edgar-award-winners

"This was Fiesta. Overhead were strings of colored lights. In the center of the square was a small green park, trees and benches and a draped in red-and-orange . A low cement wall ran around the park with entrances at each corner. Entrances hung with grotesque standards. In the street that circled the park, were thatched booths, smelling of food, the acrid smell of ; stacked with cases of , decorated with s, cheap canes topped with celluloid dolls wiggling feathers, and cheap sticks with flimsy yellow birds floating from them, balloons on brittle wooden sticks.This was Fiesta: a run-down carnival."

"Reading Dorothy B. Hughes’s novel ' for the first time is like finding the long-lost final piece to an enormous . Within its s, its -scented shadows, you feel as though you’ve discovered a delicious and dark secret, a tantalizing page-turner with sneakily subversive undercurrents. While only intermittently in print for much of the last half century, its influence on crime fiction is unsung yet inescapable. From Patricia Highsmith and Jim Thompson to Bret Easton Ellis and Thomas Harris, nearly every “” tale of the last seventy years bears its imprint—both in terms of its sleek, relentless style and its claustrophobic “mind of the criminal” perspective. But its larger influence derives from Hughes’s uncanny grasp of the connection between violence and misogyny and an embattled masculinity. And its importance extends beyond form or genre and into cultural mythos: the birth of ."

"“We didn’t know it was only the first then. It was a girl down on . She was a nice enough kid for the life she lived, I guess. Danced in a bump-and-grind house down there. We found her in an alley. Strangled.: He picked up his glass, emptied it. “No clues. Nothing. …”"

"We only have two kinds of weather in California, magnificent and unusual."

"By nine, Mildred was powdered, puffed, perfumed, and patted to that state of semi-transparency that a woman seems to achieve when she is really dressed to go out."

"They threw me off the hay truck about noon."

"Sit here, now, and look. The water, the surf, the colors on the shore. You think they make the beauty of the tropical sea, aye, lad? They do not. 'Tis the knowledge of what lurks below the surface of it, that awful-looking thing, as you call it, that carries death with every move that it makes. So it is, so it is with all beauty. So it is with Mexico. I hope you never forget it."

"She was a little given to rehearsing things in her mind, and having imaginary triumphs over people who had upset her in one way and another."

"I understood it now, understood a lot of things I had never understood before. And mostly I understood what a woman could mean to a man. Before, she had been a pair of eyes, and a shape, something to get excited about. Now she seemed something to lean on, and draw something from, that nothing else could give me. I thought of books I had read, about worship of the Earth, and how she was always called Mother, and none of it made much sense, but those big round breasts did, when I put my head on them, and they began to tremble, and I began to tremble."

"Just you and me and the road."

"Tomorrow night, if I come back, there’ll be kisses. Lovely ones, Frank. Not drunken kisses. Kisses with dreams in them. Kisses that come from life, not death.""It's a date."

"A home is not a museum. It doesn't have to be furnished with Picasso paintings, or Sheraton suites, or Oriental rugs, or Chinese pottery. But it does have to be furnished with things that mean something to you."

"I ripped all her clothes off. She twisted and turned, slow, so they would slip out from under her. Then she closed her eyes and lay back on the pillow. Her hair was falling over her shoulders in snaky curls. Her eye was all black, and her breasts weren't drawn up and pointing up at me, but soft, and spread out in two big pink splotches. She looked like the great-grandmother of every whore in the world. The devil got his money's worth that night."

"We're the friendliest enemies that ever were."

"I loved her like a rabbit loves a rattlesnake."

"Under those blue pajamas was a shape to set a man nuts."

"When she tired, I loosened up a little, to let her blow. Yes, it was rape, but only technical, brother, only technical. Above the waist, maybe she was worried about the sacrilegio , but from the waist down she wanted me, bad. There couldn’t be any doubt about that."

"If you have to do it, you can do it."

"The hand that holds the money cracks the whip."

"Stealing a man’s wife, that’s nothing, but stealing his car, that’s larceny."

"A receptionist is a lazy dame that can’t do anything on earth, and wants to sit out front where everybody can watch her do it."

"I kissed her. Her eyes were shining up at me like two blue stars. It was like being in church."

"Restaurant, hey. That's what I've got. Whole goddam country lives selling hot dogs to each other."

