Detective Fiction Authors

"You want me to stipulate that the cops violated her constitutional rights?" "This is the LAPD we're talking about, Kim. It would be shocking if they hadn't violated her rights."

"[Henry, to Tony Earl] "I'll argue self-defense." "You do that," he said, "but last time I looked at the jury instructions on self-defense, if someone comes at you with fists you don't get to blow their brains out with a semiautomatic." "You can if his fists can kill you," I said."

"[Elena, about daughter] "Now I understand that it isn't up to her to be who I might want her to be. It's up to me to love her for who she is.""

"[Henry] "Maybe she hasn't learned yet that good people can make terrible mistakes and still be good people.""

"He hoisted himself up to the ledge of the pool, the water running streams down his thin, hard body. "I came out here from Tennessee to go to school, a long time ago. I was eighteen and pretty and there wasn't anything I wouldn't do in bed. I had a lot of friends." He pushed wet hair from his forehead. "Thing is, you don't stay young and pretty forever. It began to take more and more booze to keep up the illusion, not that anybody but me was fooled. The friends drifted off, the party moved on, and I woke up one morning and I was thirty-one, broke and a drunk.""

"A child's sexual innocence isn't moral, it's literal: he has no context for it. From the adult who uses him sexually, he learns a context"

"[Mr Hendricksen, a high school principal, with Henry Rios] "Useta be there were a lot more people, with the braceros and all," he said. "Now all the big farms are mechanised and they don't need as many workers. Plus, a lot of the canneries have shut down. We're drying up. We've closed classrooms." "What about those bunkers outside?" He swept crumbs from his shirt front. "They went up in the sixties when the place was packed with kids." He squinted at me. "I guess that woulda been your generation, Mr Rios. The whole bunch of you were smart-ass troublemakers and I never thought I'd miss those days, but I do." He poured me more coffee. "You kids were alive. Nowadays, the students, they seemed kinda depressed." "It's a harder world to be young in," I said."

"He was a great and impartial hater; anyone different from him became an object of his contempt."

"I had loved so infrequently I felt a debt to those whom I had, for the reprieve from solitude."

"[Henry] I shrugged. "Being born into my family was like being thrown into an accident.""

"[Henry Rios, with Kevin Reilly] "Sometimes I can't believe what people do to each other." "Believe it," he said. "There's nothing that hasn't been done by someone to someone. People settling scores is what keeps us in business.""

"[Gus Peña] "It's time for me to take care of me.""

"[Paul Windsor, with Henry Rios] Holding up a red M&M, he added, "I thought they'd stopped making these." "Someone started a letter-writing campaign and got the candy company to start making them again." I opened a 7-Up and took a swig. It was as warm and thick as the air in the room. "It's funny what people get themselves worked up about.""

"[Henry Rios, with Josh] "I think someone's at the door." "I'll see who it is." "If it's the grim reaper, tell him he's a couple of years early.""

"I didn't know what else to say. Moments like this brought home to me that no matter how well I thought I knew him, how much I loved him, we were on different sides of the fence that separated the infected from the uninfected. I could see a little way over to his side, but he lived there."

"[Henry Rios, to Paul Windsor] "Society is a conspiracy and everyone who's different is its target.""

"Lips pursed, Sara moved swiftly and rudely through the crowd of midday shoppers as we crossed the square. Sara'd been thin as a girl, but no more. Not quite fat, but the extra weight she carried blurred her features. Pouches of flesh had gathered beneath her eyes and her chin. Damp circles stained her armpits and the seat of her dress was deeply wrinkled. Her makeup was hit-and-miss and she had the look of someone who no longer cared much about her appearance."

"[Henry Rios] "I acquired my values through trial and error." What I'd meant when I told Paul my values were acquired through trial and error was that they were learned, not given, and came out of my own experience."

"There had been little about our childhood that could be described as paradisiacal. Our alcoholic father was either brutal or sullenly withdrawn. Our mother retaliated with religious fanaticism. As she knelt before plaster images of saints, in the flicker of votive candles, her furious mutter was more like invective than prayer. Their manias kept my parents quite busy, and Elena and I were more or less left to raise ourselves. Elena and I were united only in our unspoken determination to show nothing of what we felt about this embarrassment of a life that our parents had visited upon us. In this we succeeded. To the outside world we were simply quiet children, good at school, not very social, a little high-strung."

"[Henry Rios, with Elena] The heat had become a bit denser and the light a little dustier as the fragrant morning waned. Birds called from the surrounding trees and the low burble of water sounded from the stream that ran through Elena's property. "This is heaven," I said, opening the car door. She smiled, deepening the lines around her mouth. "Have you ever read Primo Levi?" "No." "He has a passage in his book about concentration camp survivors―to the effect that those who have once been tortured go on being tortured. Heaven's not possible for people like that.""

"After talking to Mark, I'd spent much of the night in the kind of "what if" ruminations that served no particular purpose except to depress me."

"It was one of those winter days in Los Angeles when the wind has swept away the smog and the air is clear and the light still and everything has the immediacy of a dream. I parked on a street called Overland in the Hollywood Hills. It was lined with white-skinned birch trees. Their nude branches shimmered against the sky. Tattered yellow leaves clogged the gutters and the air was scented with the rainy smell of eucalyptus. There were no cars on the street and the houses were barely visible behind walls and fences and sweeping lawns that had never been trod upon except by gardeners."

