Quotes About Detective

You're supposed to be a detective. Well, detect.

Estoy seguro que a cualquiera le gusta un buen crimen, siempre que no sea la víctima

Alice Kimberly

Josephine Tey's novel, The Daughter of Time (1951)

Yes. Yes, when we live our life like 1950s detective films. I often go to my fridge, "Hullo, we're out of milk. I say mother, where's the milk?"

The cinema, like the detective story, makes it possible to experience without danger all the excitement, passion and desirousness which must be repressed in a humanitarian ordering of life.

I believe there's a landscape that exists underneath everything that we can see in present-day stuff. And I think that makes life kind of a detective story.

Kiss Me Deadly by Mickey Spillane

Any new corpses today?" "None yet." "Pity. I'm getting so I miss my morning coffee and corpse.

The feathers in the one pillow on the bed were duck down. The feather found, therefore, had not come from the pillow. It was found stuck to a smear of blood, so chances were it was left by the killer and not left by someone who'd been in the room previous to the killer. If the killer, therefore, had a pigeon feather stuck to his clothes, chances were he was a pigeon fancier. All the cops had to do was track down every pigeon fancier in the city. That job was for the birds.

The police department is a vast organization, and a detective is only an organization man.

As far as I'm concerned, you can't beat a good whodunnit: the twists and turns, the clues and the red herrings and then, finally, the satisfaction of having everything explained to you in a way that makes you kick yourself because you hadn't seen it from the start.

I've watched every episode of Poirot and Midsomer Murders on TV. I never guess the ending and I can't wait for the moment when the detective gathers all the suspects in the room and, like a magician conjuring silk scarves out of the air, makes the whole thing make sense.

But the thing is, you see -and to be honest, I don't like to mention this- I'm a bit short. There just aren't enough people getting murdered.

I really don't know what to think, Mr Holmes,' Lestrade muttered. 'Well, that's nothing new.

It was quite elementary,' returned the detective with a languid gesture of one hand.

You'd have thought that after twenty years editing murder mysteries I'd have noticed when I found myself in the middle of one.

Inspector Morse, Taggart, Lewis, Foyle's War, Endeavour, A Touch of Frost, Luther, The Inspector Lynley Mysteries, Cracker, Broadchurch and even bloody Maigret and Wallander – British TV would disappear into a dot on the screen without murder.

a detective must occasionally be guided by his worst imaginings – which is to say that he must put himself in the mind of the criminal.

Holmes had returned entirely to his old self – secretive, over-confident and thoroughly annoying.

Pünd remembered their first case together when Fraser had failed to notice that his travelling companion, on the three-fifty train from Paddington, was actually dead.

It's a simple fact of life that a clever private detective needs a much less clever police officer in much the same way as a photograph needs both light and darkness.

Well, I'm investigating a murder and now a woman has gone missing, so I wasn't exactly waiting for an invitation,' Hawthorne replied.

As far as I'm concerned, you can't beat a good whodunnit: the twists and turns, the clues and the red herrings and then, finally, the satisfaction of having everything explained to you in a way that makes you kick yourself because you hadn't seen it from the start.