Crime Novels

"There comes a time in a man’s life, he figured, the infamous midlife crisis, when a guy has to face the reality that what he has is all he’s going to get, and he needs to find his peace and his happiness in his life as it is."

"Ocean Beach Pier is the biggest pier in California. A big capital T of concrete and steel jutting out into the Pacific Ocean, its central stem running for over sixteen hundred feet before its crosspiece branches out to the north and south an almost equal distance. If you decide to walk the entire pier, you're looking at a jaunt of about a mile and a half."

"He’s hunted enough guys to know that their own heads can be their worst enemies. They start seeing things that aren’t there, then, worse, not seeing things that are. They worry and worry, and chew on their own insides, until, when you do track them down, they’re almost grateful. By this time, they’ve been killed so many times in their minds that the real thing is a relief."

"Each day seemed to last forever, Frank thinks as he watches a wave roll in and smack the pier. You'd get up before dawn, just like now, and work hard all day on the old man's tuna boat. But you'd get back by the middle of the afternoon; then it was off to meet your buddies at the beach. You'd surf until dark, laughing and talking shit out there in the lineup, goofing on one another, showing off for the bunnies watching you from the beach. Those were the longboard days, plenty of time and plenty of space. Days of "hanging ten" and "ho-dadding" and those fat Dick Dale guitar riffs and Beach Boys songs, and they were singing about your life, your sweet summer days on the beach."

"One of the nice things about living alone— maybe the only good thing about living alone, Frank thinks—is that you can play opera at 4:00 a.m. and not bother anyone. And the house is solid, with thick walls like they used to build in the old days, so Frank's early morning arias don't disturb the neighbors, either."

"Life’s like a fat orange, Frank thinks. When you’re young, you squeeze it hard and fast, trying to get all the juice in a hurry. When you’re older, you squeeze it slowly, savouring every drop. Because, one, you don’t know how many drops you have left, and, two, the last drops are the sweetest."

"It's winter in San Diego and cold outside. Okay, relatively cold. It's not Wisconsin or North Dakota—it's not the painful kind of cold where your engine won't turn over and your face feels like it's going to crack and crack and fall off, but anyplace in the Northern Hemisphere is at least chilly at 4:10 a.m. in January. Especially, Frank thinks as he gets into his Toyota pickup truck, when you're on the wrong side of sixty and it takes a little while for your blood to warm up in the morning."

"When I'm finished, I reach for the towel, catch a glimpse of my reflection in the mirror above the basin. The glimpse turns into a full vacant stare. Blood spots all over my face. A missing earlobe. Battle on. That's what they say. I rub the towel over my face, watch the blood smear in the mirror. Yeah, you battle on."

"I was a pain in the ass when I fought. You want something that much, you think you can do it, that's all that matters. People, they're a waste of breath. Can't talk to people, because they're never gonna see the world like you see it. You get so wrapped up in yourself and your goals you can't see beyond the ring."

"This sport, it's a business more than ever now. The rankings don't mean anything. Those rankings were fixed when I was in the circuit, no reason to believe they're any different now. Talent talks, but it's the money that keeps you running. You got promoters paying off boards so their fighters can square off against each other and keep the dollars rolling through the gate. Doesn't matter who knocks down who, the promoter's the only one that really wins."

"A guy makes his living with his fists, it gets so that's the only thing he knows how to do. And when you're pro, you learn things you don't want to learn. You can get like me and get out, do something else, scrub yourself, and try not to look back."

"Burgess gazes through me, like he's trying to read my mind instead of asking me straight out. Probably thinking that if he did ask something, he'd get a fistful of lies in return. Some blokes I know, that stare puts the shits up them, makes them paranoid. Others just take it as a confirmation of their recidivism, makes them think their record marks them like a bad dose of acne, that they haven't got a chance in the outside world. And that's what they call a self-fulfilling prophecy."

"Innes, for all his faults and problems, is an engaging character with a sharp sense of humor and a ton of turmoil in his life. And Banks, a member of the so-called 'Brit grit' movement, has an easy, breezy style that keeps you flipping the pages."

"The joker swigs whiskey and grips the bottle that little bit harder. This isn't going to end well. Everyone squaring up like it's West Side fucking Story. This is going to end with the pair of us in hospital and no medical insurance."

"I enjoy the hard-boiled style. ... It certainly isn't a new formula, though Ray Banks does follow it well."

"Jesus, man, you get hit in the head that many times, you hear one thing, you see something else, find out the people you respected and loved are setting you up because you're getting older and slower? You'd be a fucking saint not to let that affect you."

"I miss heroes. I miss real heroes. Used to be, you knew who the heroes were just by looking at them. Good guy in the white hat, bad guy in the black hat. You knew where you stood."