"[Irene Gentry] "We all love according to our natures.""

"[Irene Gentry] "Some people are just so beautiful that life seems to speak to us through them - they're vital, radiant. It's more startling in men than women, I think, because we don't usually let ourselves think of men that way. But Shakespeare knew. Remember the sonnets? 'Shall I compare thee to a summer's day,' was written to another man.""

"[Henry Rios] It has never taken much for me to dislike a cop. My automatic assumption that most of them are assholes is seldom disappointed."

"Larry was in his study, going through a pile of papers. Watching him, it occurred to me that I hardly knew him at all. It was as if all these years I'd been seeing him in profile and now that he turned his face to me, it was the face of a stranger."

"His eyes were judging me. It was as if I was the last of a long line of grown-ups who would fail him."

"[Larry Ross] "There are only two stages to dying, Henry. Being alive and being dead.""

"They were empty gestures, the kind it was beginning to seem that these people were full of."

"[Grant Hancock, with Henry Rios] "As for me, when I die I'll direct my family to bury me without fanfare." I smiled. "When you die, Grant, the tailors and barbers will declare a day of national mourning.""

"[Henry, with Katherine Paris] I smiled as charmingly as I knew how. Her hard, intelligent face showed no sign of being charmed."

"[Josh, and Henry] He sat down again and looked at me. "I just really wanted to see you again." I looked at him. "Why?" "I've seen you before," he said. "I beg your pardon?" "Two years ago you gave a speech at a rally at UCLA against the sodomy law. Remember?" "I gave so many speeches that year," I said apologetically. He smiled. "I remember. Afterwards I came up and shook your hand." The smile faded and he looked at me gravely. "You gave me the courage to be who I am. But it didn't last." "Few of us come out all at once," I said, gently. "It's not the easiest thing to do." He shook his head and frowned. "I never came out at all." "We are at a gay bar," I said. "It's easy to come out in a bar," he said, "or in bed." A shadow crossed his face. "Are you alright?" He stared down at his hands and said, "No." There was a lot of pain in the little word. He grabbed my hand, clutching it tightly. "What is it Josh?" I asked. "He drew a shaky breath. "My life's a lie," he said. "No one knows who I really am, not my friends or my folks. I can't live this way anymore.""

"[Josh and Henry] "Do you want to?" he whispered. I raised myself on my elbow and said, "Of course I do, but I haven't carried rubbers with me since I was sixteen." "Just this once," he said. "You could pull out before - you know." I squeezed his neck between my fingers. "No," I said softly. "There's AIDS, Josh. It's not worth the risk.""

"The rich are different, I thought: condemned to live their lives in public, they go through their paces at the edge of hysteria like show dogs from which every trait has been bred but anxiety."

"[Ben Vega, with Henry Rios] "How can you defend a guy like that?" "If I had a nickel for every time someone asked me that question I'd be retired by now," I replied. "So do you really want an answer or were you just asking so you can feel superior to me?" Startled, but game, Vega said, "Yeah, I want an answer. Really." "Well, the answer changes depending on the case," I replied. "Sometimes I defend someone because I think he deserves a break,, or maybe just because I like him. And sometimes I do it because, whatever the guy's done, worse has been done to him." I grinned. "And sometimes I do it for money. And sometimes I do it because no one else will. Like this case.""

"[Henry Rios, with Aaron Gold] "Every choice closes doors," I said, "and at some point you are left in the little room of yourself. I think most people who get to that room go crazy because they're surrounded with missed possibilities and no principle to explain or justify why they made the choices they did.""

"[Henry, with Katherine Paris] She looked away from me. A moment later she said, "I have never understood homosexuality. I can't picture what you men do with each other." "I could tell you but it would completely miss the point.""

"The unity of instinct and the universal belief in freedom for the individual which id the backbone of democracy is a very real thing in Britain today. We are not only fighting for it, it is our greatest weapon."

"There were times when I wished I had been 'prenticed to a different trade. I was putting in seven hours a day on it. It was an odd life I was always hoping that the end of one thriller would not overtake me before I had finished the other."

"Few people can see God, and it seems an even bolder mind to see the Devil. Active evil is more incomprehensible than active good, and so it ought to be."

"Our ideal is the statesman who knows and loves his country and who never makes the mistake of underestimating his employer, either in intelligence or strength."

"To be free takes a lot of time and trouble."

"As a nation, we English will fight and die for principles we cannot find time to teach in our free schools."

"Courage is not herself enough. She cannot stand alone. She is a part, not a whole, a wife, not a man and wife. A well appreciated helpmeet."

"We, me and thee and the parson and all the other lads in the village constitute the public, and the politicians are our servants."

"Once sex rears its ugly 'ead it's time to steer clear."

"'A quotation's only a short neat way of sayin' somethin' everybody knows, like "It's crackers to slip a rozzer the dropsy in snide."' (Italics in original)"

"What attracted me the most of all to the detective story, was the protective covering offered to the author."

"Telling the truth is the basis of all classic art."

"There is something very good in pride of race if you can be satisfied in your heart it is absolutely genuine and is based on things you have see, heard and felt rather than on those you have read."