The hotel was guest-friendly with hourly rates and had enough room to swing a cat, if it were a small cat and you wanted to swing it.

Tito snored away on the other bed. Out there, all around them to the last fringes of occupancy, were Toobfreex at play in the video universe, the tropic isle, the Long Branch Saloon, the Starship Enterprise, Hawaiian crime fantasies, cute kids in make-believe living rooms with invisible audiences to laugh at everything they did, baseball...

Downtown, a dress for Meg- I do it every time I kill a man.

I decided to coin the term ‘cosy crime noir’ for Brighton Belle. That is ‘cosy crime’ for today’s sensibilities because there is that slightly edgy element to it.

Shouldering the duffel bag with the Marine Corps bulldog, Old Man knocked Jan’s photo off the bed table. He turned to stone staring down at the photo. His face then splintered into hurt. Tears seeped into his eyes. He grappled for the nearest bedpost and slumped forward on extended arms. His shoulders jerked and head...

The finest thing in the world is knowing how to belong to oneself.Michel de Montaigne

Home? What is home? Home is where a house is that you come back to when the rainy season is about to begin, to wait until the next dry season comes around. Home is where your woman is, that you come back to in the intervals between a greater love – the only real love...

So. You’re a fallen angel.” She folded her arms.”I’m not fallen,” he said roughly.”Then what are you?”He shrugged. “Busted.

Cherchez la femme, Bucky. Remember that.

The rain fell like dead bullets.

The main rub was the lack of RnR and I burned out. Three years and three stripes later, I ejected from the MP Corps, vowing I’d never do police or criminal investigative work again. Instead, I returned home when I should’ve learned better.

She’s dead. So is your fat pansy. You can be dead, too, if you want.

I wasn’t that good you know. What I was was a guy who could write a little, publishing in magazines surrounded by people who couldn’t write at all. So I looked pretty good. But I never thought I was that good at all. All that I thought was that I tried to tell the truth.

Freedom breeds uncertainty; uncertainty invites chaos.

A Dick and Jane story written in blood and battered bone.See Spot.See Spot run.See Spot run from a gaping chest wound.Run Spot run.See Detective smear Spot into a baggy for DNA testing.

A quick butchers shows up Old Bill three-handed, also a particularly nasty female grass–-and if looks were acid baths the two she collects from us would reduce her to gristle quicker than Mrs. Durand-Deacon.

When the guy with asthma finally came in from the fire escape, Parker rabbit-punched him and took his gun away.

A second red-orange spearhead leaps straight at O’Shaughnessy. The whole world seems to stand still. Then the gun behind it crashes, and there’s a cataclysm of pain all over him, and a shock goes through him as if he ran head-on into a stone wall.A voice from the car says blurredly, while the ground rushes...

I had a funny feeling as I saw the house disappear, as though I had written a poem and it was very good and I had lost it and would never remember it again.

He was wearing a gleaming cream-coloured linen suit, and a Panama hat. The weirdest thing about this was that he was not the most outlandish-looking person in the room by a long way. Not that Little Miss Dresses-Like-Bogart over here has a right to complain

Ever since I could remember, She was all that mattered.

He told himself she wasn’t really such a bad person, she was just a pest, she was sticky, there was something misplaced in her make-up, something that kept her from fading clear of people when they wanted to be in the clear.

Did you ever think much about jobs? I mean, some of the jobs people land in? You see a guy giving haircuts to dogs, or maybe going along the curb with a shovel, scooping up horse manure. And you think, now why is the silly bastard doing that? He looks fairly bright, about as bright...

And then, with a shock like high-voltage coursing through me, the phone beside me started pealing thinly.I just stood there and stared at it, blood draining from my face. A call to a tollbooth? It must, it must be a wrong number, somebody wanted the Information Booth or-! It must have been audible outside, with...

It was a cool day and very clear. You could see a long way-but not as far as Velma had gone.

The dark clouds make the black sea. (Les nuages noirs – Font la mer noire)

I had killed a man, for money and a woman. I didn’t have the money and I didn’t have the woman.

