Quotes About Crime

Some players are criticised for having no loyalty. Well, I wanted to go back home and play for the club I supported. I don't think that's a crime.

There are not enough jails, not enough police, not enough courts to enforce a law not supported by the people.

What does signature mean? Supposedly these are the added touches that make the crime personal to the killer.

We can't get at crime unless we know what language it speaks. Otherwise, we are just suppressing the cough, not curing the disease.

One way to make sure crime doesn't pay would be to let the government run it.

The fact that a crime might have been committed with impunity in the past may make it seem more familiar and less gruesome, but surely does not give it any greater legitimacy.

I've been surprised that 'Elizabeth is Missing' has been so well received as a crime book. I love mystery stories, and that is what I decided to write.

When I began to write, I was surprised at how little London had been used in crime fiction. Places such as Edinburgh or Oxford or L.A. seemed to have stronger identities.

Was this humanity? Was this nobility? Was this the Christian glory that presumed to hold itself above the heathen Turk? To suffer innocents be sacrificed on an altar of corruption, merely that a lofty family be spared discomfiture? Oh, this was tenfold more abominable than the crime itself, that high authority should wink at it!

A dead man is the best fall guy in the world. He never talks back.

That's the difference between crime and business. For business you gotta have capital. Sometimes I think it's the only difference.

Nobody yelled or ran out of the door. Nobody blew a police whistle. Everything was quiet and sunny and calm. No cause for excitement whatever. It's only Marlowe, finding another body. He does it rather well by now. Murder-a-day Marlowe, they call him. They have the meat wagon following him around to follow up on the business he finds. A nice enough fellow, in an ingenuous sort of way.

It's a swell theory, I said. Marriott socked me, took the money, then he got sorry and beat his brains out, after first burying the money under a bush.

It could have been a beautiful friendship," Beifus said with a sigh. "Except for the ice pick, of course.

The homicide skipper that year was a Captain Gregorius, a type of copper that is getting rarer but by no means extinct, the kind that solves crimes with the bright light, the soft sap, the kick to the kidneys, the knee to the groin, the fist to the solar plexus, the night stick to the base of the spine. Six months later he was indicted for perjury before a grand jury, booted without trial, and later stamped to death by a big stallion on his ranch in Wyoming. Right now I was his raw meat.

Whoever had done it had meant business. Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.

My opinion means nothing. It happens every day. The most unlikely people commit the most unlikely crimes. Nice old ladies poison whole families. Clean-cut kids commit multiple holdups and shootings. Bank managers with spotless records going back twenty years are found out to be long-term embezzlers. And successful and popular and supposedly happy novelists get drunk and put their wives in the hospital. We know damn little about what makes even our best friends tick.

Well, all he did was kill a Negro," I said. "I guess that's only a misdemeanor.

Such a lot of guns around town and so few brains.

Don't kid yourself. You're a dirty low-down detective. Kiss me.

Once outside the law you're all the way outside. You think he's just a gambler. I think he's a pornographer, a blackmailer, a hot car broker, a killer by remote control, and a suborner of crooked cops. He's whatever looks good to him, whatever has the cabbage pinned to it. Don't try to sell me on any high-souled racketeers. They don't come in that pattern.

I'm not Sherlock Holmes or Philo Vance. I don't expect to go over ground the police have covered and pick up a broken pen point and build a case from it. If you think there is anybody in the detective business making a living doing that sort of thing, you don't know much about cops.

Then I sat there holding the neck of the cool bottle and wondering how it would feel to be a homicide dick and find bodies lying around and not mind at all, not have to sneak out wiping doorknobs, not have to ponder how much I could tell without hurting a client and how little I could tell without too badly hurting myself. I decided I wouldn't like it.

him." I said: "Nerts! You seem to forget I know why Lou was killed." Beasley sat up in his chair and moved his right hand