Quotes About Mystery

If I had a razor, I'd cut your throat — just to see what ran out of it.

I bet she snaps a mean garter.

Or can I call you Phil? Sure. You can can me Vivian. Thanks, Mrs. Regan. Oh, go to hell, Marlowe.

She thought. It was nice to watch her thinking. She still had her legs crossed, and still carelessly.

You know who they are?" Tony said softly. "I could maybe give nine guesses. And twelve of them would be right." (I'll be waiting)

You mean something happened to him?" Her voice faded off into sort of a sad whisper, like a mortician asking for a down payment.

in a voice with half the steps missing.

Then she lowered her lashes until they almost cuddled her cheeks and slowly raised them again, like a theater curtain. I was to get to know that trick. That was supposed to make me roll over on my back with all four paws in the air.

I got down there about nine, under a hard high October moon that lost itself in the top layers of a beach fog.

His blue eyes frosted. 'Are you attempting to tell me my duties, sir?' 'No. But I'm having a lot of fun trying to guess what they are.

She was wearing a brown tailor-made and from a strap over her shoulder hung one of those awkward-looking square bags that make you think of a Sister of Mercy taking first aid to the wounded.

And there are still a number of people around who say that Hammett didn't write detective stories at all-merely hard-boiled chronicles of mean streets with a perfunctory mystery element dropped in like the olive in a martini. (The Simple Art of Murder)

I sat down on the edge of a deep soft chair and looked at Mrs. Regan. She was worth a stare. She was trouble. She was stretched out on a modernistic chaise-longue with her slippers off, so I stared at her legs in the sheerest silk stockings. They seemed to be arranged to stare at. They were visible to the knee and one of them well beyond. The knees were dimpled, not bony and sharp. The calves were beautiful, the ankles long and slim and with enough melodic line for a tone poem.

When the plot flags, bring in a man with a gun.

Carli's was a small club at the end of a passage between a sporting-goods store and a circulating library. There was a grilled door and a man behind it who had given up trying to look as if it mattered who came in. (Smart-Aleck Kill)

A dark woman with a sharp nose opened her mouth to yell and no sound came from her. There was the instant when nobody makes a sound, when it almost seems as if there will never again be any sound—after the sound of a gun. (Guns at Cyrano's)

It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window. She was wearing street clothes that looked black and white, and a hat to match and she was a little haughty, but not too much. Whatever you needed, wherever you happened to be—she had it.

One moment, please. Whom did you wish to see?" Degarmo spun on his heel and looked at me wonderingly. "Did he say 'whom'?" "Yeah, but don't hit him," I said. "There is such a word." Degarmo licked his lips. "I knew there was," he said. "I often wondered where they kept it.

The big man leaned down from his hips and bent his knees a little and breathed in my face. 'What for did you call me Hemingway, pally?' 'There are ladies present.

Under the thinning fog the surf curled and creamed, almost without sound, like a thought trying to form itself on the edge of consciousness.

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

I called him up from a phone booth. The voice that answered was fat. It wheezed softly, like the voice of a man who had just won a pie-eating contest.

the colour of her hair was dusky red, like a fire under control but still dangerous.

She was quite a doll. She wore a white belted raincoat, no hat, a well-cherished head of platinum hair, booties to match the raincoat, a folding plastic umbrella, a pair of blue-gray eyes that looked at me as if I had said a dirty word.