Winter was gray and mean upon the city and every night was a package of cold bleak hours, like the hours in a cell that had no door.

I sat down in a booth, and the waitress shoved a menu in front of me. There wasn’t anything on it that sounded good, and anyway, one look at her and my stomach turned flipflops… Every goddamned restaurant I go to, it’s always the same way… They’ll have some old bag on the payroll —...

He’s prowling back and forth like a lion with distemper now. There’s a shiny streak down one side of his face. “I shouldn’t have let her go ahead – I ought to be hung! Something’s gone wrong. I can’t stand this any more!” he says with a choked sound. “I’m starting now -“”But how are...

Being a Berlin cop in 1942 was a little like putting down mousetraps in a cage full of tigers.

Normally, I don’t take to drinking so early in the morning, but I bend the rules when I get my ass kicked before sunrise.”–Thomas Morelli

I preyed on this sort of thing, discontentment, a clash of passions among the rivals, and the zealots. Open sores opened secrets. That’s how I roll.” Jackson Guild, The Trinity Conspiracy, Betrayal at Black Mesa

In Woolrich’s crime fiction there is a gradual development from pulp to noir. The earlier a story, the more likely it stresses pulp elements: one-dimensional macho protagonists, preposterous methods of murder, hordes of cardboard gangsters, dialogue full of whiny insults, blistering fast action. But even in some of his earliest crime stories one finds aspects...

The phone rang. Softly, in actuality, yet it seemed loud and ominous, as phones do at night in dark hotel rooms.

And he’s alone there, with the unconscious pilot lying a little way off for company, and some other guy he’s never even seen, only spoken to over the radio.He wants to sleep so badly – dying they call it – and he can’t. Something’s bothering him to keep him awake. (“Jane Brown’s Body”)

She killed to get the dream she wanted, then found out it didn’t want her back.

Inevitably, his vision verged toward the fantastic; he published a scattering of stories – most included in this volume – which appeared to conform to that genre at least to the degree that the fuller part of his vision could be seen as “mysteries.” For Woolrich it all was fantastic; the clock in the tower,...

Pulling out onto the highway I noticed a stone pillar commemorating the Donner Party. They were a true testament to the American spirit, push forward at all costs and eat the dead when necessary. Wasn’t that the American dream in a nutshell.

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 the person at the center of the storm, splitting our reaction in two, stripping his protagonist of moral authority, denying...

It’s a case of mistaken identity. It’s one big mistake. You weren’t even in the country when it happened.”Maja in the short story ‘Metro’ by Steen Langstrup

The struggle doesn’t last long; it’s too unequal. Their momentary surprise overcome, they close in on him. The well-directed slice of a gun-butt slackens the good arm; it’s easy to pry the disabled one from around the racketeer’s collar.Tereshko is trembling with his anger. ‘Now him again!’ he protests, as though at an injustice. ‘All...

I’ll remember you… I remember everyone I’ve lost.

The arctic pavement turned into a whirlwind of viscous blood. The fiery shadows on the metropolitan walls blitzed him, avenging overachievers starved for vengeance. He fell into the abyss. His migraine made his head feel heavier than it was. Thoughts of her were coals for the old train engine inside his head.

Taking my drink, I moved around the bar to her. Her smile was a little crooked as I sat down. I guessed it had been a wet night for platinum blondes.

The hallmarks of the noir style are fear, guilt and loneliness, breakdown and despair, sexual obsession and social corruption, a sense that the world is controlled by, malignant forces preying on us, a rejection of happy endings and a preference for resolutions heavy with doom, but always redeemed by a breathtakingly vivid poetry of word...

I did.”Conversation between Alis K and WillyThe Informer

It’s hard to say goodbye for good at any time or any place. It’s harder still to say it through a meshed wire. It crisscrossed his face into little diagonals, gave me only little broken-up molecules of it at a time. It stenciled a cold, rigid frame around every kiss.

…Alright, Mandy Valems,” Alecto agreed.

It’s time to end the brain drain and move to brain gain. It’s time for a great mind of Nigeria to return home. You’re the mind we need, Doctor.