Close to Death Quotes

“Was Giles a racist?”
― Anthony Horowitz, Close to Death

“They did not stock any modern, violent crime novels, especially ones that contained bad language.”
― Anthony Horowitz, Close to Death

“There’s a poem by William Blake.’ He closed his eyes, recalling the words. ‘“I was angry with my friend; I told my wrath, my wrath did end. I was angry with my foe: I told it not, my wrath did grow.”
― Anthony Horowitz, Close to Death

“Despite their age, they were still working, running a small business that May also owned. The Tea Cosy was a bookshop with a café attached,”
― Anthony Horowitz, Close to Death

“Her clothes, especially her heavy black gardening gloves, did her no favours – but when she turned and smiled, she was strikingly attractive:”
― Anthony Horowitz, Close to Death

“You’ve written all these pages and nobody’s been killed.’ ‘I have to set the scene! And anyway, you know perfectly well that there’s more to a novel – even a crime novel – than violent death. It’s all about character and atmosphere and language. Why do you think people read Jane Austen? She wrote thousands of pages and she never felt the need to murder anyone.’ ‘Actually, that’s not true. Anna Parker murdered both her parents and she was planning to do the same to her sister.”
― Anthony Horowitz, Close to Death

“There’s a poem by William Blake.’ He closed his eyes”
― Anthony Horowitz, Close to Death

“casual reader looking for Harlan Coben, Stieg Larsson, Ian Rankin or even James M. Cain (The Postman Always Rings Twice)”
― Anthony Horowitz, Close to Death

“Dudley had turned out to be central to everything that had happened. I hadn’t realised quite what part he’d play when I’d first introduced him, arriving with Hawthorne at Riverview Close. When I was writing those pages, I’d thought he was just the sidekick. Like me.”
― Anthony Horowitz, Close to Death

“Most murderers don’t really think about what they’re going to do,’ he said. ‘You get the fantasists, the husbands who hate their wives, the kids who hate their stepdads, and they may think about murder for years . . . but they’re never going to do it. Planning it is enough. You know as well as I do that most murders are acts of passion – spur-of-the-moment things. One drink too many. A fight that gets out of control. But then, just now and again, you get the genius, the killer who’s not going to get caught, who sits down and works it all out. These are what you call the stickers, the crimes that are like no others because there’s an intelligence behind them. That’s where I come in. That’s sort of my speciality.”
― Anthony Horowitz, Close to Death

“There were cameras in Gardener’s Cottage and burglar alarms in both The Stables and the Lodge, but otherwise the houses in Riverview Close were surprisingly lacking in electronic security. It was part of the charm of the place that it existed in the world as it had been fifty years ago, when neighbours left their doors open or their keys under the mat and burglaries were rare enough to be news.”
― Anthony Horowitz, Close to Death

“May was sitting opposite her, holding a book. The cover showed the silhouette of a village with the title in red letters above: The Inverted Jenny: An Amelia Strange Mystery. ‘It’s a wonderful story,’ she was saying. ‘Of course, you’ve read The Murder of Roger Ackroyd – this was written in 1924, the same year. It starts with a summer fête in the village of Blossombury in Wiltshire. The vicar, who is running the cake stall, is poisoned and it turns out his uncle is Sir Henry Fellowes, the local squire and a well-known philatelist. The mystery starts when a very valuable stamp is found inside one of the coconuts.”
― Anthony Horowitz, Close to Death

“On the radio, Pharrell Williams had reached the reprise. ‘Happiness is the truth . . .’ ‘He’s got a point,’ Hawthorne said. Dudley shook his head. ‘Happiness isn’t the truth, Danny. It’s making sure the bastards pay for it.’ A bitterness that Hawthorne hadn’t seen before had crept into his eyes.”
― Anthony Horowitz, Close to Death

“Gareth liked classical music. Alison said it drove her mad, but they recognised and tolerated each other’s fads. It was the secret of a long and successful marriage.”
― Anthony Horowitz, Close to Death

“I put all that behind me and set off back down the hill, then followed the road in the direction of Petersham, with a quite extraordinary view of the River Thames and the fields beyond that could have inspired Constable or Turner: a huge azure sky and a ribbon of glinting water twisting all the way to the horizon. The Italian Gothic towers of the Petersham Hotel rose up in front of me – the building had been there since the nineteenth century – and for the first time I understood something of what it must have meant to live in Riverview Close. Richmond was exclusive in the true sense of the word. It excluded much of the worst of modern life.”
― Anthony Horowitz, Close to Death

“It’s my belief that, these days, the best locked-room mysteries come from Japan. Try Murder in the Crooked House by Soji Shimada, or The Honjin Murders by Seishi Yokomizo, a true master of the art and the author of almost eighty books. They are both fiendish and elegant. In the first, the entire setting becomes an accomplice to the crime. As for the second, the gurgle of the waterwheel and the music played on the koto (a sort of zither), both integral to the plot, will always stay with me. Sheer genius. But far removed from real life.”
― Anthony Horowitz, Close to Death

“The first and still the most famous locked-room mystery is said to be The Murders in the Rue Morgue, written in 1841 by Edgar Allan Poe, the man who inspired Sherlock Holmes. Here, a mother and a daughter are brutally murdered in their flat, the daughter stuffed up a chimney, but the door and the shutters are securely fastened from inside and the flat is four floors up from the street, with no way to climb in. The story has a great ending, but one that doesn’t really play fair. I’m not sure a modern writer would get away with it.”
― Anthony Horowitz, Close to Death

