Will you pipe down for a minute? Naturally she was dead since I work at a cemetery. Her face struck a chord though. So, I rummaged around in the old Rory memory bank, and Emily...

There was a ringing in his ears, like a dead phone line that he couldn’t hang up on.

I go where I want to go, I do what I want to do, and I am beholden to no one.

Never patronize your readers. That means don’t talk down to them.

He said when the Lord made people He made them all the same for starters. But life marks people. If you know the way, you can read them like maps.

Non mi resta che un giorno di vita, dopo averne sottratti quindicimila alla morte, me ne resta appena un altro ancora. Al massimo due

Al… You ever kill anybody? In the United States? Because I know you mean it and everything, but I know these guys better than I know you. They’re soldiers, that’s all. No questions, no time...

At that exact moment, 6-0-0, the sun climbed over the skyline of oaks, revealing its full summer angry-god self. Its reflection flared across the river toward our house, a long, blaring finger aimed at me...

You have the Answer. Just get quiet enough to hear it. ~Pat Obuchowski

The Professor is coming…

Either I’ve got a wart on my nose they find curious, or I’ve grown a tail, Albie Merani muttered to himself. Just then he thought. I’d better get a move on, got work to do....

…We were pulling into the next station, when the woman suddenly got to her feet and made a move to squeeze past me. As her knees made contact with mine, she turned towards me. Her...

I started out a human being. But pretty much had all the humanity wrung out of me after passing the Bar and practicing law for ten years. Not sure what I am now.

I ought to warn you, dear, he can get rather wild when he’s hungry

The viewpoint character in each story is usually someone trapped in a living nightmare, but this doesn’t guarantee that we and the protagonist are at one. In fact Woolrich often makes us pull away from...

His voice as smooth as silk, Grant started into his standard crowd-pleaser: Sinatra’s ‘My Kind of Town.

In the half-century of his life, a tick on the Doomsday clock, he had borne witness to the most unbelievable technological advances. He had started off listening to an old Bush radio in the corner...

Crime isn’t pretty, only fashionably dressed.

She had been lying there, facedown in the water long before the tide had turned at 3.04 that morning. Her eyes were staring into the river, her blonde hair first fanning out, then drawing back...

It’s open,” he said loudly and stood up to receive his visitor. In walked a tall blonde, her high heels stabbing the scuffed- up hardwoods, her perfume battling the smell of coffee and dust permeating...

Faith doesn’t move mountains, Detective. It just obscures the view.

For every criminal mastermind, there were ten cretins: the cruel algebra of intelligence applied across the masses.

We were about to give up and call it a night when somebody threw the girl off the bridge.

I don’t want you to say anything. I want you to listen. You know, being confident isn’t the same as being right.

She knew with chilling and absolute certainty she was next.

Regress towards progress – Dr Wannamaker

False assurances were certainly more harmful than none at all.

I needed to know, Jesse. I needed to get inside his head. To find this son of a bitch, I need to get inside his head.” – Stephanie Carovella

The old joke is that psychiatrists are doctors who can’t stand the sight of blood. Maybe they can’t stand it, but if they work where I work, they damn well better get used to it.At...

Rage and despair shook her for minutes or hours. She was unaware of the passage of time. Finally spent, she retreated inward and collapsed onto the floor in a fetal position, the letter in shreds...

Sometimes death is even better than to confess a secret.

I’ve always said women are vicious creatures – Detective Zach Grimes

When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a...

I looked at her, with her hair spilled out on the pillows and the warmth of her body warming mine. And I thought, god-dang, if this ain’t a heck of a way to be in...

Because I want to have sex with him–and because that’s sinful–I’m blushing and flushing furiously under his scrutinizing scrutiny.

Distance and time and a whitewashed mind hadn’t kept a child from growing, from existing, from demanding a place on this earth.

I was its skin, its movement, its shape, its god, its creator, its destroyer. And you thought Dexter was bad. The Bridgeman arrives soon.

Whose Daddy’s Little Girl Now?

God, I swear I’ve never seen a more nervous bunch of people. Like a bunch of rats in a science lab.

Practically every fella that breaks the law has a danged good reason, to his own way of thinking, which makes every case exceptional, not just one or two. Take you, for example.

The whole thing becomes like this evil enchantment from a fairy tale, but you’re made to believe the spell can never be broken.

Her immediate impulse was one of self-preservation. She was tied up in this somehow, she didn’t know why or how, but there was something waiting for her on the other side of this crowd.

He began as a minor imitator of Fitzgerald, wrote a novel in the late twenties which won a prize, became dissatisfied with his work, stopped writing for a period of years. When he came back...

When it came to watching television, Ted was ambidextrous.

Sometimes a girl’s gotta be bad to be good.Murder in the Dog Park

Listen, we got two stiffs and a river of red in a villa in Herne Bay…

Drug addicts had their drugs. Alcoholics had their bottles. Serial killers had their murders.

A pawn only needs to move five spaces to become the queen” – from Bhendi Bazaar

Someone’s head in a bucket on the hood of my car.

There are times when you have to commit a crime to prevent an even bigger one. At least, that’s what I tell myself when I can’t sleep at night.