"There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge."
— Raymond Chandler

"Dead men are heavier than broken hearts."
— Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep)

"They wouldn't tell Scipio how much of the counterfeit cash was left since, as Riccio put it, 'You're a detective now, after all.'"
— Cornelia Funke (The Thief Lord)

""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)

"Jumping to conclusions is like playing with damp gunpowder: both likely to go off in wrong direction."
— Charlie Chang

"And then I thought that I had to be like Sherlock Holmes and I had to detach my mind at will to a remarkable degree so that I did not notice how much it was hurting inside my head."
— Mark Haddon (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time)

"When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon."
— James Crumley (The Last Good Kiss)

"Only once in a generation does anything as fresh as a vomiting detective come along."
— Dean Koontz (Odd Thomas)

"The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes."
— Arthur Conan Doyle (Arthur Conan Doyle Collection: The Hound of the Baskervilles/The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes/The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire)

""At the small table, sitting very upright, was one of the ugliest old ladies he had ever seen. It was an ugliness of distinction - it fascinated rather than repelled.""
— Agatha Christie

"If anyone ever told five-year-olds the truth about life, he thought, there’d be a rash of kindergarten suicides. "
— P.J. Tracy (Live Bait)

"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)

"'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)

""You've a pretty good nerve," said Ratchett. "Will twenty thousand dollars tempt you?"

"It will not."

"If you're holding out for more, you won't get it. I know what a thing's worth to me."

"I, also M. Ratchett."

"What's wrong with my proposition?"

Poirot rose. "If you will forgive me for being personal - I do not like your face, M. Ratchett," he said."
— Agatha Christie

""It often seems to me that's all detective work is, wiping out your false starts and beginning again."
"Yes, it is very true, that. And it is just what some people will not do. They conceive a certain theory, and everything has to fit into that theory. If one little fact will not fit it, they throw it aside. But it is always the facts that will not fit in that are significant.""
— Agatha Christie (Death on the Nile)

"I plan on solving this faster than I can get to the bottom of a cup of Darjeeling."
— Nancy Drew

"I'm just a man, no more enlightened than any other."
— George P. Pelecanos (The Night Gardener)

"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)