Fantasy Authors

"Now, personally, I’d have been happier driving an armored personnel carrier in through the front door. But since we’re the Met, and not the police department of a small town in Missouri, we didn’t have one."

"“Peter,” said Tyburn. “I need you to stop just pretending to be clever and actually be clever.”"

"Police doctrine is, even if you’re waiting for someone to do something violent to your suspect, you should de-escalate the situation because at the very least a peaceful solution produces a ton less paperwork."

"A promise is a promise, or as Nightingale put it, “either your word is good or it’s worthless.”"

"“How about this then, Peter,” she said. “You’ve been part of something that no wizard has ever been part of before. You know something that’s not in their books.” I wanted to say that lots of things weren’t in the libraries of the wise, including plate tectonics, molecular biology and the complete works of J. K. Rowling. But she’d probably say that I was missing the point."

"“Come on then,” yelled Beverley, for whom de-escalation was something that happened to other people."

"From a policing point of view, guns are a pain. Once someone is known to be tooled up, your operational priorities are suddenly fucked up. It all becomes about managing whoever was stupid enough to pull a gun in central London and your number one priority is public safety, followed closely by officer safety and then, not so closely, by the safety of the moron with the gun."

"And having made sure my attention was focused in one direction the universe, which likes a good laugh, smacked me in the face from the other side."

"The ABC of policing literally goes: Assume nothing, Believe no-one, Check everything."

"One of the advantages of being the police is that when you want to buy something slightly dodgy, you generally know where to shop."

"“Nice,” said Abigail. “Very plausible.” “Yeah, but just because it’s plausible doesn’t mean it’s true.”"

"Taking a statement from anyone can be a long process on account of the fact that your average member of the public wouldn’t know the truth if it donned a pink tutu and danced in front of them singing the Chicken Song."

"I am a goddess, Peter, a creature of temperament and whimsy. I’m supposed to be arbitrary and mercurial—it’s practically my job description."

"He didn’t have “instincts”, he had thirty years of experience—which was much more reliable."

"“You know how some people work at being stupid?” she asked. “If you give them a clear, common sense choice they give it a lot of thought and then choose stupid.”"

"Even hardened professional villains consent to be policed. This is clear from the way they complain that nonces, rapists and bankers get shorter sentences than decent ordinary criminals. It’s the same with all the other criminals, the weekend shoplifters, the drunk drivers, the overexcited protesters and executives who pop in to the loo for a quick snort. When it’s their stuff that goes walkies, or their car that’s damaged, when their kids go missing and their briefcases gets snatched, they all seem to be pretty consensual about the police. Everyone consents to the police. It’s just the operational priorities they argue about."

"I find you get two types of police, those that don’t want to know and those that do. Unfortunately, dealing with things you don’t want to know about is practically a definition of policing."

"The narrow hallway was lined with framed photographs while the far end was dominated by a faux movie poster for Gone with the Wind starring Ronald Reagan sweeping Margaret Thatcher off her feet while a mushroom cloud bloomed behind them. She promised to follow him to the end of the world. He promised to organize it."

"You don’t get to be a senior investigating officer unless you have a degree in skepticism, an MA in distrust and your CV lists suspicious bastard under your hobbies."

"Nightingale had taught me to be cautious of the early sources. “A great deal of it is accurate,” he said. “And a great deal is less so. Unfortunately it can be difficult to determine which is which.”"

"Landscaping is the great cardinal sin of modern architecture. It’s not your garden, it’s not a park—it’s a formless patch of grass, shrubbery and the occasional tree that exists purely to stop the original developer’s plans from looking like a howling concrete wilderness."

"His big claim to fame, beyond writing the first ever vampire novel, is his work attempting to classify where whatever it is that powers magic comes from. He called it potentia because there’s nothing quite like Latin for disguising the fact you’re making it up as you go along."

"Keeping a secret always makes the police suspicious. And while we’re willing to believe in the possibility of a totally innocent explanation, we never think that’s the way to bet."

"Charing Cross Road was once the bookselling heart of London and disreputable enough to avoid the multinational chains in their unceasing quest to turn every street of every city into a clone of every other."