"Have you got a little bit of gypsy in you?""Gypsy? I had rings in my ears when I was born."

"I had killed a man, for money and a woman. I didn’t have the money and I didn’t have the woman."

"Let's get stinko."

"We’re just two punks, Frank. God kissed us on the brow that night. He gave us all that two people can ever have. And we just weren’t the kind that could have it. We had all that love, and we just cracked up under it. It’s a big airplane engine, that takes you through the sky, right up to the top of the mountain. But when you put it in a Ford, it just shakes it to pieces. That’s what we are, Frank, a couple of Fords. God is up there laughing at us."

"He was enthusiastic about everything, but when she came in with the pie he grew positively lyrical."

"There’s a shark. Following the ship."I tried not to look, but couldn’t help it. I saw a flash of dirty white down in the green. We walked back to the deck chairs."Walter, we’ll have to wait. Till the moon comes up.""I guess we better have a moon.""I want to see that fin. That black fin. Cutting the water in the moonlight."

"Love, when you get fear in it, it’s not love any more. It’s hate."

"He might be asleep, but even asleep he looked like he knew more than most guys awake."

"I make no conscious effort to be tough, or , or grim, or any of the things I am usually called. I merely try to write as the character would write, and I never forget that the average man, from the fields, the streets, the bars, the offices, and even the gutters of his country, has acquired a vividness of speech that goes beyond anything I could invent, and that if I stick to this heritage, this ' of the American countryside, I shall attain a maximum of effectiveness with very little effort."

"A woman is a funny animal."

"That’s all it takes, one drop of fear, to curdle love into hate."

"... Walter, the time has come.""What do you mean, Phyllis?""For me to meet my bridegroom. The only one I ever loved. One night I'll drop off the stern of the ship. Then, little by little I'll feel his icy fingers creeping into my heart."

"My advice for writers? Just get it out. You can fix bad pages. You can't fix no pages."

"I used to think that comedy came from wanting acceptance, wanting to be liked. Now I know differently. I know it's all down to fear. Fear, ladies and gentlemen, is the only true comedian in town."

"Charlie saw her eyes were wet and he didn't know what to say because he wasn't used to thinking about people the way they really were, especially women: he only saw them as people who were going to be dumb enough to buy his line of crap or who were going to slam the door in his face and leave him eating tacos-to-go that night instead of sitting down at a Macdonald's. The Judge had asked him if he had any friends and he couldn't think of any, and he'd never realised it before."

"He felt her watching him, maybe wondering if he was some kind of nut. He'd been wondering about that himself, as a matter of fact, during the past hour, but very slowly he was beginning to think he might not be any kind of nut at all, and that would make a nice change."

"Berlatsky noted these things because all his life he had noted things, like a sparrow picks at crumbs. You could miss a lot of chances by not using your eyes."

"He looked around at the peeling paint and the missing light-tubes and the juke-box with its 'Out of Order' notice stuck across the glass, and she knew what he was thinking: this was the kind of place that made you wonder how the hell it kept going, then a week later you come past and see it's shut down."

"The only person who saw the car go into the ravine that night was Berlatsky."

"For forty-three years Berlatsky had made a point of keeping out of trouble and now there was this."

"Maria fetched the letters, half-running. She was the most willing girl they had ever had, and within three months she'd be speaking good English, and a month later she would leave, as they all did, because her mother was sick in Tijuana: in other words, someone—often a close neighbour—had offered her even more money, a colour TV set and the whole of every Friday off as well as Sunday."

"He has a one-hundred-and-ten percent British accent. Only other guy I ever met with an accent like it is an Armenian with a Lebanese passport who works for Unesco and was educated at the English High School in Istanbul before going on to the Sorbonne."

"'Bitter?' He grinned. 'Why on earth should I feel bitter? We were barbarians. You will note that I say "we". I include myself. What would we in our ignorance have done with so much old bird-crap, so much phosphate. Nothing. Our exploitation by the Powers was the best thing that ever happened to us. Even the American bombing was good. Simple people enjoy loud bangs.'"

"If I had not made the money, someone else would have done so. Not one of those unfortunate creatures would have been any better off and I should have lost money."

"Drug addicts, you know, are always very eager to get other people to take drugs too."

"They say that the Devil still quotes the scriptures"

"The important thing to know about an assassination or an attempted assassination is not who fired the shot, but who paid for the bullet."