Quotes from John Lawton

Really, when you get to know him Ike's OK. I mean not grouchy or anything and not too bright. I mean OK for a general – you wouldn't want him to be President or anything like that.

D'ye know the Black Swan, East India Dock Road?' Troy shook his head. 'Bloke found dead in his room. Blood all over the place. Door locked from the inside. A real Sherlock Holmes-er.

Troy interjected that murder was unlikely to be one of the many ways in which Wells had offended society.

But, then, he was the youngest child of four, stranded at the far side of a large family like a poorly used preposition at the end of a sentence.

the silent tutting infuriated him as symptomatic of a generation. The assumed air of gravity and the fraudulent pretence of judgement in situations that required only answer or action struck him as the manner in which old men concealed their hollowness.

Troy wrapped his hand around the gun and asked himself why God had so ordered the world as to make elder brothers into know-alls.

Troy wrapped his hand around the gun and asked himself why God had so ordered the world as

The mess was three-quarters empty, but the dozen or more men at the bar seemed hell bent on making up for it by celebrating Christmas as loudly and as drunkenly as they could. It seemed a bleak variety of joy.

The Smoking Mountain (Knopf,

A tailored and pleated version of men's striped trousers flapped around her long legs and pinched in tightly at her waist – a black silk shirt, complete with silver cufflinks, rippled from broad shoulders across a small bosom. A single strand of pearls at the the throat. This was hardly a gesture to femininity, for the whole appearance contrived femininity in irony.

I'm terribly sorry, but I really don't see how I can help you.' It was the sort of line that if uttered in a play by J. B. Priestley would lead to the host getting up to heave on the bell-pull prior to the butler showing the detective his way out and his place in society.

Troy glanced at the boys, wondering how much they heard and how much they understood. Eight cherubic faces, and sixteen hard, ruthless eyes looked back at him.

When you see as many dead as I do they begin to blur into one colossal corpse. The world-carcass.

He had never heard of a composer called Tippett but he knew it meant a tuneless evening of scraping catgut.

If Poland was not so much a country, more a state of mind, then Russia was less a country, less a state of mind than an hysterical heart.

How best to state his case. In a game of stakes and odds, Onions held a full corpse to his one arm – he didn't even have a pair.

People with views of the Thames seemed always to be looking out, expecting more from the promise than the view would ever deliver.

He stared at those decent, well-meaning faces with their decent, well-meaning expressions, lost now in the chaos which their pitifully decent, well-meaning society struggled to keep at bay.

How odd to still be shocked by what one has always known.

Bonham walked down the line with a stack of sixpences and passed them out like a priest of mammon at unholy communion. Hands flashed like the tongues of lizards, deftly trousering the loot.

Troy had always thought of pipes as a way of passing off vacuity as thought, the hollow man's way of seeming less than hollow.

The same picket of urban cowboys met Troy at the lost junction of Cardigan Street and Waterloo Place. The same child's stare, suspicious of any adult, met his greeting to the boys.

He looked back at Troy – a bold, challenging eye-to-eye stare that Troy had often wished he possessed himself. If he could look like that he'd be the hard man of the Yard in no time.

In the cafés of Leman Street the only way to get tea without sugar was to put your hand across the cup before they could spoon it in. Such habits were almost solely responsible for British teeth.