"I didn’t bother calling Nightingale on the mobile I’d got him for Christmas because he only turns it on when he wants to call someone—the new technology being strictly there for his convenience, not anybody else’s."

"Technically, you don't have to have a corpse to convict for murder but detectives always feel better when they've found your actual victim—they're superstitious like that."

"We did not tell him we were witch hunting, as that sort of thing tends to cause alarm."

"It’s a police mantra that all members of the public are guilty of something, but some members of the public are more guilty than others."

"Most people don’t see half of what’s in front of them. Your visual cortex does a shit load of imaging processing before the signal even gets to your brain, whose priorities are still checking the ancestral savannah for dangerous predators, edible berries and climbable trees. That’s why a sudden cat in the night can make you jump and some people when distracted, can walk right out in front of a bus. Your brain just isn’t interested in those large moving chunks of metal or the static heaps of brightly colored stuff that piles up in drifts around us. Never mind all that, says your brain, it’s those silent fur-covered merchants of death you’ve got to watch out for."

"We were pretty certain we knew roughly where he’d been, but members of the public have an unnerving tendency to switch straight from lying to your face to telling you what they think you want to hear—with no intervening period of veracity at all."

"You don’t actually know enough about me to insult me properly."

"Was it better to die in the illusion of sunshine and warmth or face death in a cold darkness of reality? Was it better to die in happy ignorance or terrified knowledge? The answer, if you’re a Londoner, is that it’s better not to die at all."

"A lot of people have died in the Underground, through accidents, stupidity, or suicide. All the one-unders whose dying wish had been to make other people late for work."

"I looked at Lesley—surely nobody could really be that stupid? She shrugged. Lesley has a much lower opinion of humanity than I do."

"“I want assurances,” said Zach. “You can have my word,” I said. “No disrespect, Peter,” he said, “but I don’t want a promise from the monkey, I want it from the organ grinder.”"

"All diplomatic cars have distinctive plates that indicate status and nationality, for the ease and convenience of terrorists and potential kidnappers."

"Half-caste, I thought. I hadn’t heard that one in a while. Not since Mum fell out with Aunty Doris, who having grown up in Jamaica in the 1950s regarded political correctness as something that happened to other people."

"It was a good plan, and like all plans since the dawn of time, this would fail to survive contact with real life."

"“Fortunately,” said Nightingale, “seeing isn’t always believing.”"

"As Conan the Barbarian famously said, “That which does not kill us does not kill us.”"

"Dedication: This book is dedicated to all the people who get up and do something about it, whatever it is and however small the thing is they do."

"The perennial problem for retailers the world over are the customers. Not only do they clutter up the shop, but they also demand to be reminded of the title of a book they read a review about in the Telegraph, given directions to The Lion King, helped to find a book their mum will like and, occasionally, purchase some actual merchandise. All of this customer-facing activity gets in the way of the shelving, merchandising, sticking, destickering, table pyramiding and stock returning that is necessary for the smooth operation of a modern bookshop."

"The media always calls this sort of thing senseless, but the motive made sense—it was just stupid, is what it was."

"Nightingale says that conspiracies of silence are the only kind of conspiracies that stand the test of time."

"“Any abductions?” I asked. “Loads,” he said. “But none verified.”"

"Like young men from the dawn of time, I decided to choose the risk of death over certain humiliation."

"So just chalk it up to pixie dust or quantum entanglement, which was the same thing as pixie dust except with the word “quantum” in it."

"“The scope of your ignorance, Peter,” said Seawoll, “is truly frightening.”"

"Back in the summer I’d made the mistake of telling my mum what I did for a living. Not the police bit, which of course she already knew about, having been at my graduation from Hendon, but the stuff about me working for the branch of the Met that dealt with the supernatural. My mum translated this in her head to “witchfinder,” which was good because like most West Africans, she considered witchfinding a more respectable profession than policeman."

"There were screams and yells from the street below as people saw what was happening. There would be lots of phone-camera footage on the news that night from people with more media-savvy than brains."