“There’s a very specific subgenre in the murder mystery/crime arena that has its own rules and effectively presents the reader with a seemingly impossible puzzle. It’s not enough for the characters to be isolated (The Mousetrap, Orient Express). Everything has to be so fiendishly arranged that the detective has no chance of solving the puzzle . . . until he or she does.”
― Anthony Horowitz, Close to Death

“Did he think he was about to be arrested?’ Hawthorne asked. ‘He didn’t say. But the police wouldn’t have arrested him for something he hadn’t done.’ ‘I’m sure that’s never happened,’ Dudley agreed.”
― Anthony Horowitz, Close to Death

“Then why do you think he committed suicide?’ Khan asked. ‘You should never use the word “committed” in that context, Detective Superintendent. Suicide may be a sin, but it is not a crime!”
― Anthony Horowitz, Close to Death

“Surely that’s just semantics.’ ‘The trouble with you, Tony, is that you’re great with long words, but you never think them through. The semantics! It’s the small things that matter. That’s how criminals give themselves away.”
― Anthony Horowitz, Close to Death

“Dudley was always on the money. He was the one who saw the packed suitcase in the hallway of the dentist’s house, for example. Not me. That turned out to be important. And he also worked out that Sarah Baines had been in prison.’ He paused. ‘I know you’ve been out with me a few times and you’ve never noticed a thing. In fact, you’ve helped the killers more than you’ve helped me. But he’s not the same.”
― Anthony Horowitz, Close to Death

“The meeting was your idea?’ Hawthorne asked. ‘The idea presented itself when I was talking to Adam. It’s long been my experience that it’s all too easy to get a false impression of someone if you don’t talk to them. You imagine the worst and that’s what they become. There’s a poem by William Blake.’ He closed his eyes, recalling the words. ‘“I was angry with my friend; I told my wrath, my wrath did end. I was angry with my foe: I told it not, my wrath did grow.”’ He smiled. ‘The poem is called “A Poison Tree”. I suppose we met to avoid cultivating one.’ ‘There must have been a lot of anger in the room,’ Hawthorne said. ‘Wrath,’ Dudley corrected him.”
― Anthony Horowitz, Close to Death

“It was immediately obvious that he lived alone. The house had a sense of emptiness. It felt stuck in time, as if nothing had changed, but it was immediately obvious what was missing. There were photographs on every surface, mounted in a variety of frames, but all of them showing the same subject: a beautiful woman, always smiling, her face filled with life. Iris Pennington at work, Iris on the beach, Iris and Andrew arm in arm on a swing chair, Iris and Andrew dancing, Iris making a heart sign with both hands, Iris in bed, ill and wasted but still smiling for the camera. Well House spoke equally of her death and her surviving husband’s life.”
― Anthony Horowitz, Close to Death

“I like the jewellery,’ Dudley said. ‘Is that a snake around your neck?’ ‘As a matter of fact, I designed it. I have a jewellery business. And it’s part of my Rare Poison collection.’ ‘Sounds unusual.’ ‘The necklace is shaped like the butterfly viper that lives in Central Africa. The creature is really quite wonderful with its brilliant blue-green markings and bright red triangles. It’s also venomous. The earrings are inspired by the webs of the orb-weaver spider from Madagascar, which turn gold in sunlight. I’m exploring the correlation between beauty and death in nature.’ ‘They look lovely but they kill you,’ Hawthorne said. Gemma Beresford smiled for the first time. ‘Exactly.”
― Anthony Horowitz, Close to Death

“So when did you move in?’ Hawthorne repeated the question he’d asked earlier. ‘Fourteen years ago, just after the close had been developed. We arrived about a month after our neighbours, May Winslow and Phyllis Moore. They’re next door.’ ‘Like most neighbours,’ Dudley said.”
― Anthony Horowitz, Close to Death

“Who were you with?’ Hawthorne insisted. Lynda reached for another tissue. ‘His name is Jean-François. He’s my French teacher.’ ‘You’re learning French?’ ‘Giles was talking about buying a place in Antibes.’ ‘Mais malheureusement, cela n’arrivera pas,’ Dudley muttered. Lynda stared at him. ‘What?”
― Anthony Horowitz, Close to Death

“The Kenworthys’ home was expensive and wanted you to know it. The furniture was Scandinavian, the lights ultra-modern, the carpets ankle-deep and the paintings straight out of some smart auction-house catalogue. Two young boys lived here with their parents, but there was no mess, no scattered clothes or toys, as if their very existence had been wiped away. A plate-glass window at the back, rising almost the full height of the stairs, looked out over the new patio with a Union Jack fluttering on the other side of a chrome-plated beast of a gas barbecue.”
― Anthony Horowitz, Close to Death

“Hawthorne was a diminutive figure, oddly dressed in a suit and a loose raincoat despite the warm July weather, looking around him with eyes that seemed to absorb and analyse every detail, a face that gave nothing away. His hair was short, neatly brushed, of no particular colour. He was in his mid to late thirties, although it was difficult to be sure as there was something childlike about his appearance.”
― Anthony Horowitz, Close to Death

“All my life I’ve been getting notes. I get them from producers in London and New York, from directors, from Jill, from lead actors . . . even, on occasions, from their partners. My books are scrutinised by editors and copy editors and (more recently) sensitivity readers. I sometimes feel that I’m surrounded by notes, like a cloud of midges. But I never lose my temper. I always try to see the alternative point of view. It wasn’t easy with Hawthorne.”
― Anthony Horowitz, Close to Death