"By transplanting his thuggish noir from Manchester to LA, Ray Banks' second Cal Innes novel has two sets of mean streets to pace. Not that his grasp of characterisation has gotten any stronger: Donkey Punch is as terse and macho as Saturday's Child, although his hardboiled writing style has become more poised and confident."

"Much of Innes' narration is East London slang, generously laced with profanities and hard for Americans to grasp. But Banks' tough-guy prose is irresistible."

"I'm constantly surprised by the space in this country. Back in Manchester, there's no such thing as this much space. The city center's become a shrine to high-rise buildings, people shunted into tiny apartments, paying over the odds to enjoy wooden floors and sky-high urban living. Students and young professionals everywhere, multiplying like a hostile virus. But here a man can live without seeing another individual if he wants to. It's a comforting thought, that kind of isolation. I've lived too long under people's feet, or with people under mine. Might be good to get away from it all out here. It's a fantasy. A ridiculous fucking dream, but that's what this country's all about."

"You don't reason with a pillhead psycho. You don't try. You do what I just did — hit him as hard as you can and run the other way. And you hope you hit him hard enough that the battle's done and so's the fucking war. Hope you put enough force into those blows to make 'em count, put him down and keep him down."

"The PI days are over, if they'd ever been there in the first place. I've been concentrating my energies on caretaker work, whatever errand Paulo needs me to run. Sweeping floors, picking up the focus pads, grunt work. Whatever pays the bills and keeps me clean. Because God knows, being on license isn't all it's cracked up to be. Probation's a barbed wire leash. And I've already felt it dig into my throat once before."

"Vivid and realistic, with an appealingly flawed hero and an interesting setting amid the underside of modern LA, this is a knockout."

"Even after all that had happened, the bitterness and disappointment in his voice cut me to the heart. "Henry," I said. I wanted to say something profound, that Julian was only human, that he was old, that flesh and blood was frail and weak and that there comes a time when we have to transcend our teachers. But I found myself unable to say anything at all. He turned his blind, unseeing eyes upon me. "I loved him more than my own father," he said. "I loved him more than anyone in the world.""

"I don't have any friends here for the winter," I said, and I didn't. "You shouldn't push your friends away like that. The best friends you'll ever have are the ones you're making right now. I know you don't believe me, but they start to fall away when you get to be my age."

"I suppose in that regard my tastes are rather Hellenistic. Landlocked places interest me, remote prospects, wild country. I've never had the slightest bit of interest in the sea. Rather like what Homer says about the Arcadians, you remember? With ships they had nothing to do...." "It's because you grew up in the midwest, " Charles said. "But if one follows that line of reasoning, then it follows that I would love flat lands, and plains. Which I don't. The descriptions of Troy in the Iliad are horrible to me—all flat land and burning sun. No. I've always been drawn to broken, wild terrain. The oddest tongues come from such places, and the strangest mythologies, and the oldest cities, and the most barbarous religions—Pan himself was born in the mountains, you know. And Zeus. In Parrhasia it was that Rheia bore thee," he said dreamily, lapsing into Greek, "where was a hill sheltered with the thickest brush...."

"Don't say 'fuck' anymore," said Henry, in a quiet, but ominous voice. "Fuck? What's the matter, Henry? You never heard that word before? Isn't that what you do to my sister every night?"

"When Bunny started in again ("And then there's the one about the Old West—this is when they still hung folks...") camilla edged over on the windowsill and smiled nervously at me. I went over and sat between her and Charles. She gave me a quick kiss on the cheek. "How are you? she said. "Did you wonder where we were?""

"Someone who didn't know there was such a thing in the world as Death; who couldn't believe it even when he saw it; had never dreamed it would come to him. Flapping crows. Shiny beetles crawling in the undergrowth. A patch of sky, frozen in a cloudy retina, reflected in a puddle on the ground. Yoo-hoo. Being and nothingness. ...I am the Resurrection and the life; he who believeth in Me, even if he die, shall live; and whoseover liveth and believeth in Me shall never die...."

"Horrific as it was, the present dark, I was afraid to leave it for the other, permanent dark — jelly and bloat, the muddy pit."

""You had better watch out," she said. "I have heard some weird shit about those people [...] like they worship the fucking Devil." "The Greek have no Devil," I said pedantically."

"[Henry and Bunny] seem to argue quite a bit." "Well, of course," said Camilla, "but that doesn't mean they're not fond of each other all the same."

"Since the two of them had been out of sorts for over a month, Henry in particular. Bunny, I knew, had been hitting him hard for money in the past week,s but though Henry complained about this he seemed oddly incapable of refusing him. I was fairly sure that it wasn't the money per se, but the principle of it; I was also fairly sure that whatever tension existed, Bunny was oblivious of it."

