The Great Hotel Murder Quotes

“...when a man blends truth and falsehood skillfully in one comprehensive statement, it is difficult to tell the veracities from the fibs.”
― Vincent Starrett, The Great Hotel Murder

“Trees that are only trees by daylight are many and various other things at night. They are lurking, impossible monsters of the animal world or crouching human ruffians, of ferocious aspect and intent, depending upon their shape, size, color, distance from the beholder, and general state of well-being or decay. One's own well-being has some bearing on the matter. Strong nerves are needed to walk among them in the darkness.”
― Vincent Starrett, The Great Hotel Murder

“They left the little city behind them and swung out into the open country. Immediately the trees resumed their solemn march on either side, very much -- it seemed to Blackwood -- as if they were files of soldiers on perpetual guard. He was ardently sick of trees, in spite of an early-morning notion that dwellers in the city were oafs and half-wits. Trees hemmed one in. They weighed mysteriously on the senses. He hoped that he would never see another adjectival tree. The poet who could sing of trees was full of bats and mice and fleas. Riley Blackwood, jiggling along a country road in northern Wisconsin, would have given up a dollar and a half for just one glimpse of a sputtering white electric sign in Clark Street.”
― Vincent Starrett, The Great Hotel Murder

“The manner of a fool,' said Mr. Blackwood, 'when it masks the mental processes of a wise man, is an advantage of great worth to a detective.”
― Vincent Starrett, The Great Hotel Murder