Quotes About Detective

mystery to solve.

balls. Those, and the stacked rifles, may have referred to the

A short time later the convertible pulled into the driveway of the Hardys' large, pleasant house on a tree-shaded street. The boys jumped out and hurried inside. Fenton Hardy, a tall, rugged-looking man, was in the dining room having a cup of coffee. Seated at the table with him were Mrs. Hardy and the boys' Aunt Gertrude, his unmarried sister. The detective greeted Frank and Joe with a warm smile. "Sit down, boys, and I'll tell you what this case is all about.

The first thing that put me on the map was my Sherlock Holmes novel.

Anyone who has ever tried to plot a detective mystery knows that the hardest thing to come up with is motive.

I've written a detective series myself, set in an imaginary, and slightly futuristic, Chinese city. The novels have an extremely tenuous relationship with the real world, since the hero is the city's Hell and ends up with a sidekick who is a demon.

There is justice in a detective story, and none in madness. And while there is danger in a detective story, it eventually is put to rest, which distinguishes a detective story from life, where the mysteries are illimitable. H

Easy strode to the back door. "Call the Kearny Detective Agency up in SF and ask them to go talk to the Levin girl. Also get them to check on Jill's Porsche, see if the cops have picked it up anyplace in San Francisco." He opened the door.

It's only music, though she said. Perhaps, Aschemann agreed. For the detective, he thought, nothing is ever only itself.

Don't you read mystery novels?" "Not very often. Anyway, what does that mean, 'mystery novel'? What is a 'detective novel'?

Oh, I'm interested in everything, Joe. That's why I'm a bloody brilliant detective.' She gave him her widest smile. 'That's why I'm in charge and you're sitting there, doing as you're told.

The detective thinks he is investigating a murder or a missing girl. But truly he is investigating something else altogether, something he cannot grasp hold of directly. Satisfaction will be rare. Uncertainty will be your natural state. Sureness will always elude you. The detective will always circle around what he wants, never seeing it whole. We do not go on despite this. We go on because of it.

You cannot follow another's footsteps to the truth, Silette wrote. A hand can point the way. But the hand is not the teaching. The finger that points the way is not the way. The mystery is a payless land, and each detective must cut her own trail through a cruel territory. Believe nothing. Question everything. Follow only the clues.

There are no coincidences, Silette wrote. Only mysteries that haven't been solved, clues that haven't been placed. Most are blind to the language of the bird overheard, the leaf in our path, the phonographic record stuck in a groove, the unknown caller on the phone. They don't see the omens. They don't know how to read the signs. To them life is like a book with blank pages. But to the detective, it is an illuminated manuscript of mysteries.

Beauty is a great mountain, Detective, and fashion only illuminates one face at a time.

I have committed another crime, Hadley,' he said. 'I have guessed the truth again.

It's all very well to have your eight suspects parading in their endless ring-around-the-rosebush outside the library. That's fine. But give some sensible reason why they were there. If you must shower the room with bus tickets, provide a reason for that too. In other words, construct your story. Your present problem is not to explain the villainy of the guilty: it's to explain the stupidity of the innocent.

There's no keeping anything from you, is there, Devil-face?" she demanded, rolling about in her seat almost gaily. "Now, then, how did you know that?

paperchase. And it is on a deduction drawn from

But for the greatest long - range murder ever committed in a locked room, gents, I commend you to one of the most brilliant short detective stories in the history of detective fiction. (In fact, it shares the honours for supreme untouchable top - notch excellence with Thomas Burke's The Hands of Mr Ottermole, Chesterton's The Man in the Passage, and Jacques Futrelle's The Problem of Cell 13.) This is Melville Davisson Post's The Doomdorf Mystery

You couldn't get a clue during the clue mating season in a field full of horny clues if you smeared your body with clue musk and did the clue mating dance.

They were the footprints of a gigantic hound!

My name is Sherlock Holmes. It is my business to know what other people don't know.

Come, Watson, come! The game is afoot.