The Mystery of the Crooked Man Quotes

“Crime bookshops smell weird, because of all that cheap paper in one place.”
― Tom Spencer, The Mystery of the Crooked Man

“Were there just fewer nonces in my day? Or were we tougher, was this the coddled generation about which one was forever hearing? Neither, surely. Perhaps we have become rather less willing to be fatalistic than once upon a time—the idea of risk was increasingly intolerable.”
― Tom Spencer, The Mystery of the Crooked Man

“The poor building’s Georgian sash windows had been ripped out and replaced with plastic double-glazing in the wrong size, and the intervening space had been filled in with breeze blocks.”
― Tom Spencer, The Mystery of the Crooked Man

“There was a stand selling sacrilegiously hollowed-out Green hardbacks, converted into little handbags. As an aside, I believe there is a special place in hell for people who carve up books to make knick-knacks.”
― Tom Spencer, The Mystery of the Crooked Man

“People think that leather car seats are luxurious, but to my mind there is something vaguely redolent of sex work about them, perhaps because, unlike cloth car seats, they seem designed to be able to be wiped clean.”
― Tom Spencer, The Mystery of the Crooked Man

“It’s not that I don’t like sex. I just don’t like having to talk about it or think about it or have it. Otherwise I have no problem with it.”
― Tom Spencer, The Mystery of the Crooked Man

“It’s not that I don’t like sex. I just don’t like having to talk about it or think about it or have it. Otherwise I have no problem with”
― Tom Spencer, The Mystery of the Crooked Man

“No matter how low one sets one’s expectations, one has constantly to be on the alert for failure on the horizon, and foul up preëmptively in order to get out ahead of it. That’s good Crooked Man thinking.”
― Tom Spencer, The Mystery of the Crooked Man