Quotes from Richard S. Prather

I caught a couple of landmarks and knew we were on Benedict Canyon Drive, getting up into the hills. I'd driven here several times before—in happier days—and I knew almost all the road. It was hilly along here and there were steep clifflike drops and sloping ones. Maybe Dutch would let me jump off a cliff. Suicide. I strained at the rope on my wrists, but it was tight.

Of course. She smiled slowly. Well, I didn't need to get all dressed then, did I? She had a way, all right. The words came out like asterisks, or the dots at the end of jazzy paragraphs in books.

Ark, he was called. His real name was Hyath Arkajanian, and he was Armenian or Lithuanian or something, I couldn't remember for sure

a man with milk in his arteries and clabber in his veins.

Ted Valentine got up from his chair and walked over to me. He stuck out his hand and said, "I'm horribly sorry.

He'd hooked me, I am not a man who goes gaga upon touching a rare first edition of Lady Chumley's collected couplets, say, but I was interested. As I took the manuscript from him, he was saying, "Oddly enough, perhaps my greatest interest is the art and literature of India. I have, myself, visited the overpowering caves at Ellora, Ajanta, and Elephanta." I examined the manuscript with growing interest.

I'll let you sweat a while. You ain't gonna know when it's comin' or from where. You'll just be walking along or riding somewhere—and bing—that's it.

I've always liked the drive from L.A. to Vegas. Through only a few towns after San Bernardino but a lot of flat, dry desert, much of it on four-lane freeways, then, like a concrete and neon oasis: Fabulous Las Vegas.

Camel-nose laughed deep in his muscled throat as if I'd just told him the one about the lumberjack and the water barrel. But he didn't relax his hold on my wrist.

everything in this case seemed crazy as three reefers and a quart of absinthe.

She was a tall, firm, abundantly curvaceous, lovely with pollen-gold hair and a shape to make corpses kick open caskets.

two turnpike commissioners in Pennsylvania. Even the jury found those boys guilty of conspiracy.

Sometimes when you've pulled and pushed at a problem without getting an answer, or tried to grab a too-slippery memory, if you completely dismiss the matter from consciousness, often — when it's least expected — the answer will pop up like toast from the depths of your unconscious toaster. I do it all the time. In fact, that may be why some people call me Shell Scott, the Unconscious Detective.

He a user?" Samson nodded. And a pusher. But we never proved it. Got him for possession, that's all. He worked the black cigar from one side of his wide mouth to the other

She nodded. "Yes. I talked to Chief Thurmond. He couldn't tell me much but he said he might have much more for me later, and that they were still investigating." "They'll be investigating in the year two thousand if I know the cops in this town. I could stick the local Boy Scout chapter in the station and get more done. I wonder why the hell they gave out this bunch of guff.

pulled out into the Chavez Ravine Road, headed toward Elysian Park Avenue and Sunset Boulevard. We'd driven

We've got literally hundreds of cults—everything from John Believer's World Security Party, with its devilishly clever slogan, "Everybody Is Something," to Zoomites, complete with Head Zoom

there wasn't anything beyond the Flamingo except desert and McCarran Field.

I'm the boy who's going to glom onto this junk—if I'm lucky.

The only car in sight was just turning into Chavez Ravine Road and traveling fast. All I could see was the taillight

Papa grabbed my ten-dollar bill as if it were already twenty shots of bourbon

I watched the proceedings from across the room while Cleopatra babbled at me. She was pretty drunk. Finally, I got what she was burbling: "Wild Party." You know, the thing in verse about a party that's quite a ball itself. She must have spent a lot of lonely nights memorizing that one.

Usually, I park on North Rossmore in front of the Spartan Apartment Hotel, but tonight I drove to the alley behind the Spartan and pulled into one of the slots there.

looked like enough moolah to choke all the cows in Carnation.