Quotes About Investigation

If you don't know there's a trampoline in the room, you're not going to dust the ceiling for prints.

Round up the usual suspects.

Logic, reason, pure science: these, Aronnax insists, are the proper ways to pursue a mystery. Not fables and fairy tales.

that overeager reporters would somehow

It is only likely frauds that are detected.

In just about every other book I can think of, we're chasing on the heels of our heroes - the spies, the soldiers, the romantics, the adventurers. But we stand shoulder to shoulder with the detective.

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 had received an answer to the question that Holmes had put to me. Now all I needed to know was why I had asked it.

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.

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.

Agnes Carmichael, who turns out to be the killer, hasn't spoken a word – hardly surprising, as she's a deaf mute.

The grieving widow,' Hawthorne muttered. 'Do you think so?' 'No, Tony. I've seen more grief at a Turkish wedding. If you ask me, I'd say there's a lot of things she's not telling

His first job was to find some rich lady's pedigree Siamese cat. He managed to run it over on the way to see her. The second job was a divorce case – which you may think is run-of-the-mill until I tell you that the clients were perfectly happily married until he came along… There hadn't been a third case.

But at the same time I recalled something Holmes had said to me many times, namely that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

I mean, that number on the wall for a start! What sort of person bludgeons someone to death and then wastes time painting cryptic messages for the police to find?

It was true that she looked too ordinary, too vulnerable to be a psychopathic killer, but then, from what I'd read, most psychopathic killers are just like that. It's why they're so hard to catch.

In fact, Fraser had often heard the detective remark that there was no such thing as a coincidence. There was a chapter in The Landscape of Criminal Investigation where he had expressed the belief that everything in life had a pattern and that a coincidence was simply the moment when that pattern became briefly visible.

Whodunnits are all about truth: nothing more, nothing less. In a world full of uncertainties, is it not inherently satisfying to come to the last page with every i dotted and every t crossed? The stories mimic our experience in the world. We are surrounded by tensions and ambiguities, which we spend half our life trying to resolve, and we'll probably be on our own deathbed when we reach that moment when everything

Actually, I'd say that both of you are fucking idiots, if you want the truth,' he began. 'You come over here like Batman and Robin and you get yourselves involved in a murder investigation. But you don't help anyone because you've got bigger fish to fry. In fact, you were obstructive. You say you made no difference to the crime scene, but that's not true.

There was something quite animalistic about Hawthorne. The closer he got to the truth, the more you could see it in his eyes, in the way he sat, in the very contours of his skin.