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Half a capital and half a country town, the whole city leads a double existence; it has long trances of the one and flashes of the other; like the king of the Black Isles, it is half alive and half a monumental marble. —Robert Louis Stevenson, Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes
As a writer, Ian believed he had a keen eye for the truth, the ability to see through the masks people wore. He believed writers and policemen shared the knack of seeing the darker side of their fellow man. It was not always a gift, he knew—and once you had it, you could not turn your back on it.
What is seen as a gift can often lead to a lifetime of being pulled along by something one cannot completely control, by a force both within you and outside of you. A calling, more a screaming need, to use that gift for yourself and for others benefit.
“‘Suspicion is a heavy armor—’” “‘And with its weight it impedes more than it protects.’ I don’t believe Robert Burns was talking about police work when he wrote those lines, sir.”
Even the sun misbehaved in Edinburgh. At the height of summer, it refused to retire at a reasonable hour, shining bravely on well after nine o’clock. In winter, the land descended into perpetual twilight, the sun barely scraping the horizon as it slunk across the sky in search of rest, as if exhausted by its summer excess.
“‘A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool.’”
“‘Expectation is the root of all heartache.’”
“And you—are you a believer?” “The whole question strikes me as irrelevant.” “What about the existence of good and evil?” “I don’t see why God should enter into it. If you are being virtuous only to enter into heaven and avoid damnation, then aren’t you just thinking of yourself?”
He longed for the certainty and safety of fiction—in real life, monsters weren’t always vanquished, and heroes didn’t always win.
“We all have something, Sergeant. No one is without their Achilles’ heel,”
“Coincidence does not have so wide a reach as you seem to imagine.”
the chief inspector preferred to lead in the traditional Scottish way, with an eye to everything that could go wrong. That way, as Ian’s father used to say, one was less often disappointed.
“The worst thing you can do to anyone is give up on him,” Donald said in a voice all the more terrifying because it was so quiet.
