mystery-authors

"I don't believe the half I hear, Nor the quarter of what I see! But I have one faith, sublime and true, That nothing can shake or slay; Each spring I firmly believe anew All the seed catalogues say!"

"Youth is a silly, vapid state, Old age with fears and ills is rife; This simple boon I beg of Fate — A thousand years of Middle Life."

"A cynic is a man who looks at the world with a monocle in his mind's eye."

"It is the interest one takes in books that makes a library. And if a library have interest it is; if not, it isn't."

"Advice is one of those things it is far more blessed to give than to receive."

"He laughs best who laughs last, The wiseacres vow; But I am impatient, I want to laugh now."

"They borrow books they will not buy, They have no ethics or religions; I wish some kind Burbankian guy Could cross my books with homing pigeons!"

"“A noble theme!” the tyro cried; And straightway scribbled off a sonnet. “A noble theme,” the poet sighed; “I am not fit to write upon it.”"

"I love the Christmas-tide, and yet, I notice this, each year I live; I always like the gifts I get, But how I love the gifts I give!"

"The books we think we ought to read are poky, dull, and dry; The books that we would like to read we are ashamed to buy; The books that people talk about we never can recall; And the books that people give us — oh, they’re the worst of all!"

"A blunder at the right moment is better than cleverness at the wrong time."

"A guilty conscience is the mother of invention."

"Of two evils choose the prettier."

"Science tends to frighten those who are infrequently exposed to it, while the practitioners of science are often the most misunderstood people in the world."

"He sees death in convicted thieves, the burglars, the muggers, the con men, the pimps, a death imposed by law, the gradual death of confinement behind bars."

"To spend his allotted time on earth as a bank teller or an insurance salesman would have seemed an utter waste to Rick. Women, he had reflected had no such problem. Creation had been given to them as a gift and a woman was self-sufficient within her own creative shell. A man needed more which perhaps was one reason why a woman could never understand a man’s concern for the job he had to do."

"They'd taught him how to milk cows, and now they expected him to tame lions."

"A detective sees death in all the various forms at least five times a week."

"He sees death in the prostitutes who have witnessed the death of honor, and daily multiply the death of love, who bleed away their own lives 50 times a day beneath the relentless stabbings of countless conjugations."

"He sees it in the juvenile street gangs, who live in fear of death and who propagate fear by inflicting death to banish fear. And he sees it at its worst, as the result of violent emotions bursting into the mind and erupting from the hands."

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

"She expressed herself clearly, as only people who talk a lot to themselves can."

"Averno was my homage to Mankell. I tried to use something from one of his books in every one of the poems. Nobody noticed it, which is good, but it was there for me."

"Human beings worked constantly to make their gods unnecessary. He was an individual who made scientific measurements: one day time and perhaps also space would be measured and controlled by scales of measurements hitherto unknown. The supernatural was shadows dancing in the remains of a childhood fear of the dead."

"The black novel seeks to present as forcibly as it can the terminal psychic situation that occurs in people who have arrived at a point where they have no hope, no motive, and no longer even the desire to conceal anything from themselves; the black novel intervenes at the moment where a human being approaches his last moment: The first night of death must seem so strange. A special mood is necessary to make language plastic enough to convey such experience exactly; experience so devastatingly simple that, like love, it verges on the indescribable. Nearly every attempt to convey it can really only be described as another in a seemingly endless series of attempts since we cannot describe what we are not yet in a position to know — and yet it is the black novel's absolute duty to express it. T. S. Eliot, I think, got closest to describing the nature of this challenge when he wrote (I paraphrase): It is not necessary to die to describe death."

"Existence is sometimes what a forward artillery observer sees of enemy lines through field glasses. A distant and troubling view brought suddenly into focus with a wealth of obscene detail."

