"Why bother yourself about the cataract of drivel for which Conan Doyle is responsible? I am sure he never imagined th…"

"Death seems to provide the minds of the Anglo-Saxon race with a greater fund of amusement that any other single subject."

"I generally thought of a character or two, and then of a set of incidents, and the question was how my people would b…"

"Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid."

"Hammett took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley."

"It seems to have been taken for granted, quite wrongly, that because murder novels are easy reading they are also lig…"

"Detective stories—the modern fairy tales."

"In the melodrama of the brutal thriller we come as close as it is normally possible for art to come to the pure self-…"

"Sapper, Buchan, Dornford Yates, practitioners in that school of Snobbery with Violence that runs like a thread of goo…"

"As the strong man exults in his physical ability, delighting in such exercises as call his muscles into action, so gl…"