"For a warning of what happens in the absence of such a pressure valve, we have the example of the Romans. The emperors. Think, for example, of Tiberius, the ugly stepson, trying to live up to the command of his stepfather Augustus. Think of the tremendous, impossible strain he must have undergone, following in the footsteps of a savior, a god. the people hated him. No matter how hard he tried he was never good enough, could never be rid of the hateful self, and finally the floodgates broke. He was swept away on his perversions and he died, old and mad, lost in the pleasure gardens of the Capri: not even happy there, as one might hope, but miserable. Before he died he wrote a letter home to the Senate. 'May all the Gods and Goddesses visit me with more utter destruction than I feel I am daily suffering.'"

"Are you the new neanias?" he said mockingly. The new young man. I said that I was. "Cubitum eamus?" "What?" "Nothing."

"The Greeks were different. They had a passion for order and symmetry, much like the Romans, but they knew how foolish it was to deny the unseen world, the old gods. Emotion, darkness, barbarism." He looked at the ceiling for a moment, his face almost troubled. "Do you remember what we were speaking of earlier, of how bloody, terrible things are sometimes the most beautiful?" he said. "It's a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely? To throw off the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves? Euripides speaks of the Maenads: head thrown back, throat to the stars, 'more like deer than human being.' To be absolutely free! One is quite capable, of course, of working out these destructive passions in more vulgar and less efficient ways. But how glorious to release them in a single burst! To sing, to scream, to dance barefoot in the woods in the dead of night, with no more awareness of mortality than an animal! These are powerful mysteries. The bellowing of bulls. Springs of honey bubbling from the ground. If we are strong enough in our souls we can rip away the veil and look that naked, terrible beauty right in the face; let God consume us, devour us, unstring our bones. Then spit us out reborn."

"If I threw myself off, I thought, who would find me in all that white silence? Might the river beat me downstream over the rocks until it spat me out in the quiet waters, down behind the dye factory, where some lady would catch me in the beam of her headlights when she pulled out of the parking lot at five in the afternoon? Or would I, like the pieces of Leo's mandolin, lodge stubbornly in some quiet place behind a boulder and wait, my clothes washing about me, for spring?"

"She really was older, not the glancing-eyed girl I had fallen in love with but no less beautiful for that; beautiful now in a way that less excited my senses than tore at my very heart."

"In this swarm of cigarettes and dark sophistication they appeared here and there like figures from an allegory; or long-dead celebrants from some forgotten garden party."

"But do you really think," he said, concerned, "that one can call psychology a science?" "Certainly. What else is it?" "But even Plato knew that class and conditioning and so forth have an inalterable effect on the individual. It seems to me that psychology is only another word for what the ancients called fate." "Psychology is a terrible word."

""Death is the mother of beauty," said Henry. "And what is beauty?" "Terror." [...] "And if beauty is terror," said Julian, "then what is desire? We think we have many desires, but in fact we have only one. What is it?" "To live," said Camilla. "To live forever," said Bunny, chin cupped in his palm."

"There is much to admire in Tartt's novel, but it is especially laudable for how persuasively she chronicles the steps from studying classics to committing murder. This is a difficult transition to relate in a believable manner, and all the more difficult given Tartt's decision to tell the story from the perspective of one of the most genial of the conspirators. Her story could easily come across as implausible—or even risible—in its recreation of Dionysian rites on a Vermont college campus, and its attempt to convince us that a mild-mannered transfer student with a taste for ancient languages can evolve, through a series of almost random events, into a killer. Yet convince us she does, and the intimacy with which Tartt brings her readers into the psychological miasma of the unfolding plot is one of the most compelling features of The Secret History."

"Those first days before classes started I spent alone in my whitewashed room, in the bright meadows of Hampden. And I was happy in those first days as really I'd never been before, roaming like a sleepwalker, stunned and drunk with beauty."

"It's a life's work to see yourself for what you really are and even then you might be wrong."

"I didnt know you could steal your own life. And I didnt know that it would bring you no more benefit than about anything else you might steal."

"I don't aim to quit while I'm ahead. I just aim to quit."

"All the time you spend tryin to get back what's been took from you there's more goin out the door. After a while you just try and get a tourniquet on it."

"I aint got all that many regrets. I could imagine lots of things that you might think would make a man happier. I think by the time you're grown you're as happy as you're goin to be. You'll have good times and bad times, but in the end you'll be about as happy as you was before. Or as unhappy. I've knowed people that just never did get the hang of it."

"You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from."

"[W]hen you encounter certain things in the world, the evidence for certain things, you realize that you have come upon somethin that you may very well not be equal to and I think that this is one of them things. When you've said that it's real and not just in your head I'm not all that sure what it is you have said."