Quotes About Intrigue

First of all, he said, with a sly smile, we have to kill you!

He opened the door wider. He's waiting. He gave me what was probably meant to be a significant wink, but a corner of his mouth moved more than his eye did and the result was a fairly startling face.

Samuel Spade's jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth. His nostrils curved back to make another, smaller, v. His yellow-grey eyes were horizontal. The V motif was picked up again by thickish brows rising outward from twin creases above a hooked nose, and his pale brown hair grew down--from high flat temples--in a point on his forehead. He looked rather pleasantly like a blond Satan.

Nora was eating a piece of cold duck with one hand and working on a jig-saw puzzle with the other when I got home. I thought you'd gone to live with her, she said. You used to be a detective: find me a brownish piece shaped something like a snail with a long neck. Piece of duck or puzzle?...

She tilted her head to the right. You didn't even tell me you had taken the case. I had done what? Oh, I see what you mean. Well, I hadn't and haven't. My getting shot ought to prove I was an innocent bystander. Does it hurt much? It itches. I forgot to have the dressing changed this afternoon. Wasn't Nora utterly terrified? So was I and so was the guy that shot me. There's Halsey. I haven't spoken to him yet.

Alice opened the door when I rang. She had on green pyjamas and held a hairbrush in one hand. She looked wearily at Quinn and spoke wearily: Bring it in. I took it in and spread it on a bed. It mumbled something I could not make out and moved one hand feebly back and forth, but its eyes stayed shut.

Are you asleep?" I said I was. She lit a cigarette for me, one for herself. "Don't you ever think you'd like to go back to detecting once in a while just for the fun of it?

To swipe the immortal lines uttered by Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon, a great mystery should take the lid off life and let [you] look at the works.

A bullet kissed a hole in the door-frame close to my noodle.

I told him about the letter Wynant had sent his sister. He said: "He writes a lot of people, don't he?

Men have thought me beautiful and I have played with them. Women are like that. Men have loved me, and doing what I liked with them, I have found men contemptible. And then comes this little fat detective whose name I don't know, and he acts as if i were a hag - an old squaw. Can I help then being piqued into some sort of feeling for him? Women are like that.

I had seen the girl somewhere before. She was a slender girl in a glistening blue gown that exhibited a generous spread of front, back and arms that were worth showing. She had a mass of dark brown hair above an oval face of the color that pink ought to be. Her eyes were wide-set and of a gray shade that wasn't altogether unlike the shadows on polished silver that the poet had compared them to. The Girl With The Silver Eyes

She's in," he said when I joined him. "She went up the road, cut across through some bushes, came back to the edge of the cliff, and slid feet-first through a cellar window." That was nice. The crazier the people you are sleuthing act, as a rule, the nearer you are to an ending of your troubles.

the Charles-Street Avenue house.

looking at Spade with cobalt-blue eyes that were both shy and probing.

Someone was tapping on the window.

maybe somebody finally shot the dog.

disappearing faster than weekend houseguests in an Agatha Christie story.

Nerezza had no nose.

Exactly," said Slank.

To be described is to be seduced. Shit. One turn of phrase. One thing noticed that she'd never noticed. It works always.

She backed away, looking at him, his shirt hiked up, his crotch exposed. She could think only of a campfire, one small log, all of it doused in milk.

She points at my chest. "And much more interestingly, what's that?" "Blood," I say. She gets her camera out.

Dark, cool, musty, smoky, where light fell funny and everyone looked like someone you knew or wanted to know. Or, more likely, wanted to forget.