Quotes About Crime

The Ballad of Mac the Knife Fair in Soho. The beggars are begging, the thieves are stealing, the whores are whoring. A ballad singer sings a ballad. See the shark with teeth like razors. All can read his open face. And Macheath has got a knife, but Not in such an obvious place. See the shark, how red his fins are As he slashes at his prey. Mac the Knife wears white kid gloves which Give the minimum away.

As crimes pile up, they become invisible.

Rule number one of crime scene work: If it's wet and sticky and it ain't yours, don't touch it. -Terry Cooper, crime scene specialist, Georgia Bureau of Investigation

So, was the crime lab a reward for almost being killed?' 'No, it was a reward for not being Bryce,

Had the Army been helpful, maybe the murderer wouldn't be wherever he was taken.

including one entitled Criminal Investigative Failures. Having read the Chronicle article and seen the KXAN-TV broadcast, Rossmo

Our criminal class grew out of good religious native soil.

Our 'Hooligans' go from bad to worse. They are an ugly growth on the body politic, and the worse circumstance is that they multiply, and that School Boards and prisons, police magistrates and philanthropists, do not seem to ameliorate them. Other great cities may throw off elements more perilous to the State. Nevertheless the 'Hooligan' is a hideous excrescence on our civilization. The Times [London], October 30, 1890

According to NYPD figures, a contract killing could be had in Brooklyn for a mere $500. More often than not, though, people in New York were killed for free.

Famous crime stories almost always lead to the passing of new laws.

Crime shapes how we think about the world it shapes social decisions that we make it shapes our base of knowledge. But we don't talk about it intelligently.

What happens in many of these cases is that, in the absence of evidence, the crime is pinned on a person of low social standing who is known to be in the vicinity of the crime. We have seen this repeatedly.

And then you come to the 1910 to 1912 era, and . . . Jesus H. Christ, what is happening here? Axe murders start appearing like dandelions. Murdering your neighbors with an axe became the nation's fourth-largest sport.

The period from 1910 to 1912 was the era of the axe murderer. It is not a silly argument to say that this era came about because of The Man from the Train, that he was the man who spread the idea across the country. He was the Typhoid Mary of the Axe Murder Epidemic.

I think capital punishment works great. Every killer you kill never kills again.

Banning gun shows to reduce violent crime will work about as well as banning auto shows to reduce drunken driving.

his brain splattered all over the trunk of a car.

I was so obsessed by Lisbeth Salander and all the characters, but of course if you're going to write a crime novel worthy of Stieg Larsson, you need a plot, don't you?

I believe that people would be alive today if there were a death penalty.

Sometimes I'm like, Wow, 'Criminal Minds' is deep.

A good writer can set a thriller anywhere and make it convincing: the trick is to evoke the setting in such a way that it highlights the crime or unsettles the reader.

The danger that may really threaten (crime fiction) is that soon there will be more writers than readers.

Scandinavian crime fiction has become a great success all across the world and rightfully so. Sjowall and Wahloo ushered in a whole generation of Swedish crime writers, many of whom are now available in English.

I'm always interested in what classic crime writers got into when they stepped away from the genre stuff they were known for. That's why 'Mildred Pierce' is like noir without any real crime.