"By the word existence I mean the one contract valid for mankind; I define it as the general contract. In it are the clauses of human life; its uses, responsibilities, limitations, its inevitable eclipse. This contract is the basis of the black novel, whose loathing of violence, which it describes as precisely as possible in order to remind people how disgusting it is, causes it to rise up against death forced on any person before his time, and that is where it becomes a novel in mourning. Each contract is to be terminated in the way that its clauses are set out; but it is not to be destroyed by any contract-holder. That possibility is contained in no contract. To break his contract is either to invite the breaker's destruction, or else it is evidence that the act of destruction has been carried out by a signatory who has already been destroyed, such as a killer — and that is why my detective picks up Suarez' battered head and kisses it. I will go further. What is remarkable about I Was Dora Suarez has nothing to do with literature at all; what is remarkable about it is that in its own way and by its own route it struggles after the same message as Christ. I am not the kind of person that anyone would expect to say such a thing, for although I believe firmly in the invisible, I am not religious. But in writing the book I definitely underwent an experience that I can only describe as cathartic; the writing of Suarez, though plunging me into evil, became the cause of my seeking to purge what was evil in myself. It was only after I had finished the book that I realised this; I was far too deeply involved in the battle with evil that the book became to think any further than that at the time [...] Suarez was my atonement for fifty years' indifference to the miserable state of this world; it was a terrible journey through my own guilt, and through the guilt of others."

"Then we sat in silence, watching the scenery whirring past us in the improving light. I was lighting us both a cigarette when he turned to me and said: 'Sorry if I got cross, morrie.' 'That's all right,' I said. 'Bit on edge, I suppose.' It was all very kosher and British. 'Not surprising,' I said. 'It's been an angstful sort of night.'"

"It seems to me that no matter whether you marry, settle down or live with a bird or not, certain ones simply have your number on them, like bombs in the war; and even if you don't happen to like them all that much there's nothing you can do about it – unless you're prepared to spend a lifetime arguing fate out of existence, which you could probably do if you tried but I'm not the type."

"'You're not very good at it, are you?' said Gust, 'they ought to have sent heavies in.' He thought the man very likely could have got a job playing Hess in this new TV series they were doing on the war, and he would have had a word with a few directors he knew in Soho if he had been a mate of his. But, as he wasn't, Gust kicked him in the stomach as he tried to drag himself up on one leg with the help of the bar-rail, then turned back to the other man. 'You all right?' he said. 'How are you feeling now? Chipper?' He took one of the man's ears in his thumb and forefinger; the ear was tiny, considering the size of his head, and it had little hairs inside it. Gust picked up a cocktail stick out of a dirty glass on the bar and jabbed it down into the eardrum as far as he could; when he pulled it out the stick was half-way red, and there was some grey stuff in it as well. He shouted down his ear: 'I think I just broke your foot!' but the man wasn't making sense any more; he was wailing with his hand clapped to the side of his head, swaying up and down from the waist like a bereaved widow, or else perhaps he just didn't hear, or maybe the music was too loud. Gust realised then that he had pushed the stick in too far and that the man would probably die. Dirty cocktail-stick in the brain? What a bleeding way to go! Now the man with the broken leg tried another naughty stroke; although he only had one hand free because he was using the other one to hold onto the rail, he still managed to smash a glass and try putting it in Gust's face. 'This is just self-defence after all,' Gust said to himself. He stamped on the man's feet again; this time he definitely felt bones go and the man screamed, dropped the glass and let go of the rail; but instead of letting him fall Gust took him round the waist, ripped his fly open and searched inside his pants until he found his testicles, which he yanked right out into his hand. Their owner can't have been much into baths because they smelled like something tepid from a canteen counter. Gust wrung them like the devil having a go at a set of wedding bells with all the grip he had, until the man was shrieking on the same D minor as the music. 'It's nothing personal,' said Gust, 'but I'm afraid you're going to have to learn to fuck all over again.' He wiped the blood off the man's prick down his face, then pulled the face towards him and drove his nose into his brain with his head. The music boosted into E major on a key change, and the man doubled up under a bar-stool, leaving a lot of blood behind him while Gust receded into the half darkness towards the black drapes on the walls."

"Nothing else much matters once you have achieved the hardest thing, which is to act out of conviction. Even if you have been beaten by evil, in the bitterness of defeat the battle has left a trace for the others, and you can go feeling clean. I recognise that I am a minor writer; but this does not affect the depth of my convictions."

"The bore is the human cuckoo. He will take over anything, usurp any nest. His one outstanding feature is that he has no features. He has nothing whatever to offer society, not the least germ of an original or positive idea – and yet the rest of us somehow find ourselves moving up to make room for him, just as the body makes itself host to a destructive virus. Bores would take the entire world over if they could; sometimes they do. Here is an extract from the diary of one who did: 'I still lack to a considerable degree that naturally superior kind of manner that I would dearly like to possess…' (Heinrich Himmler, November 1921)."

"It was a great game, and exciting and dramatic and even at times tragic - but funny it emphatically was not."