, The Red House Mystery

“A three-pint problem”
― Melvyn Small, Holmes: Volume 1

“Do you mean to tell me, Superintendent, that this is one of those damned cases you get in detective stories where a man is killed in a locked room by some apparently supernatural agency.”
― Agatha Christie, Hercule Poirot's Christmas

“And there are still a number of people around who say that Hammett didn't write detective stories at all-merely hard-boiled chronicles of mean streets with a perfunctory mystery element dropped in like the olive in a martini. (The Simple Art of Murder)”
― Raymond Chandler, The Simple Art of Murder

“Style, you either have it or you don't, and if you have it, you have it all the time.”
― David Biagini, The Lovable Rogue Mysteries: Thirteen Tales Of Crime From The City

“The unsigned will is one of those tropes of detective fiction that I’ve come to dislike, only because it’s so overused. In real life, a lot of people don’t even bother to make a will but then we’ve all managed to persuade ourselves that we’re going to live for ever. They certainly don’t go round the place threatening to change it in order to give someone the perfect excuse to come and kill them. It looked as if Alan Conway had done exactly that.”
― Anthony Horowitz, Magpie Murders

“She sat in a corner warm with sunlight, a copy of Home Notes open unread upon her knee, and watched the green meadows flying past while the business men in the carriage talked about news in the papers— awful, as usual— their golf, their gardeners, and the detective stories they were reading.”
― Stella Gibbons, Nightingale Wood

“In 1949-1950, a movie based on a true story was made “Wer fuhr den grauen Ford?” “Who drove the gray Ford” with Otto Wernicke playing the part of Criminal Commissioner Thieme. In the plot, a robbery of 240,000 Marks is perfectly planned and carried out with the help of a stolen gray Ford. Police Commissioner Thieme and his assistant, search for the loot in the dark without success. Then one of the robbers in a moment of conscience commits a fatal mistake by sending his share of the loot to the police. This mailing provides Commissioner Thieme with enough clues to capture the robbers.”
― Captain Hank Bracker, "Suppresed I Rise"

“Hello, Bow Street Society, Miss Rebecca Trent, Society clerk speaking.”
― T.G. Campbell, The Case of the Curious Client

“Only the rougher folks are out at night, and Blue Jean's is the one place they'll go for a meal. With a reputation of serving anybody, no matter who they are or what they're involved in, the diner attracts all sorts of characters.”
― Maisy Heart, Midnight at the Diner: A Young Adult Romantic Suspense Thriller

“My life is like a detective story and I am the detective on it”
― Aryan Vinod

“Detective stories contain a dream of justice. They project a vision of a world in which wrongs are righted, and villains are betrayed by clues they did not know they were leaving. A world in which murderers are caught and hanged, and innocent victims are avenged, and future murder is deterred.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, A Presumption of Death